Home network - switch vs multi cables
Discussion
I'd like to put a bit of effort in to hard wiring some CAT 6 around our house. Last house this was a doddle as it was full of cavity walls and stud walls. This time round it's all stone and I don't think they had this in mind 150 years ago when it was build!
I'd have liked to get all of the gubbins relating to lounge TV all cabled up. There's about 6 devices there. If I run a single cat6 cable from the loft (where I intend to put router and switch) down the outside of the house and into a single socket and then take a switch to split it from there am I going to lose enough bandwidth to care about or will cat 6 be giving me more than I should ever need anyway?
I'd have liked to get all of the gubbins relating to lounge TV all cabled up. There's about 6 devices there. If I run a single cat6 cable from the loft (where I intend to put router and switch) down the outside of the house and into a single socket and then take a switch to split it from there am I going to lose enough bandwidth to care about or will cat 6 be giving me more than I should ever need anyway?
FWIW, when we did this we were told that the set up ought to be router->switch then a separate cable to each thing on the network that needs a wired connection.
If you run a secondary switch off a “lead” switch (ie router->switch->switch like a tree branching) you get “loops” (I think that was how they were described: small packets of data that end up going round and round in circles). Over time your network speed slows down as a result.
If you’re going to run one cable externally, you might as well run six. Cable - even external rates cable - is relatively cheap and holes are holes.
If you run a secondary switch off a “lead” switch (ie router->switch->switch like a tree branching) you get “loops” (I think that was how they were described: small packets of data that end up going round and round in circles). Over time your network speed slows down as a result.
If you’re going to run one cable externally, you might as well run six. Cable - even external rates cable - is relatively cheap and holes are holes.
BlackWidow13 said:
FWIW, when we did this we were told that the set up ought to be router->switch then a separate cable to each thing on the network that needs a wired connection.
If you run a secondary switch off a “lead” switch (ie router->switch->switch like a tree branching) you get “loops” (I think that was how they were described: small packets of data that end up going round and round in circles). Over time your network speed slows down as a result. .
Whoever told you was incorrect or communicated badly.If you run a secondary switch off a “lead” switch (ie router->switch->switch like a tree branching) you get “loops” (I think that was how they were described: small packets of data that end up going round and round in circles). Over time your network speed slows down as a result. .
As long as you avoid actual physical loops (so don't connect two switches together via two cables, or once directly, and then connect them both to a third switch) you won't have a problem.
If you buy good quality equipment (i.e. stuff that has spanning tree support or broadcast storm control), even if you create loops there isn't a problem, but you can't easily predict which of your paths the traffic will go along.
If you create a loop with equipment that doesn't automatically defuse them then the resulting packet storm will make a network unusable in seconds.
If what you were describing were true, imagine the immense bundles of network cables where a building with a few thousand people in it had all their connections terminated.
To add to xeny’s post, if you’re worried about capacity (which you probably shouldn’t be given what you’ve written) worth also checking whether your switches can support link aggregation (sometimes called port aggregation). That allows you to run two cables between (appropriately configured) ports on each switch to increase your bandwidth beyond that possible with a single cable. It doesn’t look like something it would be worth you paying extra for but if you’re choosing between two different models at the same cost then worth bearing in mind.
Don’t forget the importance of the terminations. Dead easy to make good connections if you use the tool less keystone jacks, and the cost increase isn’t enormous.
If you want proper overkill then 6a cables or fibre and 10g switches... only makes sense if you have very fast internet, long runs (6 will support 10g at shorter distances) and a lot of internal traffic, but there are an increasing number of switches that will give you a number of gigabit ports + a couple of 10g ports for uplink/downlink to/from your next switch.
Don’t forget the importance of the terminations. Dead easy to make good connections if you use the tool less keystone jacks, and the cost increase isn’t enormous.
If you want proper overkill then 6a cables or fibre and 10g switches... only makes sense if you have very fast internet, long runs (6 will support 10g at shorter distances) and a lot of internal traffic, but there are an increasing number of switches that will give you a number of gigabit ports + a couple of 10g ports for uplink/downlink to/from your next switch.
I went over the top when we refurbished the house (though not by PH standards). Shielded CAT5e runs; at these distances 1Gbps is easy, the Fluke says 5Gbps is doable for future (but totally unnecessary).
