It depends on the neighborhood. Where I live, all utilities are underground. At a former house, I had broadband coming from utility poles.

I’ve had fiber installed at two houses this year, and in both they worked with me to get the fiber, the ONT and the Ethernet exactly where I wanted them at no additional charge. At my old house, the fiber came in through the basement in the back, the fiber runs under the joists until it ends up under my office, and they ran Ethernet up to an outlet on the office wall. At the new house, it enters into my basement workshop, on the top shelf of a cabinet, where the ONT is and Ethernet goes to my router. There is plenty of extra fiber coiled above the drop ceiling for relocation.

At 2000 square feet one unit might work. If you have brick, stone, or concrete interior walls, then it probably won’t work well.

Usually I recommend one WiFi access point per thousand square feet per floor, especially with stick frame and plaster construction, although more area per AP is usable if the surrounding WiFi radio environment isn’t too crowded.

As they said.

But use Ethernet for new network cabling. Coax is good if it is already installed in the walls, but not so good for new work.

Change the shop WiFi device to Access Point mode if possible. Change its SSID (WiFi name), password, and security setting to exactly match your home setting. Then devices will roam seamlessly between home and shop.

Cascading switches is fine.

Doesn’t Spectrum provide a modem for no extra charge? But if you are having difficulties with yours, they’ll swap it out for you.

You might find bargains on newer gear with higher specs at resale shops.

Imagine you want a drink of water. What is best: going outside in the rain and opening your mouth up to catch drops, or turning on a water faucet? WiFi is like rain, Ethernet is like a faucet.

If your router doesn’t have enough LAN ports for your devices, you can get an inexpensive gigabit Ethernet switch to add more.

Maybe the router is the DNS server for the network, especially if it has content filtering.

One of my ASUS routers is under spec’d for RAM, and I had it set to automatically reboot every Sunday morning at 2 am. Trouble is, it simply wasn’t designed to have so many devices connected to it. Otherwise it is a good device.

My place of employment has an 80 Mbps upload / 80 Mbps download fiber optic connection, with approximately 150 users. The network works fine, but the network hardware is good, enterprise-class hardware: Fortigate firewall, Cisco routers, Brocade managed switches, and Extreme Networks WiFi access points.

Sure, no one is downloading games over the network, although there are a lot of software updates, but they are doing extensive YouTube and Netflix streaming, etc., and our supposedly tiny 80 Mbps connection handles multiple 2K streams without issue, and without lag or hiccups.

The first most important thing our network does beyond typical consumer hardware is traffic shaping, Quality of Service, and traffic prioritization. There simply isn’t any reason why software updates, downloads, and media streams need to have low latency, but it is critical that interactive processes get high priority. ASUS routers have some of these functions, but a router distribution such as pFSense, OPNsense, or OpenWRT, running on PC hardware will do it better than simple consumer models. Consider the “prosumer” class Omada or UniFi product lines as well.

Small but frequent critical infrastructure traffic such as DNS and clock synchronization is centralized on the network, so that each and every device is no longer getting that information from over the Internet, but from a local server, and our firewall enforces that, redirecting or blocking attempts to bypass the local server. Many Windows and Google updates are also locally handled by a server, so these updates gets downloaded only once.

Is this a store bought cable, or did you buy bulk cable and terminate it yourself?

Can you cut off the ends and reterminate the cable with new jacks? Or just buy a new cable.

No. Question is solved.

As others mentioned, it is possible with a managed switch, a router that supports VLANs, lots of networking skills, and two Ethernet runs between the switch and router, but it isn’t something that I’d recommend at all.

An easy alternative is to get a wired router and place it in the basement, and connect the existing WiFi router—configured into access point mode—and keep it where it is. The wired router is likely less expensive than a managed switch, and likely will require fewer skills to configure well.

You want a system that supports ‘provisioning’, where all you have to know is the serial numbers of the gear and access to a cloud controller to configure it. Then, they will automatically download their configuration from the cloud controller when they first connect to the Internet. I think that both Ubiquiti UniFi and TP-Link Omada equipment supports this provisioning, as does all enterprise gear as far as I know. You’ll be able to monitor and otherwise manage the system remotely via the cloud controller. You’d need to have someone connect the router first to an already existing modem or ONT (avoid ISPs who mandate the use of a gateway), and then connect everything else.

If there is cable damage, you could get only 100 Mbps, or nothing at all. There is no in-between.

“Cat 7” cabling could be scammy and not perform for you—lots of folks think that “bigger is better” but that’s not the case in the Categories of cabling. For your use, Cat 6A, 6, perhaps 5e, or even maybe Cat 5 could work.

Check with the POS company. They may require a completely independent system.