Ethernet, wifi, dual WAN, for the home that has it all

[HTFB]

I know not that of which I speak. Please, O wise ones, tell me about how many boxes I need, what shape they are, and whether they need to lurk in a dark cupboard or in an actual room.

We are refurbishing a house, and all the decisions need to have been made yesterday. For Passivhaus reasons all the wiring that goes through the outside wall is being done by the same electrician, and that includes data. It seems the obvious time, while the place is gutted, to install Ethernet cable. I'm not quite sure why we would want it, but we couldn't have it later. So it's going in.

What we definitely do need is a redundant supply of internet. In the current flat we have a Virgin Media cable router and phone line ADSL, which each provide wifi but don't know about each other. If one connection goes down I have to retune the laptop / phone / etc to the other, and the printer is only connected to the ADSL router. Now is the chance to do things properly and it ought to be possible to have one network at home which can fail over / load-shift between the two external connections. I believe this is done with a Dual WAN box.

So the components of the system need to include:

• the modem for the phone line,
• the modem for the cable,
• the dual-WAN capability,
• connecting the ethernet cables,
• providing WiFi, upstairs and down.

How many different boxes does this need? Do they become a neat rack with blinkenlights, or a weird tangle of different shapes?

The electrician has quoted for "internet switch + patch panel + enclosure" but the dual-WAN side of things is a new thought. Which we need to be able to flesh out by, er, 9:30 tomorrow. What, O wise ones, would you do?

[edited to add: and is there any reason why we shouldn't do this?]

[Kim]

Benefits of Ethernet cable are basically:

- Performance: Unless something's broken, electrons go in and come out at the other end.  You have a guaranteed throughput from point to point (rather than sharing a medium, as radio systems do), and it's generally faster and lower latency than the current wireless standards.
- Reliability: As your're not sharing a medium, and not susceptible to interference from neighbours' WiFi networks, and other radio technologies in the same band, it keeps working reliably.
- Power delivery:  You can send DC power over Ethernet cables along with the data.  This is useful for powering things like WiFi access points, CCTV cameras, VOIP phones, network hardware, environmental sensors, etc.
- UTP Structured cabling can be used for things other than Ethernet.  Analogue telephony is the obvious example.  Also handy for things like baseband analogue video, serial (RS232, RS485 and similar), Dallas One-Wire sensors, or simple contact-closure interfaces (PIR or door/window sensors, counting pulses from a utility meter, that sort of thing).

If it hasn't occurred to you already, you may want to mount one or more WiFi access points on the ceiling(s) to provide optimal coverage.  Run Ethernet cable to the likely positions.


At this point, you don't really need to consider the details of dual-WAN beyond the fact that you're going to want both incoming lines to meet^[1] somewhere convenient for some magic boxes of blinkenlights.  That's probably going to be the same place as the switch and patch panel.  Obviously they'll need power, and enough ventilation not to overheat.  Consider that you might want other kit there in future (UPS, CCTV, that sort of thing), and that some of it might have noisy fans (though I try to avoid them wherever possible, if only on reliability grounds).

19" racks (which might just be a couple of rack rails mounted to a wooden frame) are a good approach for neatness.  Non-rackmount kit can be placed on rack-mountable shelves.

Final note: 'Electrician' is to data and RF wiring what 'plumber' is to mains power wiring.  Some of them will do a decent job.  Most of them *think* they're doing a decent job. 


_{[1] Though note that you could place modems/ONTs where convenient for the telco and run Ethernet back to your router.}

[pcolbeck]

What Kim says.

Plus I would look at getting a cable run to outside if you have a garden a reasonable height up on the middle of the house facing the garden (just above head height so maybe 7 or eight feet) then you can add an outside grade WiFi access point if you want good coverage in the garden.

Also 19 inch rack mount kit is ubiquitous in my world (enterprise networking) but home grade stuff is usually a lot smaller and can usually be neatly mounted on a 1m x 1 m piece of plywood much like you would a fuse box.

As for number of boxes its basically:

1 x Ethernet switch for aggregating all the Ethernet cable runs
1 x Firewall
1 x Dual WAN port router that supports whatever your WAN (ie Internet) options are eg Fibre, VDSL etc (or 2 one for each type of WAN)
1 x Wirelless LAN controller (for better smarter WiFi)

Basically you separate out all the functions rather than have everything in one box.

