Coral Acceletor is only needed if you run setup that does not have GPU or enough CPU. Spare laptop usually has enough power to handle AI detection, but RasPi doesn’t. I run mine in CPU at rack server.

Cameras own detections are limited in my experience, and it is much harder to integrate to anything else, like HomeAssistant for notification & automation

HomeAssistant + Frigate combo is just plain awesome. You can leverage the automations of HA through Frigate’s AI detection, so you get things like notifications.

It is quite long game, and only second game ever to break 2M concurrent players on steam

I would suggest more learn by doing approach. Learning OSI model etc is nice, but it is quite jargon :)

Use some old PC as a server, and get some network cards into it, and use it as firewall/router. Route your home network/NAT/DNS/DCHP through it. Raspberry Pi’s are nice, but their hw is still bit limited.

OPNSense is quite nice and easy free and open source firewall/router solution.

If you want to add bit of flexibility, you can use some virtualization platform like VMware in to the machine, so that you can run OPNSense in it, with some other virtual servers.

Then when you get things working, you can start looking in to VLAN’s, because they are quite important part of enterprise networking. Most cheap switches nowadays support VLAN’s out of the box.

Here in Nordics datacaps outside of mobile are unknown. Unlimited is standard here.

I use rasp as Bluetooth receiver for my home assistant sensors (Ruuvi tags mainly)