I wonder when we'll see SOHO >1Gbps Ethernet?

[watercooled]

Even if your broadband was faster than your gig ethernet, that would only be a factor if one user was using that much bandwidth. If its shared out, gig ethernet gives each user a gigabit.

Unless the gateway had a >1Gbps connection to the switching fabric, you'd still be limited to 1Gbps total.

I suspect it wouldn't be as useful as it sounds. If only one machine is sending bonded packets and the destination is on a single interface, then the switch would have to rate adapt 2Gb to 1Gb which means storing the data rather than just sending it on, which means it might run low on buffer space and have to tell the sending PC to slow down while it deals with what it already has. So that means you would need all of your devices on 2Gbit, which is a lot of extra cabling and expense for an occasional doubling at best in performance.

...snip...

I get your point, but it wouldn't be too different to any other unmatched network, like the GigE transition when we still had a load of 100Mbit devices connected - provided you had at least a couple of GigE devices connected they could benefit from the higher speeds (unless something is causing HOL blocking, something you'd have to be careful about when configuring flow control).