All the above need to go somewhere. Near where the internet comes into the house is good.

Then you will need ceiling mounted WiFi Access Points spread around your house, how many depends on how big the house is, how many floors, if its square or long and thin etc). For a normal four bedroom house 4 would usually do it, two upstairs and two downstairs and give you excellent WiFi everywhere.

I would go for Ubiquity kit for the wireless and the Ethernet switch. You can buy their WiFi controller or just the download the software and run it on a Raspberry Pi.
For a firewall I would go Pfsense (its free) on an old mini PC with dial network card.

[yoav]

You may already know that Virgin cable isn't fibre to the home. You can't actually connect it directly to a wi-fi router. It's co-axial copper cable which connects to their own box that acts as a wifi router, with optional phone and TV outputs. You can switch this box to modem only mode and connect it by Ethernet to the wifi-router.
As an aside, would you use Ethernet to connect to wifi-routers through the house to directly to computers? If the former, would a mesh system not be the way to go?

[pcolbeck]

Never use a WiFi router unless you really really have to.

Mesh WiFi is a solution to not having Ethernet cable to access points, If you cant run cable use mesh, but cabled APs are much better (more bandwidth for a start).

[chrisbainbridge]

We did this in the last house and it made a big difference.  multiple ethernet cables whoever I thought we might need them.  Now I would double the number.

I don't know much about passivhaus standards but is the problem how many acres points through the wall breaching the insulation or the installation of multiple ethernet cables during first fix of cabling?

Definitely have access for 2 cables/fibreoptics.whatever at this stage if you think you will need them in 2, 5, 10, 20 year time future proofing is always good.

[Kim]

I'd also add that the great thing about ducts and conduits is that you can pull cables that haven't been anticipated or even invented yet through them in future.

[sizbut]

I have wired ethernet for several reasons, though self-installed so no one will ever call it neat. Wired ethernet still kicks wireless into touch for speed and reliability. It doesn't care about the chimney stack in the middle of the house which kills the wireless. And I have plenty of electronic devices that are internet capable but don't do wireless (PVR, Blueray player, TV, 2 NAS units).

Working from home I have a room as the work office, another as the personal office, and other stuff all over the house; and the wired ethernet means they all work at full speed when needed. And can be accessed from different rooms when needed.

Do it - and don't ignore what might seem to be a pointless room for an ethernet socket. In my house, the hidden cupboard that housed just the electricity and gas meters now also houses the NAS that backsup all my files (and does DHCP, DNS and a lot more).

Yes, I do also have a wifi mesh now to work around that chimney stack as some devices (the phone and Google Chromecast) just don't have ethernet ports - and its nice go mobile with the laptop at times.

[HTFB]

This is all very helpful indeed. Thank you.

We did this in the last house and it made a big difference.  multiple ethernet cables whoever I thought we might need them.  Now I would double the number.

I don't know much about passivhaus standards but is the problem how many acres points through the wall breaching the insulation or the installation of multiple ethernet cables during first fix of cabling?

Definitely have access for 2 cables/fibreoptics.whatever at this stage if you think you will need them in 2, 5, 10, 20 year time future proofing is always good.

Doubled cables? Here's me not quite sure why I need it at all. We're resisting as much intelligent home technology as we can. Also here's us rapidly running out of budget. Oh dear oh dear.

The Passivhaus* issue is with sealing up around penetrations of the air tightness layer. It's easier to have them done now while we have trades on site, and utterly inconceivable that a future Virgin/BT/etc installer would even be able to grasp the problem. We can't get full fibre to the home yet, though I suppose we would want it. So maybe we need to anticipate a future cable for that.

*it's not actually to Passivhaus standard, which is basically impossible to achieve in a retrofit, but that's the general idea. We ought to recoup the cost through lower energy bills by about 2090 or so.

I'd also add that the great thing about ducts and conduits is that you can pull cables that haven't been anticipated or even invented yet through them in future.

These would be internal conduits rather than penetrations to the outside? We don't want to give the architect conniptions.

[quixoticgeek]

Another vote for put in lots of cable, even if you don't terminate it yet.

If you have a dual RF45 port in the study, run 4 cables to it. Cable is dirt cheap, and the effort of adding cable later once all the ducts are under plaster, is a lot greater than doing it now. When I wired up my flat in the UK, I ran 8 cat5e* cables to my desk, but only terminated four of them. 8 was what I could fit in the trunking.

