I’m struggling to think what one can even do with just two ethernet ports of different speeds. It’s begging to be used as a gateway, VPN or firewall but you can’t because you’ll top out at 1G anyway. And assuming one of them is the LAN side, supposedly it’ll be going to a switch so the router will never see LAN traffic anyway, only stuff through it which hits the bandwidth limitation.
I guess technically one could bond the WiFi and 1G link to make use of the 2.5G link? Or as an AP like it’s got 2.5G upstream and passes through another AP down the line using the 1G port.
Very questionable specs.
E: it occured to me this looks like a potentially really good standalone AP if you give it 2.5G upstream and then branch off to another device down the line like some Ubiquiti ones do. But the form factor is ugly as hell to be mounted on a ceiling…
The key there is the switch does most of the work in hardware, so you can have 1G going between all ports with no CPU usage, so the internal 1G port doesn’t matter as much, and the hardware acceleration lets it efficiently handle routing across VLANs without involving much of the internal port. Those internal switches can usually handle VLANs and basic NAT nesrly entirely on its own.
With a single external 2.5G port you lose that because your traffic will have to go in the router and back out to the switch to cross VLANs, so it’s basically a 1.25G link. And it needs to be a managed switch too since the router doesn’t come with a built-in one anymore. Best you can do is software VLANs but the other device will need to also use the VLAN explicitly in that case, as there’s no switch to give you untagged ports.