Zen Fritzbox in the garage, feeding a Netgear GS908E and three more Fritzboxes - one in my office, one in the workshop at the end of the garden, and one in the living room. The Fritzboxes are set up as a wireless mesh.
The Netgear connects most of the wired stuff - CCTV NVR (which feeds the cameras), and another GS908E in the living room, feeding the telly and consoles. The office and workshop wired stuff are connected to the local Fritzboxes.
That means everything is visible via the core Fritzbox. The Netgears are centrally manageable, and are surprisingly powerful as well as ridiculously cheap. Under £30 and with the full smart management suite. This probably sounds awfully complicated, but it was all set up in a couple of hours, including the static IPs and host names.
Cable wise, from the garage there is:
One to the workshop
One to the loft (where the CCTV NVR sits)
One to the office (two would have been nicer to segregate wired and wireless, but I thought the core wireless was going to reach)
Two to the living room
And breathe.
Zen Fritzbox in the garage, feeding a Netgear GS908E and three more Fritzboxes - one in my office, one in the workshop at the end of the garden, and one in the living room. The Fritzboxes are set up as a wireless mesh.
The Netgear connects most of the wired stuff - CCTV NVR (which feeds the cameras), and another GS908E in the living room, feeding the telly and consoles. The office and workshop wired stuff are connected to the local Fritzboxes.
That means everything is visible via the core Fritzbox. The Netgears are centrally manageable, and are surprisingly powerful as well as ridiculously cheap. Under £30 and with the full smart management suite. This probably sounds awfully complicated, but it was all set up in a couple of hours, including the static IPs and host names.
Cable wise, from the garage there is:
One to the workshop
One to the loft (where the CCTV NVR sits)
One to the office (two would have been nicer to segregate wired and wireless, but I thought the core wireless was going to reach)
Two to the living room
And breathe.
Many thanks for the input all. Looks like two cables for redundancy should do the trick nicely.
In terms of connectors, I've been using the pass through type which I found really straight forward to do and never had to remake one. Hands were numb after doing about 50 of them though!
The terminations, wall plates, I can't remember the brand that I used last time but again, it was nice and simple push in type that worked every time.
I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
LooneyTunes said:
To add to xeny’s post, if you’re worried about capacity (which you probably shouldn’t be given what you’ve written) worth also checking whether your switches can support link aggregation (sometimes called port aggregation). That allows you to run two cables between (appropriately configured) ports on each switch to increase your bandwidth beyond that possible with a single cable. It doesn’t look like something it would be worth you paying extra for but if you’re choosing between two different models at the same cost then worth bearing in mind.
Don’t forget the importance of the terminations. Dead easy to make good connections if you use the tool less keystone jacks, and the cost increase isn’t enormous.
If you want proper overkill then 6a cables or fibre and 10g switches... only makes sense if you have very fast internet, long runs (6 will support 10g at shorter distances) and a lot of internal traffic, but there are an increasing number of switches that will give you a number of gigabit ports + a couple of 10g ports for uplink/downlink to/from your next switch.
Cheers. I have switches etc from our old place. Basic netgear stuff but worked great there and only a year or two old. I guess the good thing there is that if I've run two cables already, I could always change the switch at a later date. Don’t forget the importance of the terminations. Dead easy to make good connections if you use the tool less keystone jacks, and the cost increase isn’t enormous.
If you want proper overkill then 6a cables or fibre and 10g switches... only makes sense if you have very fast internet, long runs (6 will support 10g at shorter distances) and a lot of internal traffic, but there are an increasing number of switches that will give you a number of gigabit ports + a couple of 10g ports for uplink/downlink to/from your next switch.
In terms of connectors, I've been using the pass through type which I found really straight forward to do and never had to remake one. Hands were numb after doing about 50 of them though!
The terminations, wall plates, I can't remember the brand that I used last time but again, it was nice and simple push in type that worked every time.
Sporky said:
I went over the top when we refurbished the house (though not by PH standards). Shielded CAT5e runs; at these distances 1Gbps is easy, the Fluke says 5Gbps is doable for future (but totally unnecessary).