Also another vote for a small 19" rack. It makes things tidier.

J

*CAT6 was not yet mature

[HTFB]

You may already know that Virgin cable isn't fibre to the home. You can't actually connect it directly to a wi-fi router. It's co-axial copper cable which connects to their own box that acts as a wifi router, with optional phone and TV outputs. You can switch this box to modem only mode and connect it by Ethernet to the wifi-router.

I don't understand the topology here. If we put this box by the TV, say, we would surely not plug its output into the Ethernet on the ethernet-switch side of the firewall? We want the router to do its dual WAN magic. Or are we repurposing this particular cable-run so it doesn't go into the front of the switch but into the back of the router?(But in fact I think we don't forseeably want cable TV and the merit is in having all the kit together, so the Virgin internal connector and box should also be in the same cupboard). There's no fibre-to-the-home for this postcode yet, irritatingly.

Also re topology, the wireless LAN controller: where does this fit in? My guess is that this can just plug into the front of the ethernet switch like all the other devices, including the wireless access points, and they will all sort themselves out? And if I don't get one of these right away, is it a problem?

Also another vote for a small 19" rack. It makes things tidier.

"You are taking all my coat cupboard space." Despite pcolbeck's advice we might want to get boxes to double up their roles where possible.

[quixoticgeek]

"You are taking all my coat cupboard space." Despite pcolbeck's advice we might want to get boxes to double up their roles where possible.

Note, housemates get grumpy if you hang routers on coat hooks. DAMHIKT.

J

[AuldThumper]

It's your choice how you want to go

At the basic end you need two boxes - the virgin hub and a DSL WiFi router like the Asus DSL-AX82
That gets you wifi coverage (additional mesh "repeaters" can be added if the coverage isn't good enough) and the ability to hard wire 4 rooms. You can put a small switch in each room to allow multiple devices to be connected to the single hard wired point

Throw in an 8 port switch like the TP-LINK SG108 to add 7 additional hard wired rooms.  This would be my setup of choice

At the other end you have the 8' tall 42u Telco rack, seperate audio, , data and security plus a spare Justin network cables run to each room,  several bits of hugely expensive Ubiquity kit, a couple of data center class servers and a power bill that would make Blackpool illuminations blush

In a domestic setting I would run a cable to each room that made sense (lounge, kitchen, office,  bedrooms, garage/shed etc) and a couple of spares into the attic (upstairs wifi, security cams etc)

Personally I would also run coax, a couple of Ethernet and mains power and optionally an optical fibre to an external sealed enclosure. That should cover getting any form of internet into the house (I expect DSL to go away eventually)

I'd be thinking along the lines of an under stairs cupboard as a good location for the server room

[Ham]

General advice from folk is accurate, but you absolutely don't need a 19" rack to use 19" rack stuff, but you do need to have someone who understands cable runs: how to get lots of cable into one place, what the volume looks like, etc etc, the stuff you get from experience. I cabled up my home almost 25 years ago now, and I have a 19" 48 way patch panel flush mounted on the wall (actually, using 100mm screws and about 50mm lengths of pipe as spacers)  by the entrance to my cellar, where lots of other stuff is flush wall mounted, too. It's only Cat5 but has proved invaluable over the years, as has the coax distribution I did alongside it. A 19" switch will happily sit flush to the wall, on 90^o brackets. Similar screwfix sourced metal bits can also create a mini shelf, cable router for the balancing of. The only thing I didn't do was to have a cable terminating to the outside rear wall that could serve the garden.

[quixoticgeek]

General advice from folk is accurate, but you absolutely don't need a 19" rack to use 19" rack stuff, but you do need to have someone who understands cable runs: how to get lots of cable into one place, what the volume looks like, etc etc, the stuff you get from experience. I cabled up my home almost 25 years ago now, and I have a 19" 48 way patch panel flush mounted on the wall (actually, using 100mm screws and about 50mm lengths of pipe as spacers)  by the entrance to my cellar, where lots of other stuff is flush wall mounted, too. It's only Cat5 but has proved invaluable over the years, as has the coax distribution I did alongside it. A 19" switch will happily sit flush to the wall, on 90^o brackets. Similar screwfix sourced metal bits can also create a mini shelf, cable router for the balancing of. The only thing I didn't do was to have a cable terminating to the outside rear wall that could serve the garden.

