Wired networking in the home

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Chicken Chaser

Original Poster:

7,824 posts

225 months

Thursday 22nd August 2019
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Probably a very easy question to answer but i'm just trying to get it sorted before its beyond the point of no return!

I'm wiring up an extension iv'e built onto my house. Up until now, we've used a wireless Virgin hub at the rear of the house with a powerline adapter at the front to catch most of the house with wifi. As the house will be roughly twice the size it was, and having the opportunity to put some CAT5E into the place, I've now moved the hub to the front of the house, and ran CAT5e into the new kitchen, entertainment room and 1st floor bedroom. All areas however, only have one ethernet port. I was planning on using these for TVs in each room, however wondered whether it was better off running a switch from each one for multiple sources (TV, Xbox & Sonos in one room) or considering whether it was even possible to have a wireless access point at the end of each of these cables?

Should I just run powerlines all over still and just use the wired connections for the TV?

Chicken Chaser

Original Poster:

7,824 posts

225 months

Friday 23rd August 2019
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paulrockliffe said:
Gigabit switches and Mesh Wifi are the way to go. I have just added Google WiFi (well tried the two slave APs are faulty!), once you setup the APs wirelessly they can then go anywhere down-stream of the primary device, so they will plug into a Switch and work things out for themselves. I'm sure the others will work like this perfectly happily too.

If you run a switch to several devices, you're limiting capacity to one run of Cat5/6, but Gigabit is going to be good enough for that not to matter, the only risk is that you balls up the cable install and it ends up running at 100mb, but even then that's easily 5 devices streaming in HD at once, you're not going to notice in any normal circumstances.

My setup is ADSL into Google WiFI, then to a 24port switch that feeds the whole house. I then have another 8 port switch in the workshop, one behind the TV and there'll be one going in the loft too. Extra APs are going off two of those switches.
Cheers Paul. Could you give me a link to some suitable APs? Also, when you say ballsing up the cable install to throttle it, what could possibly cause such a throttling?

Chicken Chaser

Original Poster:

7,824 posts

225 months

Tuesday 27th August 2019
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Brilliant Roger, just what I was looking for. Makes sense now and your post has highlighted that I should also stick a cable into the garage!

Chicken Chaser

Original Poster:

7,824 posts

225 months

Saturday 28th September 2019
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I'd belatedly like to thank you all for the comments. I intend to cable up some stuff, and the stuff that i'd like to keep wireless - laptop, phones etc I'll use wireless. I have powerline availability for one of the rooms which isnt being touched but the others i've ran cables through which can terminate at a switch and can take the multiple inputs.