To Gigabit or not, that is the question. In terms of the Enterprise market, it’s really whether to go Gigabit or 10 Gigabit. But in the SMB market, the question is Gigabit or Fast Ethernet.
Prices have come down in Gigabit to the point where Gigabit is almost the default. However, in the purpose built hardware that the value vendors use, Fast Ethernet is still more common than Gigabit, especially in the entry level units.
One of the cost considerations isn’t so much the load balancer itself, but the cost of the actually getting connectivity at levels greater than 100 Mbps. (Remember, the whole point of Gigabit is to have the ability to push 101 Mbps, not necessarily 800 Mbps). A couple of quick searches on Google show that prices for raw bandwidth in a colo facility in the US starts around $12 per Mbit, give or take, making 100 Mbps $1,200 USD per month. Combined with the colo costs, server rental (or upfront capital expenditure), that’s not an insignificant cost when compared with the prices of the devices in the value market.
At that level of traffic, hopefully you have a revenue source sufficient to pay for a Gigabit-capable valuemarket load balancer. If not, you may want to consider bandwidth reducing measures, such as putting company videos up on Youtube.
