Data infrastructure in my new house
 

I'm about to start building a modest (3 bedroom) house. Because of the material and design, I reckon I will need 3 or 4 wireless access points and a few ethernet ports. Any suggestions on what hardware I need for this ? I see a vast range of kit with wildly varying costs which seem to be mostly aimed at businesses with 100s of users. Has anyone any experience of creating a simple but robust domestic setup ?

I got fed up with Wifi because my neighbours' kit seems to cause so much interference, so I ended up cabling almost everything. I have a couple of cheap TP-Link TL-SG108 gigabit switches in the same location as my modem and router, and cables from there to key locations in the house. Simple (if you're able to physically route the cables), cheap (the switches are around 20 quid a go) and does the job well. At one point I had another TL-SG108 in the box under the TV, but that went after I simplified the TV setup.

Basic home use kit such as that from Linksys or Netgear (and there are several other similar vendors) should be more than adequate for the network devices.

Buy a 12 or 24-port unmanaged switch as the central hub to which all your ethernet ports are "flood wired" back to, and connect this switch to your internet modem / router / firewall. Bear in mind that you can cascade switches downstream from the "core" switch if necessary, either permanently or temporarily.

You have choice with RJ45 cabling at the "data cabinet" end, assuming that you have cabled in ethernet wall sockets around the house, and the RJ45 cables gathered in the data cabinet - you can either terminate them with an RJ45 connector and plug them straight into the switch (being careful of the correct TX/RX wiring), or install a patch panel and then use fly leads to connect the patch port to a switch port. Given that you probably don't need the flexibility of the patch panel (your connections are pretty static), it's likely a no-brainer, although the patch panel can be more elegant, which could be a consideration of it's going to be visible.

I would strongly recommend that any wireless access points are hard-wired back to the central switch - I have had problems using a secondary WAP connected wirelessly to the primary WAP / router - the connection drops out too frequently.

3-4 WAPs seems a lot for a 3-bedroom house - is there a particular requirement (due to distance or construction material) for so many?

For the logical network side, I would consider using the internet modem / router just to do NAT / FW stuff and serve wired connections, not wifi, and use it to manage DHCP for the entire network, so that your other WAPs are all acting as repeaters on the same IP network, and do not serve DHCP. You can have each WAP with the same SSID or different - unless you have very widely dispersed APs, keeping the same SSID on all is probably best. Just ensure that they aren't all broadcasting on the same channel - use non-overlapping channels for adjacent WAPs.

There's some really useful information here that will help: https://superuser.com/questions/1224...-access-points

HTH

I would suggest considering future-proofing your system by using fibre-optical cable to wire around the house, it’s much thinner and less prone to interference and able to cope with any faster speeds in years to come. if you don’t want to do it yourself you should be able to get an engineer to do it in a few hours.

E.g.

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/w...me-with-fiber/

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

I second the proposal for fiber.

Also run spare string through the conduits, in case you need to add more cable later.

For this type of setup, consider a Managed Switch. While you can cascade hubs and switches, these can promote bottlenecks. The speed capability of the switch is critical- you should be able to run 1 or 10Gb simultaneously on all your devices.

Consider the use of VLANs to separate traffic. For performance and security.

Consider the use if a dedicated firewall such as pfsense.

Good luck, and document everything!

Fiber is OK if you have devices that support it, but if not, that means converters and more expense. Cat.6e is not going anywhere anytime soon. Cat.5e isn't obsolete yet despite being over 20 years old.

My general advice about WiFi is: avoid it if you can until the channel / spectrum situation gets a total overhaul. If a device supports cabled Ethernet, give it Ethernet. This is especially true for high-bandwidth applications such as 4K video to TVs.

16 port switch in a central place. Cat 6e cables to every room, two for redundancy in the lounge. Works for us.

I suppose hard wired cables are less likely to be hacked. If I had the opportunity to do this, I think I would do so, especially as in the grand scheme of things, it’s not going to cost a great deal.

I'm struggling to see the case for fibre-optic in a home. Cat 6 cable supports 10 Gigabits; 4k TV requires less than 50 Megabits. We obviously can't predict the future, but is it really worth spending over £1k for bandwidth you may never use, when £100 will comfortably give you 10-100 times as much as you're likely to be able to use in the next few years?

If you're that worried, put it all in conduit with mouse lines. That way, it's easy to upgrade later (if you ever need to).

Hubs? In 2023? Really? A 10Mb hub certainly would create a bottleneck!

What exactly would be the benefit of a managed switch? Why would you want to pay £100s when £10s is all that's needed?

VLANs in a 3-bedroom house? Really?

10Gb to every device? Let's get real!

This isn't a data centre, it's a house.

One thing I should have mentioned - if you get a core switch with Power over Ethernet (PoE) you can use it to power your WAPs (many now support PoE), which removes the need to supply power to them via an AC adapter. Assuming you can cable your WAPs, that is!

