New Home Network Setup Help/Suggestions

[ESzczesniak 128]

Happily, we will be moving in to our first house very soon.  This means that for the first time I will need to actually sort out and setup a home network rather than just moving in to an apartment already setup for internet.  I was hoping and solicity a few thoughts:

1. Does anyone have any thoughts on buying or own modem?  Our service will be through Comcast.  I generally am not a fan of renting equipment and would prefer to buy.  However, we will likely be doing our "landline" through Comcast as well and I seem to remember this requires their modem, as modems from Netgear/Linksys/etc don't have the 4 wire phone jack.

2. Our home will be heavily wireless, but we do have about 5-6 hardwired RJ-45 lines for on-demand and the flight simming room.  Most routers seem to have only 4 hardwired ports.  Any thoughts on the value of spending the money for one with 8 vs placing a 4 or 8 port switch in to the router?

3. Any recommendations for a very good large household router? Our main router will for better or worse likely be in a utility room in the basement.  We will have two floors about it and are fortunate to have a larger house.  So I am sure we will need some range extenders.  

Any other thoughts or suggestions?  I've been able to set most of this stuff up in the past, so I am planning on doing this again.  However, even the simplest router has been enough to cover the apartments I've setup, so I want to make sure I get the right equipment this time around.  

[Guest]

We're using WAVE (used to be Astound), not really a fan of Comcast but you maybe limited in options pending your location.  We have 1Gbps down and 50Mbps up ... on average real world we get about 800Mbps down and about 52Mbps up when polling the same server on speedtest.  I use a Linksys 16 port full duplex switch rated at 1Gbps.

We "rent" the ISP router/modem unit simply because they often change technology and we get the latest and greatest router/modem upgrade every year from WAVE.  Since broadband technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, WAVE are talking 10Gbps for 2018 (which exceeds the capability of my Cat6 distances and routers).

We had our house wired for Cat6e trying to keep length under 50 meters ... it was fairly cheap to retro fit each room at $110 per room (only rooms we didn't do were the bathrooms).  We obviously have wireless also for our iPads/iPhones/laptops but for anything requiring reliable bandwidth performance at low latency is all hard wired (PC's, PS4, media PC, TVs, DVR) ... important for quality 4K content (i.e. NetFlix 4K etc.).

I've had good luck with Linksys but Netgear has been 50/50.  I haven't had much luck with range extenders for wireless ... get a lot of pauses and disconnect/reconnects ... especially if I connect to 5Ghz ... 2.4Ghz seems to be more reliable and better range.

Enjoy your home, hopefully you don't have an HOA and one nutty HOA board member ... we got a lovely xmas gift from our HOA in the tune of $10,083 "special assessment" due year end ... merry Xmas!

Cheers, Rob.

 

 

[EmpireKicking 8]

How much you are willing to spend and comes down to the connection and how many devices that you have in your home.  Mostly you need to by an Modem also, Yes you can get all in one and your IPS does offer you that. However most cases expecting to get an router and a modem.

I don't have good internet upload/download but I'm 100% future ready with my hardware. For my modem I'm using DrayTek Vigor 130, it's easy and simple to use. Plug and play.
My router is asus RT-AC5300, that is design for gaming, but has technology to boosts two 5 GHz data rates up to 4334 Mbps and 2.4 GHz up to 1000 Mbps. Also I got it since it has  MU-MIMO technology that allows to have 10 devices on.

Yes, it did cost allot! around £500 

[bobbyjack 61]

Yup. hard wired is always better than wireless. 

Do you really need a land line?

I've got one of those setups that use your electrical wiring to send internet. It actually works, in my case. If you must use extenders, a router in the basement won't work well. You really want the router centrally placed so that each extender gets the same power signal. Every time a wireless signal goes through anything i.e. a wall, a window, a floor (worse than a wall), a bookcase, or (even worse) a metal filing  cabinet, it gets degraded. Then that signal is picked up by and extender which by their nature don't pass along the full signal, anyway. Then, after passing through more stuff, that signal is picked up by your second extender upstairs. Which has to send any signal that might be left through more walls. 

But maybe you'll get lucky.