Need optimal setup for 3 story house with wired and wireless connections using switch and 2 wireless routers

[DeepFried_Dave]

Below is my current setup followed by the end goal I am trying to achieve. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Current Setup:
I have two CAT5e lines ran from every room in the house to a central location in the basement. At this location I have a ubee DDM3513 cable modem (provided by my cable company). This modem is connected to a Netgear wireless router (WNDR3700v3). The first port on this wireless router is connected to a TP Link Gigabit Switch (TL-SG1024D), and this switch needs to remain in this location.

Current Connections:
- Basement: It's unfinished, so we don't have any wired or wireless connections currently in the basement
- First Floor: Wired- Satellite Receiver, Apple TV, LaserJet Printer (does not have wireless capability)
- First Floor: Wireless- PS3 (This would be hardwired, but the receiver and Apple TV use the 2 ports for the living room and this PS3 isn't used for streaming, just disc play so I'm not too concerned)
- Second Floor: Wired- (2) Satellite receivers
- Second Floor: Wireless- Apple TV, PS3 for gaming (I have the ports available to hardware these, just need to stop being lazy and terminate the connections in the basement and add to switch)
- General Wireless: We have 3 laptops, 3 phones, and 2 tablets that use wireless. We really don't use any of these to stream on our network.

One of the obvious issues is that the wireless connectivity that I have with our wireless devices is not ideal due to the location of the router. We use our wireless devices on the 1st floor 70% of the time and on the second floor 30% of the time.

Additionally, we recently bought a Mac Air that supports 802.11ac. I purchased the 2TB Apple 'Time Capsule' in order to wirelessly back up the Mac Air through Time Machine, provide additional wireless storage for photo/video files (due to the small amount of storage on the Mac Air), and to take advantage of the Air's 802.11ac wi-fi support.

Desired Result:
- Connect Time Capsule to network in order for laptops and mobile devices to wireless access and/or backup (understanding that some cannot do this).
- Change primary wireless router to Time Capsule to take advantage of upgraded wi-fi support on Mac Air (primary family computer)
- Determine correct location for modem & wireless routers, and how they all need to be connected together to create an optimal network.
- Decide to remove or implement current router into new set up.

Other Questions:
- Should all hardwired devices run through switch, or should some that gaming or streaming are used be ran directly through router?
- Should any device capable of connecting to a 5Ghz do so, or should this frequency be reserved for certain applications (streaming, gaming, etc).
- What's the 'best' way to set up guest network? Is there a certain band that I should use, specific router of these two, etc. Or is recommended at all? I give out my wifi pass to all of my guests anyways, but it gets repetitive and I don't want them chewing up my streaming bandwidth ( I had 10 phones connected to my network over the holidays which made it a little difficult to SKYPE).

Thanks in advance for your advice, and I apologize for the length of the question. I just wanted to make sure that I provided enough details, and don't hesitate to ask if you need any further information.

Thanks
Dave

 

[bill001g]

Pretty big post so maybe I miss somethings.

The solution to your wireless issues is to put more wireless devices on the other floors. You want to either use AP or a router running as a AP. You hard wire this back to your main switch. In effect a AP is a switch that has wireless ports. You main router will still control all the IP and connection to the internet. All devices will still be able to communicate just as if they were wired.

You want to leave as much as you can wired. It likely doesn't matter if you plug into the switch or the router. The argument most used for plugging into the switch is traffic going between 2 devices in the house will not go into the router...but in general the switch ports in the router do not affect the performance of the router even if you do use them to talk to each other.

You of course want to avoid any gaming on wireless since it is susceptible to random interference. In general it helps to use both 2.4 and 5 because they are not competing. You can if you put in multiple AP use different channels and have multiple 2.4 and 5 and reduce competition even more. Hard to say what to use the 5g for. It has less ability to penetrate walls so the coverage is not as good but this also means you have less interference from the neighbors. You are best to use INSSIDER and see which is less competition.

If all your "phones" are using up you internet bandwidth there is not a good way to fix this. You might be able to use QoS on the router but that is a huge topic to explain why it doesn't work most the time.