Zen Fritzbox in the garage, feeding a Netgear GS908E and three more Fritzboxes - one in my office, one in the workshop at the end of the garden, and one in the living room. The Fritzboxes are set up as a wireless mesh.
The Netgear connects most of the wired stuff - CCTV NVR (which feeds the cameras), and another GS908E in the living room, feeding the telly and consoles. The office and workshop wired stuff are connected to the local Fritzboxes.
That means everything is visible via the core Fritzbox. The Netgears are centrally manageable, and are surprisingly powerful as well as ridiculously cheap. Under £30 and with the full smart management suite. This probably sounds awfully complicated, but it was all set up in a couple of hours, including the static IPs and host names.
Cable wise, from the garage there is:
One to the workshop
One to the loft (where the CCTV NVR sits)
One to the office (two would have been nicer to segregate wired and wireless, but I thought the core wireless was going to reach)
Two to the living room
And breathe.
Sounds suitably robust. I have a similar mindset in that I only really want to do this once and prefer to have loads of spare 'capacity' than 'enough'. But last time I did it, it was easy to route 100's of meters of cable around the house and hard wire nearly everything. This time I'm being a bit more conservative because I have to make quite a mess getting stuff around the house so reining it in a bit. Zen Fritzbox in the garage, feeding a Netgear GS908E and three more Fritzboxes - one in my office, one in the workshop at the end of the garden, and one in the living room. The Fritzboxes are set up as a wireless mesh.
The Netgear connects most of the wired stuff - CCTV NVR (which feeds the cameras), and another GS908E in the living room, feeding the telly and consoles. The office and workshop wired stuff are connected to the local Fritzboxes.
That means everything is visible via the core Fritzbox. The Netgears are centrally manageable, and are surprisingly powerful as well as ridiculously cheap. Under £30 and with the full smart management suite. This probably sounds awfully complicated, but it was all set up in a couple of hours, including the static IPs and host names.
Cable wise, from the garage there is:
One to the workshop
One to the loft (where the CCTV NVR sits)
One to the office (two would have been nicer to segregate wired and wireless, but I thought the core wireless was going to reach)
Two to the living room
And breathe.
I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
When you do get round to changing switches, if you’re already bought in to unifi with their APs then check out their switches too. I really like their Gen2s. They will definitely do link aggregation (the Pros also have 10g ports if you want them) and the POE versions can handle some quite serious output if needed.
Gad-Westy said:
Sounds suitably robust. I have a similar mindset in that I only really want to do this once and prefer to have loads of spare 'capacity' than 'enough'. But last time I did it, it was easy to route 100's of meters of cable around the house and hard wire nearly everything. This time I'm being a bit more conservative because I have to make quite a mess getting stuff around the house so reining it in a bit.
I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
I'd suggest that it's no more effort to pull two cables to a location than one. I like having a bit of segregation between wired and wireless, but I don't believe it makes any significant difference to the performance in my network. It did help a bit with setting up.I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
I don't know the Unifi stuff beyond the name and reputation, but I think that is a similar approach. The Fritzboxes are nice in that they're all configurable as a DSL router, a switch, a wireless AP, and as part of a wireless mesh, and the whole network behaves as a single unit through one portal. So if the core one in the garage fails, I can easily swap the workshop one in and be up and running again in half an hour. Probably quicker. Ideally I'd have used their switches instead of the Netgear, but they're darned hard to buy in the UK.
I may have overthunk the whole thing, of course, but it's been reliable and easy to tweak, and there's lots of good documentation so locking down the security was a doddle.
Gad-Westy said:
Sounds suitably robust. I have a similar mindset in that I only really want to do this once and prefer to have loads of spare 'capacity' than 'enough'. But last time I did it, it was easy to route 100's of meters of cable around the house and hard wire nearly everything. This time I'm being a bit more conservative because I have to make quite a mess getting stuff around the house so reining it in a bit.
I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
I moved it to our modern (2004) house ten years ago and started on the Unifi slippery slope, having similar thought processes to yourself. I'm feeding four Unifi AP's. Sounds like they'd be doing a similar job to your fritzboxes.
Funny you mentioned CCTV as that's on my mind too. Been looking at the POE systems. But I think one advantage of chucking all the kit in the loft is that I can run cables for that externally when I get around to it rather than trying to plan internal routing now.
