[SOLVED] Help me make my 10GB home network

[afzal.ballim]

Sorry if this gets a bit long guys, but I think I need to give some background to explain my situation.

First, for context I live in Switzerland. This means house made of thick brick walls, 30cm support walls, 15cm dividers, almost always made of brick.

I have just downscaled my home. I built a house in 1998. I did not know what I would need network wise, so I just put in empty tubes all over the house. I had 4 floors, including a basement with home cinema and fitness. My ADSL connection was to the main service panel in the basement. I installed 24 Cat5e sockets in the house, going through a managed Netgear 1GB switch. Over time, Wi-Fi happened, so I got an eclectic collection. I left my suppliers modem/router in the home cinema (Swisscom).
I eventually bought a Linksys EA6900, an Asus RT-AC87U and a Netgear X4 R7500, one for each floor with the same SSID and password and set up as Aps with wired backhaul. Spreading the 2.4GHz channels, they didn’t interfere with each other, but I never thought much about seamless handover.

I gave the 5GHz channels a different SSID, to prioritize devices for my gaming kids (2 of them). Things trundled along, so-so.

Now, the kids are all young adults, and I was hoping they would fly the nest as they finished uni, but Covid is putting a cramp in that. We’ve just moved into a much smaller home. It’s essentially a 15m x 15m floor, with 4m x 10m balconies on 2 sides (call them East and West). Each floor has one apartment, and we’ve sandwiched between the other two. Below them is a floor with our storage rooms, and below that is the entrance and garage.

You can essentially view the apartment as a west side that’s a long 5x15m living/dining/kitchen room with a balcony on the side. The east side is has the 3 bedrooms, but also the main entryway (between the northeast bedroom and the west one). The master bedroom at the south has a dressing room and a bathroom, so is about 4x10m. The middle has 2 bathrooms, separated by an elevator, and a laundry room at the back. The fuse box, and all external cabling to there. The rooms have Cat6a connectors (there is a total of 10).

The suppliers 10GB fibre optic entry point is in the laundry room. I’ve connected their modem to it, which I’ve mounted on the wall outside of the cabinet. In their infinite wisdom, the modem has no 10GB ports. It’s got one 2.5GB, 4x 1GB, and the rest is reserved for WiFi (802.aaax/ac/n/a on 5GHz, ax/n/b/g on 2.4GHz).

Even so, for future proofing I’ve put in a Netgear XS712v2 managed switch, connected up to the 2.5GB port. One of the 1GB is directly connected to the providers TV box, another to my NAS, and the other 2 to the most used desktops.

I can’t get ethernet to the storage room where we’ve made our fitness (It’s a 6.5x5m room all the same) nor to the garage (where phone signals don’t get through, but I need WiFi for our Teslas), so I’ve used a Devolo powerline from the switch for those.

In terms of devices (excluding the storage room and garage), We’ve got 5 smartphones, 6 laptops, 2 HTPCs, 3 desktops, a NAS, a WiFi printer, an Xbox, a Nintendo switch, a Wii, 2 Oculus Quest 2s, a smart AVR (Denon), 2 Sonos systems, 2 chromecasts, 3 Samsung TV/Monitors, a smart fridge, 2 smart cookers, 3 Kindles, and I’ve lost count of the smart home devices.

So, now to the crux of the matter. The routers just aren’t cutting mustard anymore. I’ve set them up with the same SSIDs and passwords in both 2.4 and 5GHz and used wifi analysers to pick channels. I want to play nice with neighbours, but that’s not been easy. A lot of the devices, in particular the phones and computers, regularly drop connections, or say they’ve got a connection with no internet. I don’t want to go Mesh, as the WiFi backhaul is just going to make the situation worse. I’m looking to future proof as much as possible and hoping someday I can replace the crappy Swisscom modem with a system with 10GB ports. In the meantime, my most pressing problem is to stop these random drops and get my gaming kids off of my back.

Any suggestions?

 

[bill001g]

Do you have coax tv cables that may solve some of your issuers. You can use moca and it is much faster than powerline. The moca 2.5 in theory can run 2.5g but all the units I have seen only have gigabit ports. Unlike things like wifi and powerline these new moca devices can actually get gigabit.

You should never play games on wifi there really is no solution to the random interference from neighbors. Even though it might be a little slower powerline will provide much better gaming experience. Games do not need bandwidth other than downloading.

In general your wifi will be limited by the end devices. it is very easy to get a router that has lots of antenna and do 4x4 mimo but is rare even for desktop cards. Almost all portable devices only have 2 antenna.

You have to be careful about "future proof". Everyone who ran out and bought wifi6 when it first came out even before end devices support it I can now laugh at and point at wifi6e. Cable you run in the wall where it is hard to replace I can see but electronic boxes you replace every few years anyway I would buy only what you feel you can actually use in the next couple years.

10g has extremely limited use in a home environment. You quickly hit bottlenecks in things like the disk systems or in the applications. Stuff has to be very carefully designed to be able to actually use 10gbit. If you talk to anyone who has gigabit internet they will tell you there are very few sites that let you download at that rate. Most times the server has artificial limitation on it so that a couple of people with high speed contentions do not exceed the ISP connection the server is using.

So in summary your best option is to try to find a solution that eliminated the wifi from the path on the gaming machines.

As far as wifi goes it appears as if you have fairly modern equipment so I would not change it until maybe next summer. By then the wifi6e stuff should be more available and end devices like phones will likely start having support. Wifi6e is going to be a massive improvement not so much in speed because it is still wifi6. It is all the extra bandwidth on the 6g radio. It should allow people to coexist with their neighbors and not overlap..........at least until we see wifi7 where the idiots likely will try to allow a signal user the ability to use all the radio channels on 6g for 1 connection.

 

[afzal.ballim]

Thanks for the reply. I'll treat to treat a few points.
First, much of our gear is connected through ethernet cables - the desktops, the HTPCs, the NAS, one of the Samsung TVs, the XBox, The Nintendo Switch, the Wii, the service provider IPTV box, and the AVR. One of the desktops is a big gaming rig and work rig for video processing, but my son often prefers using his Alienware (which is his work video processing rig) or his Oculus, and isn't interested in cables for them, even is most of his games are Steam.
The girls play, but their laptops are much more university machines, which these days means a lot of Zoom.
There are things that just aren't made for ethernet - smart devices like the cookers or iRobot, casting devices.
MOCA isn't a solution (there is coax cabling, but not much of it - the apartment was constructed in 2019-2020 and nobody has much interest in coax anymore.

I'd say the biggest issue we have is machines reporting that they have a WiFi connection, but no internet, or sudden latency issues. My guess is the router/APs don't play nice in handover. Nothing has much in the way of configuring handover. The other issue seems to be drops/latency, which could be device overload. I thought that a possible solution is to dedicate a good AP to only the gaming devices, using a different SSID and just making sure there is no overlap in the 5GHz band with any other devices. I have given that a try with the Netgear X4 R7500, but the problems remain.

Just as an aside, the 10GB seems relatively good so far. None of the machines have anything beyond 1GB NICs, but I connected 5 up to the modem and did simultaneous speed tests. They pretty much all maxed out at around 890-930 Mbps symmetric with latency in the 5-15 ms.

 

[bill001g]

I guess I looked at this as your primary concern was getting as much of 10g as you can.

With wifi you trade no wires for much less performance. You will extremely lucky to get 600mbps on the newest wifi6 older stuff you will be very lucky to get 300mbps. Now this is not a stable rate either. You take interference spikes which has some small impact on video confercing but a huge impact in online games. I really don't understand why some people pay huge amounts to get tiny improvements in say the video system of a game machine but then go "wires are ugly".

It is highly likely your problems with wifi are interference from neighbors which you can't actually fix. First I would set the SSID different on all the router/ap you have. This way you know exactly where you are connecting to. Sometime devices are not very smart on what they connect to. It also lets you manually load balance the traffic between the radios. You the human are much smarter than any software that tries this.

If you still have issues then you need to add more radio sources in most cases. I mean if you could put a AP In every room it would give the best results even though that tends to be overkill. This is partially why I mentioned the Moca and powerline units. You can use those to place wifi in the remote rooms. I would still recommend people hook to the ethernet ports on these devices but if they want to use wifi to go 2 ft I guess it will still be better than going back to the main router via wifi.