I have a mini 2U 19" "rack" on the underside of a Ikea Ivar shelf next to my desk. It's my own design, and 3d printed. Basically it slots onto the front of the shelf, then has space to fit 2U of low profile stuff. I have a single 10 port mikrotic switch/router, then the bottom U is filled with a 2U mesh blanking plate, to which I have screwed a number of 3d printed brackets to hold various single board computers, including a raspberry pi. But it could easily have a patchpanel added.

It doesn't have to be a 42U colossus... Tho I do have one of those in the living room, but that's my housemates fault more than anything else.

J

[Kim]

In a domestic setting the only real advantage of 19" stuff is that you know that if your switch releases its magic smoke in 6 years time, you'll be able to buy a current model that's exactly the same shape in at least two dimensions.

[HTFB]

Plan A seems to be "why have a rack when you can have a pile in a box?"

We haven't made space for the NAS. I always forget the NAS.

[AuldThumper]

The SIB  (stuff in box) equipment' mounting system is one of the oldest and most well understood. I use it myself in conjunction with SOS*, SOF**, SIP*** and CIC**** to put bits of equipment where they serve their purpose best

A NAS can be as simple as a SSD plugged into your WiFi router these days. It depends on what you need capacity wise and perhaps where you need it for specific use cases.


*Stuff On Shelves
**Stuff On Floor
***Stuff In Piles
****Crap In Cupboard

[Morat]

A NAS can be as simple as a SSD plugged into your WiFi router these days. It depends on what you need capacity wise and perhaps where you need it for specific use cases.

A single SSD acting as shared storage is.. eww! Please don't do that unless it's where you store stuff that you don't want to keep.

[Horizon]

A NAS can be as simple as a SSD plugged into your WiFi router these days. It depends on what you need capacity wise and perhaps where you need it for specific use cases.

A single SSD acting as shared storage is.. eww! Please don't do that unless it's where you store stuff that you don't want to keep.

Why is this so bad (asks a relative layman, with an SSD going spare)?

[Kim]

Because, irrespective of the technology, two is one and one is none.

[Jaded]

SSDs are brilliant for speed and convenience. HDs for capacity.

When an SSD fails, it is dead.
When an HD fails a necromancer may get your data back.

[ScumOfTheRoad]

I would consider the dual WAN. Why not an ADSL router with a 5G SIM for backup?
I guess that depends on the 5G signal where you are.

[HTFB]

The home that is to have it all is still not inhabited, but in the interim I wired up the router and we have lovely dual-WAN internet in our current abode. Either it's working or Virgin and EE have got their collective act together. I haven't spotted any outages during the work day for months. I like this.

There do seem to be a lot of power supplies, what with the two outward-facing boxes, the dual router, the NAS, and the wifi access point. And the ethernet switch that is to be. They all add up to a piffle of volt-amps but it takes quite a lot of space.

Is there such a thing as a multiple power supply, with a box of different sized jack plugs and little toggle switches to select the right voltage outputs, which a sufficiently daring layperson could substitute for all these separate 13A plugs?

[Afasoas]

I had exactly this problem with my rack:

2 x modems (Virgin, ADSL); firewall with a 12v power supply, auxilliary fans for rack cooling, RIPE ATLAS probes etc..
Some of that stuff needed 12v. Some of it needed 5v.

I was able to buy a conventional looking 150W 12v switching power supply with multiple connections out of it from ebay. I ran one of those into a small stepdown converter for the 5v appliances. Requires some soldering and shrinkwrap to put the right barrel connectors on all the ends, but as it's low voltage, you might be comfortable with adapters. Obviously, need to check power drawer and get suitably sizes supply/converter etc..

FWITW there are two racks in the house - a bigger beasty in the garage where servers live and another smaller one - it's in a conveniently located cupboard, houses two patch panels where all the ethernet terminates and a 24 port switch. It really is a nice size as to not waste too much cupboard space and keeps everything nice and neat.

https://www.comms-express.com/products/startech-wallmount6-6u-wall-mount-network-rack-14-inch-deep-low-profile-20kg-capacity/


Edit: One of the modems is still plugged in using it's original power supply so that we will still have Internet if the switching power supply ceases to function