Moving into new house. Question on ideal setup for 2 floors

[m_cat12]

Hello. I'm moving down the road into a new home. My current home has 4 floors : basement (movie room), first floor, second floor, and loft (office). We have 25 Mbps from our cable company and basically use wifi for everything (gaming/Xbox one, Netflix/Amazon, laptops and tablets and phones). On any given day, we could have both tv's streaming, 4 phones, 1 laptop and 1 tablet on the wifi.

My new home has 3 floors : basement (movie room), first floor and second floor.

Although we did not have many problems with our wireless service, I'd like to hardwire more equipment if possible? I'm fairly good at figuring things out. And hopefully with a bit of guidance, I'll have even better performance.

Logistics: items: setup/wish
Basement: 1 smart TV: hardwire
First: 1 smart TV/XboxOne: hardwire
Second: nothing right now-maybe a TV in the future: wifi

I purchased the digital TV and Internet bundle? The new cable company increases my speed to 50mbps. I'm in the market for my own modem to avoid modem rental fees. My wireless router is the Netgear NightHawk.

Thanks all. Appreciate your help.

 

[TotalRecall]

If i read right, its pretty obvious you want to layout some ethernet to the basement and first floor thus the question being what kind of equipment do i use? 1000ft cat6 wire is about $70 on ebay. A decent switch on first floor with a router for upstairs. Though personally i would skip wireless and layout some cable throughout the house. Both downstairs and top floor. Its not that expensive and you can to it yourself.
Thats just my 2cents of what i would do.

 

[delaro]

Hello. I'm moving down the road into a new home. My current home has 4 floors : basement (movie room), first floor, second floor, and loft (office). We have 25 Mbps from our cable company and basically use wifi for everything (gaming/Xbox one, Netflix/Amazon, laptops and tablets and phones). On any given day, we could have both tv's streaming, 4 phones, 1 laptop and 1 tablet on the wifi.

My new home has 3 floors : basement (movie room), first floor and second floor.

Although we did not have many problems with our wireless service, I'd like to hardwire more equipment if possible? I'm fairly good at figuring things out. And hopefully with a bit of guidance, I'll have even better performance.

Logistics: items: setup/wish
Basement: 1 smart TV: hardwire
First: 1 smart TV/XboxOne: hardwire
Second: nothing right now-maybe a TV in the future: wifi

I purchased the digital TV and Internet bundle? The new cable company increases my speed to 50mbps. I'm in the market for my own modem to avoid modem rental fees. My wireless router is the Netgear NightHawk.

Thanks all. Appreciate your help.

The easiest way without having to run all that Cat5 is to invest in Power line adapters, some of them you can run up to 10 devices off 1 transmitter.

Here read this it explains quite a lot.

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/home-networking-part-7-power-line-connections-explained/

We use these at home, 6 Devices and I did a little rewiring on the Outlets to make sure I didn't have any interference from other devices. Initially I had issues with a Vacuum causing trouble in the living room after I isolated the outlet I have never had a problem since.

Modem> Router> Power Line Transmitter then Receivers where ever you want them, all mine are running AV500's.

 

[m_cat12]

Hello again. Im a big fan of hardwiring the house. My new house was built in 1986 and all the walls are sheetrock. Definitely not a showstopper but ill have to read up on how to do this.

So here Is a possible new setup:
Digital Cable from Cable company (lets say Comcast) > 'Split 3 ways' somehow > 2 digital cable for TV and 1 for Internet.

So now with 3 wires:
Wire 1 and 2 go directly to digital cable boxes
Wire 3 goes into a modem> then splitter>then run multiple Cat 5/6 directly into all devices with one going to my wireless router.

Does this make sense?

Ive tried the Powerline setup in the past and for some reason im not a huge fan. Definitely not out of consideration though if the complete hardwire does not work.

Thank you all again.

 

[king3pj]

I'm not a fan of powerline either. My office is in the second floor of my house and I also wanted connections in two bedrooms. My router and main entertainment center were on the bottom floor. I was trying to avoid WiFi because I game on my office PC and stream video over my LAN from a Tivo on the bottom floor to two Tivo Minis on the second floor.

I tried powerline adapters and actually got worse performance than I did with WiFi. I'm sure it's more to do with my home's wiring than the technology itself but whatever the reason, they were not a good choice for me. I ended up giving in and running ethernet to the upstairs rooms. It was a pain to get set up but once it's done it's well worth it.