Thanks all.

It's on 3 floors with floor/ceiling slabs of reinforced concrete. There's also a run of around 40m to my workshop/man-cave/radio shack. It could make sense to do that in fibre - apart from speed and reliability, I don't want to be inducing currents in a long wire when I'm transmitting on HF.

I was imagining an ethernet 'spine' linking wireless access points on each floor, with a few ethernet ports for TV's and perhaps printers. I don't know how easy it is to arrange those access points so that client devices can seamlessly hop between them depending on signal strength and with a common SSID/password. How is that managed? I imagine it’s more than just setting up normal independent access points? I must need a single device issuing IPs though any of them so devices appear on the same network?

It's not a data centre, but wife and I both work a lot from home involving lots of Zoom calls, sprog watches Netflix and there will be a bunch of security cameras.

I recommend PoE switches that can power remote access points. I have a UPS at the entrance (MicroTik router) powering almost all of my home internet infrastructure. I also use UniFi access points, which I consider to be far better than LinkSys or NetGear. They are all dual-band and you can manage them to exclude nosy neighbors.

In my opinion, the most important thing to get right is conduit and access panels. I see no likelihood that networking technology will become entirely wireless, especially for buildings with sections of reinforced concrete, so there will be a need for wires or fibers even if the majority of network traffic is wireless. But over time, both wired and wireless technologies will change, so you'll want to be able to pull new cables/fibers/low voltage power as well as new and as yet unknown stuff. In the US, 2" PVC conduit is about $3/foot. For sure you'll want big conduit between floors. Go to some effort to keep bend radii at several inches or more.

Whatever wireless technology you choose, it will work better and faster with wired backhauls. This is important to make sure that portable devices maintain wifi connection as you move about the house or floors.

Makes perfect sense then to have a WAP per floor, each on a different non-overlapping channel, given the material and the height involved. You could run the cable to your workshop in a metal conduit which should reduce / eliminate any EMI, as well as physically protect the cable.

Just leave roaming between access points to the WIFI adapter in the client. They should detect when they need to hop to a stronger signal channel with the same SSID, and this should be seamless as far as the end user is concerned.

As I suggested, configure the central internet modem / router to manage DHCP for the whole network with the WAPs in bridge mode.

Shoulda changed the wifi channel bands - although most modern routers will go find a relatively uncongested one. 10:1 says it wasnt really your neighbours kit.

Believe me, it was. Terraced house, multiple networks on both sides including a particularly evil Virgin router that seemed to seek out the channel I was using and drown it out with a suspiciously powerful signal. I'm an electrical engineer by training, so have a reasonable idea what I'm looking at. In the end I decided that wired connections would just be more reliable and less hassle.

Cat 6 is plenty of bandwidth and the most ubiqutous connection option, If you want to future-proof your installation, run a few lengths of empty 15mm plastic pipe from your central utiliy point to your office, main tv point and your attic.

When we brought our new house, we did exactly what you're proposing, using all Ubiquiti gear, but being already built, I had to retrofit it.

A UDM-Pro as the router & firewall, a 16 port switch in the house, an 8-port switch in our hangar (though I wish I had a 16 port here...), Cat 6/A cable to an Access Point in each bedroom, the loungeroom & kitchen, and an NVR with the Ubiquiti cameras' to round out the house. 6/A cable through a spare conduit to the hangar connected to the 8-port switch with an external AP for the backyard on the hangar eave, and a pair of AP's in the hangar with a few cameras here too. The Ubiquiti gear is exxy for "just" a home layout but if you want 'prosumer' gear with greater flexibility than stuff you can buy at a department store, I'd recommend it in a heartbeat.

You can certainly get by with just the UDM-Pro to start with as it has 8 ethernet ports itself, but if you want to add an NVR & camera's, you'll need a switch. Of course, you can add these later if you wish, and simply connect the AP's direct to the UDM-P and later run a SFP cable to the NVR if you choose. One of the best things about the Ubiquiti system is it is very scalable, and being one ecosystem, it's easy to add things later.

I would go for screened CAT 5/6 in every room if you can ; routed to a switch and base station in your utility room. That way you can power things like radiator valves and CO2 and PIR sensors remotely, without having to have unsightly AC wall power supplies feeding everything. If you are going to run in cable, it makes sense to have the facility for power supply as well. If you do run in fibre instead, every device will need a data modem to feed the fibre which will need power, so run in power supply cable with it. I would run CAT 5/6 to every room and maybe a fibre to your main television viewing and listening area(s).

Using Wii-Fi is not as reliable as copper and means having to have security and passwords and brings the possibility of remote hacking. A test conducted by Which magazine who equipped a house with cameras and all sorts of consumer Wi-Fi connected devices, received 12,000 hacking attempts in the first week. You don't want the possibility of criminals being able to eavesdrop or view your children or home remotely, or detect if the house is unoccupied.