I believe he's refering to the situation where the soekris is doing the bridging, since the soekris only has 4 ethernet ports and two pci slots max it's likely that if you need greater than quantity 3 plus wireless internal interfaces that you'll need a switch. given the performance limits of even a 5501 I tend to disagree that the switching traffic internally in software bridge at less than line rate at 100Mb/s is a great trade-off vs say using a cheapo gig-e switch.
i am not sure this is the forum for home networking (in fact, i am pretty sure it's not), but wtf. i have a 5501 with 8g flash running freebsd 8.0 on a 100/100 b-flets looking kinda like .----------------. | | | b --wlan0| | r | 192.168.0.0/24 ext iij | i --- vr1| LAN hosts, PPP/NAT ---|vr0--- d | DHCP Clients WAN | g --- vr2| pptp 200-209 | e | ... | 0 --- vr3| | | `----------------' there is a gige switch on one of the vr ports, but i currently do not use it (lack of white gaffers' tape to hide cabling). my plan is to use it for ethers to the mac mini by the tv and the mbps on the desktops so that file transfers to/from the mini do not go through the soekris. randy