It's your streamer, not your modem

So many discussions I've seen lately have been about upgrading Internet devices, especially the modems and routers to get the best possible audio.  Audiogoners are talking about installing 10 GigE (10 Gigabits per second) cable for signals that barely need 10 megabits per second.  Three full orders of magnitude more bandwidth than required by hi resolution audio.  (192 k/24 bit)

I've also seen discussions about home Internet getting a little higher latency and jitter.

None of this should matter with a decent streamer.  Let me give you an example.  Because my work requires me to be online with high reliability I have two different Internet providers and a switch that detects failure in one and switches me to another.

It takes the switch approximately 40 seconds to detect the Internet is down and fail over to the other.  40 seconds.  40,000 milliseconds. For this testing I shut the modem off.  In that moment, for the next 40 seconds, I had no working Internet.  Then my back-up 5G Internet took over.  About 3 minutes after that my primary Internet's modem has rebooted and my router has recognized it as available and switched back over.

During the testing I coincidentally had Roon playing a random Jazz selection.

Not once did my audio stop.  Not even a hiccup.

Why?  Buffering.  Roon had gotten the entire song and doled it out to my end point a little at a time. 

Point is, modem quality, router quality, switches, and Ethernet cables don't matter that much.  What does is the size of the buffer and the effectiveness of the anti-jitter circuitry in the DAC.

I do by the way recommend shielded cables, Ethernet isolators and gas discharge surge protectors, but sweat a modem or router?  Not me.