Setting up a new home network - Need advice

[Ravenous26]

Recommendations on gear or flaws in my setup??

So long story short, with my job I had to move a lot and had small apartments. When I bought a house a few years ago and settled in, I went with ATT who gave me a very hard time about using my own gear. Well after nearly 3 years of issues after issues I am fed up and switching to a different ISP and as such doing a proper home network.

A little bit about the needs of the setup.
My needs - I am on call 24/7 and have to connect my work laptop through a VPN to access anything for work. Write and run a lot of AD HOC reporting which does not require a lot of bandwidth, however I also log into numerous IP CCTV units and stream/download video to validate the data from numerous different CCTV brands/types/compressions

I do not do a lot of online gaming but I hate waiting 5 hours for a 19 gig game to download haha. Every now and again the mood strikes and I do some flight sims, Arma3 and games like Gal Civ3... I do a lot of streaming - netflix, youtube, pandora, hbo go and the such.

Wife on the other hand went back to college, she does play an MMO and if often streaming audio/video in her office while she works.

Often have people over on the weekends for board gaming and a few times a year for a small lan party

Future Layout?
Modem?(more then likely having to go with Cox/Comcast DOCIS 3.0 capable of at least 150 down)
Router? (needs primary and guest networks - able to handle heavy streaming)
Main Switch(unmanaged is done) (16 Port) -
My Office - Personal PC (Wired), Work Docking Station (Wired), TV(will be wireless? might wire it), Printer(Wireless), NAS (Wired)
Wifes Office - Personal PC (Wired) , TV (will leave that wireless)
Man Cave - TV(Wireless), 6 ports for lan parties
Then One line ran to the living room into a 5 port switch located on TV stand - TV (wireless off, not wired), Xbox360 (Wireless - the nic died on it), BluRay (wired - main living room streaming device), Dish Box (Wired), Extra Line (for laptop for Steam sharing or if I choose to work in the living room on the weekend)

2 laptops in total wireless (wifes and my work)
2 cell phones on wireless
Again we often have friends over for an afternoon and others that come to visit.

So that is the needs of the network, I know what I need it to do but I am very behind on the times when it comes to current tech and what will meet my needs the best...

Thank you all for your time and advice, I look forward to seeing the feedback given.

**Adding house info**
Roughly 1,064 sqft main floor
House is a single story with basement (man cave and my office is in the basement)

TLDR - Need help picking gear for a home network- Modem/Router/Switch/Second switch in living room?

 

[Ravenous26]

Bumping this up, still hoping for some guidance.

 

[Alabalcho]

Start with good ISP. Cable is generally faster than DSL
Any top tier router (look at something in $100-150 range) will do
Get a gigabit switches throuout the house, starting with the router. Connect a switch in each room / office. Leave wireless connectivity only for devices which cannot get it by wire (phones / tablets / laptops).

 

[gerr]

Before any recommendations, how impacted are you if your Internet connection goes down? In other words, do you need Internet redundancy?

 

[Ravenous26]

Before any recommendations, how impacted are you if your Internet connection goes down? In other words, do you need Internet redundancy?

No worries about Internet redundancy. Most days I work from an office. And can use my cell phones data for my laptop in case of late night emergencys

 

[gerr]

I would suggest a Motorola Surfboard 6141 modem, don't rent anything from your cable provider!

Are you looking for a business class router, or just a beefy consumer router? Any need or plans for 802.11ac?

 

[Ravenous26]

I would suggest a Motorola Surfboard 6141 modem, don't rent anything from your cable provider!

Are you looking for a business class router, or just a beefy consumer router? Any need or plans for 802.11ac?

Beefy consumer, something so I can go with unmanaged switches. Leaning to toward ac to future proof.

 

[gerr]

A $150-$200 consumer AC router should be fine. Just make sure the AC part maxes out oat 1300Mhz, not 867Mhz. So AC1600 is 1300(ac) + 300👎. AC1750 would have 450👎, and AC1900 would have 600👎.

They all should have gig ports so any decent unmanaged gig switch should work fine.

Brands like Asus, Netgear, Dlink, & Linksys are your top tier brands with Trendnet & TP-Link being just a step behind.

 

[Ravenous26]

Thanks Gerr, sorry for the delay. Got called out of town over the weekend. I really appreciate the feedback!