Pace 526AC gateway with router with switch New home 2017 Whole house LAN

[aznkorboi]

Greetings! I wasn't sure which forum to post and ask this question so I thought why not Tom's Hardware?!

Here is my dilemma.

I have a new home with a whole home lan system. Pretty much I have a giant box in the wall downstairs with a bunch of lan cables that run into different outlets in different rooms on the walls. So, if set up, I can directly connect a LAN cable to a port in my bedroom instead of using wifi.

I also have ATT fiber optics. They use their own modem/gateway which is a PACE 526AC and it has been causing the biggest issue. You can put it in DMZ mode, which acts as a bridge to allow onie port to be open to connect your own router for example.

I also have my own router Netgear Nighthawk x10 and an unmanned Netgear switch.

Currently, they installed the fiber optic cable to run to my loft upstairs. So, the PACE is connected to the loft LAN port and in DMZ mode, my netgear router is connected to the PACE which allows me to use the Netgear router as my current router.

No issues there.

Here's what I'd like to do:
I wanted to put my PACE router in the giant box downstairs connected to the LAN ports throughout the home so that my lan ports could work in different rooms.

I also wanted to connect my switch to the PACE so that I can put all my smart hubs in there. Lastly, I wanted to be able to connect my router directly to a LAN port in the wall so that I can still use this router as my main router..


haha. Sorry for the super long question. You can tell this has been bugging me forever. Any help would be great.

 

[The Paladin]

okay well the solution seems rather simple;
upstairs Loft has Pace router with fiber optic connected to it. set in DMZ, connect your router to it.
downstairs box set a unmanaged switch to handle all the rooms you have wired with Cat5/6 cabling for wired network.
all your missing is run a single wire from your personal router in the loft to the downstairs box.

alternatively, put your router in the downstairs box, and run a cable from upstairs loft pace router to your downstairs box p[personal router, (run wiring from switch to rest of house as previous)

in both theses case your personal router is your primary router. the pace only manages the modem side of things and passes the signal to your personal router. let the switch manage the traffic will be more efficient than letting your router manage it. and it can be accesses from upstairs or not from anywhere using the web interface.