 

[jsmithepa]

When I moved into my new place, the 2nd floor carpet needed replacement, once I saw the bare plywood floor I knew that was the perfect opportunity to run CAT/RG6 wires, so that's where it happened. If you are unwilling to rip floors, walls, I've seen an illustrate book on how run cables through small drilled holes and what the best places to do so. THIS IS THE BIG JOB, because not only do you need to run the wires, but you have to properly terminate them (no big deal but can seems frustrating to the first timer) then apply finishing so thing will look built-in.

Where to place your routers switches, it many time dictated where you can rips floor/walls. IDEALLY you want all these equipment in a central closet. But lets say you need 4 feeds to go into a room but are unwilling/unable to run 4 sets of wires, so you run 1, and place a switch in that room.

Draw a diagram of where you think you need the pieces to go, post it, and we'll give u more feedbacks as needed.

There is rule of thumb that says 2 coax and 2 ethernet to a room, if not to a wall, in case you are not sure where the furniture may end up or move to.

 

[king3pj]

When I moved into my new place, the 2nd floor carpet needed replacement, once I saw the bare plywood floor I knew that was the perfect opportunity to run CAT/RG6 wires, so that's where it happened. If you are unwilling to rip floors, walls, I've seen an illustrate book on how run cables through small drilled holes and what the best places to do so. THIS IS THE BIG JOB, because not only do you need to run the wires, but you have to properly terminate them (no big deal but can seems frustrating to the first timer) then apply finishing so thing will look built-in.

Where to place your routers switches, it many time dictated where you can rips floor/walls. IDEALLY you want all these equipment in a central closet. But lets say you need 4 feeds to go into a room but are unwilling/unable to run 4 sets of wires, so you run 1, and place a switch in that room.

Draw a diagram of where you think you need the pieces to go, post it, and we'll give u more feedbacks as needed.

There is rule of thumb that says 2 coax and 2 ethernet to a room, if not to a wall, in case you are not sure where the furniture may end up or move to.

I've also seen it recommended that you run 2 or more ethernet cables to each room. In my case I only ran one. I have an 8 port gigabit switch that basically serves as the backbone of my network. It runs 5 devices in the room it is in and feeds 2 gigabit 5 port switches in other rooms that needed more than one port.

I may be limiting my maximum network throughput by connecting the smaller switches into my main switch like that but to me it was a simpler setup than running 3 cables to one room and 4 to the other. I also don't notice any congestion when streaming video from a Tivo Roamio connected to the main switch to 2 Tivo Minis connected to each of the smaller switches and doing stuff on the internet at the same time. If I am creating a bottleneck with this setup my limited uses for my LAN aren't exposing it.

I also saved some headache by purchasing 100 foot pre-made cables from monoprice instead of terminating them myself. Yes, this cost more money and the cables were a little longer than I needed but ethernet is cheap on monoprice and I don't have the technical knowledge to terminate them myself.

 

[jsmithepa]

I may be limiting my maximum network throughput by connecting the smaller switches into my main switch

Don't worry. In a typical home use, you are not going to saturate a gigabit ethernet unless you got 20 kids and they simultaneously are watching different programs.

I also saved some headache by purchasing 100 foot pre-made cables

Shrewd.

When I starting doing this thing, it frustrated the heck out of me, they look so simple and yet... until one day I was working with a contractor who was running cables, stroked a conversation with him, and he showed me the Pro's tricks.

 

[m_cat12]

Draw a diagram of where you think you need the pieces to go, post it, and we'll give u more feedbacks as needed.

Thank you. This is a good idea. Ill post my ideal state when I have a few min to draw something up.

Since posting, ive continued to educate myself on running CAT 6 cable throughout the house, switches vs modems/routers, and managed vs unmanaged.

Im still a bit unclear how to split the coaxial from my ISP but here goes:

Coaxial from ISP into 4-5 way brass? splitter. Then 2 coaxials for my TV digital boxes, and 1 coaxial into my modem. The modem is where the internet signal is parsed from the coaxial...and gives me the ethernet hookups. From modem, CAT6 into a switch. The switch will be at least 8 ethernet ports with 1 for incoming signal from the modem. Finally, all of my devices that i wish to hardwire will meet at the switch.

I think a drawing/diagram will be much clearer...

Another concern would be the network 'management software'. Currently, my NightHawk is the wireless router software that i have access to. I dont normally have access to my modem which is rented from my ISP. Im assuming that my new modem and/or switch will come with setup and management software? Most likely ill be purchasing from Netgear again as i already have the NightHawk and functionality and support may be stronger with all of my eggs in 1 basket.

Thank you all for your help and support. Much much appreciated.