I recently bought a house and want to install ethernet in every room on the first and second floors while doing some renovations.
Ideally, I would wire each room on both floors directly to the basement, where the internet enters and the network gear will be. Dropping cables from the attic to the second floor is straightforward, as is running cables from the basement up to the first floor. However, getting cables from the second floor or attic into the basement is challenging (but not impossible).
To simplify this, I’m considering placing a switch in the attic for everything on the second floor and another switch in the basement for the first floor, and linking them with a single connection from the attic to the basement. Rather than running 10-15 cables from the second floor / attic to the basement, I would only need to run one in this scenario.
My goal is to ensure that the second-floor devices have the same performance as those on the first floor. I assume simply connecting the two switches with just a single cat6 cable would create a bottleneck. Would connecting the two switches with fiber be a better solution? Any advice on this setup would be appreciated!
Depends. Say you have five drops from the 2nd floor and 5 from the first floor running to a 1Gbe switch in the basement. That would give you 5Gbe bandwidth from each floor. If you run each of those instead to a gigabit switch on the floor and run a single connection to the basement that means you have only 1Gbe bandwidth from each floor.
If you only have a gigabit internet connection, and say a NAS in the basement with a gigabit nic then those would be your bottlenecks anyway, so having a switch instead of home runs would not impact you much at all.
What I would do is run Cat6 or cat 6A cable from each floor which will allow you to upgrade the connection to the basement to 10Gbe in the future without having to deal with fibre. I would also run pairs of Cat6/6A rather than single runs so you have some redundancy incase of bad/damaged cable.
Hi Liam, thanks for the reply. When you say you’d run Cat6 or Cat6a from each floor, do you mean all home runs for each connection? Or a single cable from each floor from a switch to the basement?
Also yes, was planning on running pairs for redundancy.
Ran twin cables into each room of my house, with switches in those rooms connected back to my main switch on a LACP LAGG. If anything I wish I ran more cable, there are places where I ran cable to ports with the future intention of adding Access Points or cameras.
Another option is to run 2/4/6 cables in a LACP LAGG between the attic and basement. Though I think 2 ought to be enough.
Sorry, I would run a pair of Cat6/6A for switch uplinks from each floor, and not try to home run all your connections.
Money where mouth is - that’s similar to what I have done in my house. Internet connection comes into my study on the 2nd floor, and I have run Cat 6 to 2 switches on the first floor, and everything on the first floor runs off those switches.
Any hardware recommendations for the LAGG? My prior home’s networking needs (an apartment) were much simpler… I just used a unifi lite 16 POE switch for everything.
Well I use Netgear switches, they have an ancient GUI but they have a lifetime warranty (though not on all) meaning if the switch fails then they swap it with a new one, look for Pro versions and not Plus! The fans failed on my 48 port and it was swapped out without any issues.
I would also consider switches from https://www.fs.com/ or just stick with Unifi.
Most managed switches will support LAGs. My Netgear switches with their Smart Management supports LAGs as does my ZyXel XS1930.
I generally buy older gen switches for home from Ebay or Amazon and get the level of management that I find good enough (VLANS and LAGs etc) by searching for Smart switches. That keeps me away from Commandline only switches.
Mikrotik makes some nice products and the RouterOS looks “decent” and you can do almost everything from the web GUI. The interface for the Netgear AV line is really nice, you can do most things from the web GUI and it looks “good” with a nice functional layout.
Both offer a serial/ssh/telnet interface for complete control, and the Mirkotik offer this over a web browser too.
Do I had a preference between both of the above? I’d have to look at the application. I have Netgear handling audio and video over IP in a TV production system, and Mikrotik as a “top of rack” in my network. Also a Mikrotik in my lab and thinking about another Mikrotik for my lab to replace an old Cisco switch. The 2 Mikrotik that I use are 10gbps with SFP+ ports but that doesn’t really change the OS interface for any of the router OS based devices.
And finally, I would not install a switch in an attic, at least not my attic where temperatures can get well over 100 degrees F. I would pick a room or closet to mount the switch, then run all the other 2nd floor cables up through the attic and down into the other rooms.
For something like this I would suggest fiber runs from the floors 2 total ,but really only need one connected second could be for backup or use. Cost effective and if you think you can be careful running them top to bottom just by the length you need already terminated. Unifi equipment seems most cost effective and feature reach for a home setup.
If you run copper for your trunk drops you have be concerned about distance power and the sfp + cards tend to be little more costly than fiber modules. Just my thoughts for little future proof setting.
Might be worth making sure you don’t buy cable that offers too little bandwidth. Broadband speeds keep increasing and CAT5 cable may no longer meet your needs.
In general, unless I know 100% that something will stay at gigabit or lower (security cameras, etc.), I run cat 6a now. And odd enough, I didn’t get any pushback when I had 24 new runs put into a classroom, ended up buying 6 spools of cable and the extras are stored for when I need it again. They offered up cat 7 or cat 8 and I wasn’t ready to deal with that yet, probably should have had them put it in anyway.