I am having to redo all of my home network and I am not as tech savvy as i use to be.
Little bit of information. house is 2300sqft that is heavily insulated with sprayfoam 6in thick outside walls, between floors and ceiling. I have an office building behind the house and another building that have Cat6 run to them and I will need to hook them into the network for internet. One of these buildings I would like to put an exterior Wi-Fi router on later to cover our 20 acres. 3 gamers in the house. I need 2.4ghz for some of the stuff in the house. Atlest 8 ethernet ports are needed. Most gaming systems and tvs are on these.
I’ve been looking and I’m a little bit lost in the hardware and how to set this up. I do have fiber at the house so internet speeds aren’t an issue.
I have been looking at Asus gaming routers due to that is what we have always had but i need more ethernet ports then what they have.
Please feel free to ask questions i might have missed. As I ststed tech has moved faster then I have kept up with and im lost…or maybe just old now. 😅
Best for You is to firstly set providers router, which You probably has/get to bridge mode (so it will not acs as a router) if You can, and leave routing by You routers side. Or maybe You just get media converter from fiber to RJ45, that’s even better. In this scenario, You put router in some good spot (probably just center of the house, maybe near staircase, rather higher than lower, imagine signal boucing off the walls and going thru doors) and You’ll need to run two UTP cables to router - one from your ISP hardware to the WAN port, second to run back to place, where all of Your wiring meets, from LAN port of the router. There You have to place network switch, they usually comes with 4, 8, 16 ports, etc, so if You have 8 endpoints, then You will have 9 cables (1 from router, 8 from rooms) so best is to buy 16 port switch. If You can’t put ISP device in bridge mode for some reason, then it is pointless to have 2 routers on network, so You sets Your router of choise to Access Point mode, and in this case You need to provide it with just one cables and put it in the LAN port, as it don’t need to translate ISP network to local one. At this point, You can consider to put small rack case, end cables at patchpanel, buy rack switch, connect them with patchcords and make it pretty ;) but You can also just terminate them with RJ45 plugs, plug it to regular switch and it will work the same. 1 Gigabit is standard for now, but You can consider going for 2,5Gb devices, tho it isn’t necessary as You can always upgrade even to 10Gb, even if You have cat5e wiring (but if I can choose, then I’ll go with 6e). It also depends if Your ISP have 2,5Gb port in device that they provide to You, and what kind of speed they offer. And 1Gb devices is cheaper, as 2,5 is relatively new thing. If You have big house, it is always batter to go with multiple APs, than to buy overpriced premium router, which just can’t cover all off that. That being said, i have like 300 meters square brick house (Europe here :P) and single AX TP-Link cover it all just fine - i just place it at good spot. Tho all PCs is connected by wire.