[SOLVED] Help chosing home networking device(s)

[TheBardKSU]

Hi all,

I am needing some help deciding what to do for my networking needs. We just moved to a new house and would like to upgrade our capabilities.

Here is my situation:

• Internet speed: Currently is 100 Mbps with Comcast. Here in the next couple of months though we will be getting fiber gig-speed (940 Mbps down and up) with Century Link. We plan to do the “price for life” and will keep this speed for a long time to lock in the rate since I imagine something this fast should serve our needs for a very long time.
• Router: Currently using a Netgear WiFi router that is probably 8 years old. Not surprisingly, reception isn’t that great throughout the new house. It works ok in some areas, but in farther areas of the house speeds are way too slow.
• House layout: 4800 sq ft, two stories with a basement. So around 1600 sq ft per floor.
• House was built pre-wired for CAT5e with wall jacks throughout the house.
• Internet usage: currently mostly basic internet, video calls (mostly FaceTime with family), and lots of streaming video (videos for our young kids and shows for the wife and I, and when friends come over). Multiple devices connected (phones, laptops, multiple TVs, some Apple TVs, and we plan to add smart home devices). Not much if any gaming going on currently, but would like to have this capability for the future. Also, we often hold large gatherings where lots of people may be on their smartphones.
• Connections: I would probably like to have most of the devices on WiFi. However, I may want to do a few devices hardwired. I can think of maybe doing some of the TVs/Apple TVs hardwired to utilize 4k video with minimal lag possibility.
• Smart Home: we haven’t really explored how far to go with this but would like to start doing it sometime in the future. So, I don’t know which platform we would use yet (Alexa, Google, etc). Ideally, I would like whatever networking device(s) we go with to work with whatever platform we decide.

In summary, I am wanting to get something that will provide excellent WiFi coverage throughout the house that will also maximize as much as possible the fiber internet we will have soon and provide support for having lots of devices connected, especially if we have large groups over at our house. I also want it to work with whatever smart home platform we decide to go with. Also as mentioned, we have CAT5e throughout the house so if I could utilize this to improve speeds I can do so.

What would you all recommend I purchase to accomplish this? I haven't done much research so far but I did see for example the TP Link Deco S4 3-pack on Amazon, but I’m not sure if this would be a good solution or not (or would I want more than 3?) . I’m willing to spend some money but wouldn't want to go crazy and spent like $1,000 on this.

Note: I "COULD" live with our current setup for a short time if it makes sense to wait a couple months until we get the gig-speed, or, if it makes sense to wait until we chose a smart home platform. So I don't necessarily need a solution in the next week or anything like that.

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

First thing to consider is you are not going to get anywhere close to gigabit speeds on wifi. In most cases it is your end devices that limit this because they only support 2 feeds ie 2x2 mimo because they only have 2 antenna.

Plan to ethernet connect every device you possibly can. It cuts the wifi interference between your devices. Ethernet is also better in almost every way so any device you can wire you should.

Don't get conned by the "MESH" marketing. This is just a repeater with a different name in many cases. There are some rare units that have dedicated radio to talk to the router but most just have the standard 2 and use them to also talk to end clients. They all suffer greatly in performance. The manufacture just needed some "new" product to get people to upgrade during the many years between 802.11ac and recently released 802.11ax (ie wifi6)

What you want to do is use the design every large corporation has used from the beginning of wifi. You want to run a central router with remote AP attached via ethernet. The "mesh" systems can run in this mode and they like to act like they invented a 20yr old design. You really do not need actual AP your can use a small router running in AP mode.

If you plug as much critical things (like game consoles and tv) into ethernet as you can it should also reduce your wifi needs. Many handheld devices work fine with poor wifi where something like a game console has massive issues.

So you need a main router. You would then connection the lan ports to the ethernet cable going to the remote rooms. If you need more than 4 ports you would also need a small switch. You would then test your wifi coverage and add AP to any room the wifi was not good enough. There is no way to predict wifi coverage you must actually test since every house is different, kinda like you have to actually measure for carpet.

One consideration when you have a gigabit connection is do not plan to use fancy software features on the router. Even cheap routers have a feature that lets NAT traffic bypass the cpu chip. If you use something like parental controls or even simple traffic monitoring the traffic must pass the cpu chip and speed will drop to 250-300mbps even on the fastest router cpu.

 

[TheBardKSU]

First thing to consider is you are not going to get anywhere close to gigabit speeds on wifi. In most cases it is your end devices that limit this because they only support 2 feeds ie 2x2 mimo because they only have 2 antenna.

Plan to ethernet connect every device you possibly can. It cuts the wifi interference between your devices. Ethernet is also better in almost every way so any device you can wire you should.

Don't get conned by the "MESH" marketing. This is just a repeater with a different name in many cases. There are some rare units that have dedicated radio to talk to the router but most just have the standard 2 and use them to also talk to end clients. They all suffer greatly in performance. The manufacture just needed some "new" product to get people to upgrade during the many years between 802.11ac and recently released 802.11ax (ie wifi6)

What you want to do is use the design every large corporation has used from the beginning of wifi. You want to run a central router with remote AP attached via ethernet. The "mesh" systems can run in this mode and they like to act like they invented a 20yr old design. You really do not need actual AP your can use a small router running in AP mode.