I have a cable run from the BT master socket up to my loft (my amateur data centre) which is plugged into the BT FTTC box located in the loft. It then feeds the Unifi Gateway (USG) and then to a 24 port Unifi switch which is connected to the various cable runs I have created over time to various parts of the house.
One cable run makes a short trip into my garage to an 8 port POE Unifi switch which powers a number of Dahua CCTV cameras mounted around three sides of the garage (there's a PC in my loft dedicated to running Blue Iris, as well as a NAS, thin client running Home Assistant and a few other boxes).
I also have another 8 port POE in the loft for the cable runs to the APs dotted around the house. All of the kit in the loft is connected to a UPS which is monitored by a raspberry pi. I could go on (and on) but, in short, I'm very happy with the Unifi kit and I would focus on the quality of the cable (to support 2.5Gbit plus in the future), rather than the number of runs to each room.
Paper Lawyer said:
I moved it to our modern (2004) house ten years ago and started on the Unifi slippery slope, having similar thought processes to yourself.
I have a cable run from the BT master socket up to my loft (my amateur data centre) which is plugged into the BT FTTC box located in the loft. It then feeds the Unifi Gateway (USG) and then to a 24 port Unifi switch which is connected to the various cable runs I have created over time to various parts of the house.
One cable run makes a short trip into my garage to an 8 port POE Unifi switch which powers a number of Dahua CCTV cameras mounted around three sides of the garage (there's a PC in my loft dedicated to running Blue Iris, as well as a NAS, thin client running Home Assistant and a few other boxes).
I also have another 8 port POE in the loft for the cable runs to the APs dotted around the house. All of the kit in the loft is connected to a UPS which is monitored by a raspberry pi. I could go on (and on) but, in short, I'm very happy with the Unifi kit and I would focus on the quality of the cable (to support 2.5Gbit plus in the future), rather than the number of runs to each room.
Cheers for this. Can I ask what you use the gateway for? I must admit I like to keep things as simple as possible so I'm almost hesitant to ask but curious. I have a cable run from the BT master socket up to my loft (my amateur data centre) which is plugged into the BT FTTC box located in the loft. It then feeds the Unifi Gateway (USG) and then to a 24 port Unifi switch which is connected to the various cable runs I have created over time to various parts of the house.
One cable run makes a short trip into my garage to an 8 port POE Unifi switch which powers a number of Dahua CCTV cameras mounted around three sides of the garage (there's a PC in my loft dedicated to running Blue Iris, as well as a NAS, thin client running Home Assistant and a few other boxes).
I also have another 8 port POE in the loft for the cable runs to the APs dotted around the house. All of the kit in the loft is connected to a UPS which is monitored by a raspberry pi. I could go on (and on) but, in short, I'm very happy with the Unifi kit and I would focus on the quality of the cable (to support 2.5Gbit plus in the future), rather than the number of runs to each room.
Just on this point of connecting a TV to a wired connection, I planned to do the same and ran two network cables down the wall, all nicely plastered in etc. Bought a new telly in 2019, a q85R 65" and plugged it into the network only to find the physical connection limited to 100Mbit!!! So it's now connected via wifi which is faster (BT FTTP).
bmwmike said:
Just on this point of connecting a TV to a wired connection, I planned to do the same and ran two network cables down the wall, all nicely plastered in etc. Bought a new telly in 2019, a q85R 65" and plugged it into the network only to find the physical connection limited to 100Mbit!!! So it's now connected via wifi which is faster (BT FTTP).
Are you saying the TV can't do more than 100mbit over wired or the connection you've got won't? If the latter, look closely at your cable terminations - my first guess would be a connector not all the way when the plug was crimped.xeny said:
bmwmike said:
Just on this point of connecting a TV to a wired connection, I planned to do the same and ran two network cables down the wall, all nicely plastered in etc. Bought a new telly in 2019, a q85R 65" and plugged it into the network only to find the physical connection limited to 100Mbit!!! So it's now connected via wifi which is faster (BT FTTP).
Are you saying the TV can't do more than 100mbit over wired or the connection you've got won't? If the latter, look closely at your cable terminations - my first guess would be a connector not all the way when the plug was crimped.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff