Looking for advice on rigging up a wired home network

Barbatum083

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Jan 29, 2015
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Greetings,
I've been doing some searching and I can't find a solid answer that addresses my personal situation, and with my limited networking knowledge, I don't know how to take what I've read and make it work for me. I have a Motorola SURFboard SB6141 which is connected to a Asus RT-AC68R in the back room of my house, which is where the coax line enters the house. In my living room and master bedroom, I have three devices I'd prefer to be on a hard line and not wifi. My question is, how can I get a hard line to all of those devices? I'm not afraid to cut into walls and install plugs but I don't think it'd be as simple as just running really long Cat5e cables up in the attic to those rooms. I have a vague idea of what a switch is, but I'm not sure I really know how it works well enough, or if that would be something that would work for me. Thanks.
 
Solution
The sequence is most likely: SB6141 ---> RT-AC68R ---> SWITCH === (all ethernet runs) ===> to other rooms.

Yes it's as simple as running long cables up the attic and down the next room, and TERMINATING, that last part seems obvious but there are certainly correct ways to it.
Well for networking connections you have 3 choices; WiFi, Powerline, and Ethernet. Powerline uses the electrical wiring in your house to transmit data, however it is very unreliable. Same device will work for some people but not others or only in part of a house. So its generally regarded as a "no other option" kind of choice.

Now Ethernet is just that a straight cable drop from your router to the other device. The cable can go up to 100 meters before its signal strength becomes unreliable.

Best build practice would be to run it inside the walls. Though, depending on your house, you can run it along the basement or attic and then drop it into the walls just where you want the wall connection to be.

Your router has a switch already (all those extra ports on the back) so you don't necessarily need one. However if you only want to run 1 cable from the router and then split it into 3 where your other devices are you would use a switch there, so they can all share the single cable connection back to the router.

Switches are plug and play devices, you just plug your cables into them and they work so no need to worry about any complicated settings with them.
 

Barbatum083

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Jan 29, 2015
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So how far are you talking before a straight cable's signal strength starts to become unreliable? I doubt it'd be 100 meters or even close to that from my router to the mentioned devices. Also, would it make a difference with signal strength to use one line to a switch then to the devices, or three separate lines.

 
The sequence is most likely: SB6141 ---> RT-AC68R ---> SWITCH === (all ethernet runs) ===> to other rooms.

Yes it's as simple as running long cables up the attic and down the next room, and TERMINATING, that last part seems obvious but there are certainly correct ways to it.
 
Solution
The signal strength will be near perfect right up to that 100m length, so long as the cable isn't damaged in some way.

In terms of bandwidth it wouldn't be noticeable unless you have a 1Gbps internet connection and all 3 of your devices were trying to saturate it at once. For your average home user you won't even come close to overloading the bandwidth of a single Ethernet cable so no worries about splitting a single cable to three or more devices.