If you plug as much critical things (like game consoles and tv) into ethernet as you can it should also reduce your wifi needs. Many handheld devices work fine with poor wifi where something like a game console has massive issues.

So you need a main router. You would then connection the lan ports to the ethernet cable going to the remote rooms. If you need more than 4 ports you would also need a small switch. You would then test your wifi coverage and add AP to any room the wifi was not good enough. There is no way to predict wifi coverage you must actually test since every house is different, kinda like you have to actually measure for carpet.

One consideration when you have a gigabit connection is do not plan to use fancy software features on the router. Even cheap routers have a feature that lets NAT traffic bypass the cpu chip. If you use something like parental controls or even simple traffic monitoring the traffic must pass the cpu chip and speed will drop to 250-300mbps even on the fastest router cpu.

Thank you for providing help with this and providing a detailed response. I think I followed much of what you said and feel like I have the basic idea of what you are talking about. Could you provide a recommendation for the hardware you are suggesting? Both for the main router and APs (if I'll need them)?

Also, for the devices that will end up needing to be WiFi connected, what is the maximum possible internet speed I could expect for those devices? And for the ethernet devices I assume for all of them the maximum possible speed would be the gigabit speed?

 

[bill001g]

Wifi you might see 300mbps if you are fairly close to the router. It has so many variables it is not possible to say. Since most wifi devices are small portable devices they should not need huge bandwidth.

I generally try to stay away from a particular router since the vendor do nasty stuff like keep the name the same on the outside but replace the internal chips and they work very different.

What you can do in general is look for routers that have a number 1200-1750 range. These tend to match end devices. A lot of the routers are getting larger number by supporting things like 4x4 mimo and there are almost no wifi devices with 4 antenna. They also use non standard data encoding methods that are not common on end devices. They are doing it for the person who thinks bigger number is always better even though they can never use the features.

A critical feature to check for in your case is gigabit lan and wan ports. Most routers now have them but there are still 10/100 models being sold.

Stay with the larger brands. asus tend to be the premium brand along with a premium price. Tplink is cheaper and still good quality. Still many other like linksys, netgear etc are fine. Avoid things like buffalo or belkin or all those non brand routers you find on amazon/ebay.

I

 

[SamirD]

bill001g has some great advice (as always ), especially on the point about wiring every device that you can. There is simply no substitute for wired ethernet in terms of performance. A good rule of thumb is that any device that won't be mobile can be easily wired.

As far as wireless your use case sounds ideal for a Ubiquiti setup. It's not going to be the cheapest, but it will be by far the fastest and most reliable setup since you have a wired backbone it can plug into. Although I haven't personally used their products, I have read so many first-hand user experiences and installation experiences across a variety of online forums that I think they would be ideal. Their access points have solid coverage and you could probably use one per floor back to the wired backbone and a ubiquiti router/gateway at your wiring closet/switch.

 

[.454]

Wifi you might see 300mbps if you are fairly close to the router. It has so many variables it is not possible to say. Since most wifi devices are small portable devices they should not need huge bandwidth.

I generally try to stay away from a particular router since the vendor do nasty stuff like keep the name the same on the outside but replace the internal chips and they work very different.

What you can do in general is look for routers that have a number 1200-1750 range. These tend to match end devices. A lot of the routers are getting larger number by supporting things like 4x4 mimo and there are almost no wifi devices with 4 antenna. They also use non standard data encoding methods that are not common on end devices. They are doing it for the person who thinks bigger number is always better even though they can never use the features.

A critical feature to check for in your case is gigabit lan and wan ports. Most routers now have them but there are still 10/100 models being sold.

Stay with the larger brands. asus tend to be the premium brand along with a premium price. Tplink is cheaper and still good quality. Still many other like linksys, netgear etc are fine. Avoid things like buffalo or belkin or all those non brand routers you find on amazon/ebay.

I

I'm in the same boat here and have been reading a lot of your advice in other threads. As far as router selection goes, do they have to be the same, as in the main one be AX and the AP be AC?

 

[bill001g]

I'm in the same boat here and have been reading a lot of your advice in other threads. As far as router selection goes, do they have to be the same, as in the main one be AX and the AP be AC?

I forget quickly what these thread even a couple days old did and did not discuss. You can mix and match devices the newer stuff is all backward compatible. The new problem I suspect we will see with 802.11ax is that is uses so much bandwidth that it makes it impossible to not overlap the radio channels. Then again their primary market is for the people that only have 1 radio source and they try to get as much bandwidth out of that one source as they can.

I have been too lazy to go read the design white papers companies like cisco and HP put out that talk about implementations using 802.11ax. I would hope they don't recommend just setting the channel width to 20mhz and in effect not use the feature.