Hey everyone,

I’m looking at getting a new (to us) home cabled up, and in the past I’ve always designed with the following principles (ignoring WiFi APs within this scope):
- Single patch panel near comms cabinet
- Wall port per device + additional ports for future proofing

Essential, a star topology - the patch panel connects to a single switch with no other switching. However, I’m wondering if that’s maybe overdoing it a tad, given that I’m in Australia where 100Mbps internet is considered top of the line*, and the vast majority of traffic is device->internet, with very little intranet traffic beyond occasional file/print transfers or streaming from a media server.

So to that end, I’m considering a revised tree style topology with the following design principles:

- Single patch panel near comms cabinet
- Wall port per room, with 4 and 8 port unmanaged switches branching to devices

In real life, that’s going to mean the following clusters each hanging off an unmanaged switch:
- Home office with 3-4 computers and a MFD
- TV/Media devices (gaming consoles, Android TV box, AV receiver)
- 2-3 gaming PCs

So obviously each unmanaged switch becomes an additional point-of-failure, but a tolerable one. In terms of throughput, I’m unlikely to touch the sides (as they say), and the 100Mbps WAN connection is a far narrower bottleneck than theoretical limit of 4-5 devices sharing a single 1Gb cable back to the “root” switch - but is there any gotchas that I’m not considering, like latency, additional overhead per switch, or future proofing for PoE+ (currently I have WiFI APs and LED Panels that will all be ceiling mounted and cabled per device)?

Any advice/suggestions would be appreciated!