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For anyone else reading personally ceiling APs can't be overstated. My father-in-law is crazy about internet, but I've realized he was crazy like a fox when we did our to-the-studs renovation. He treated APs like a fire alarm or a CO monitor: one per room.

My brother-in-law thinks he's crazy, and obviously it only really works if it is practical to run the wire and you can afford the number, but for my relatively small house it is insane how little I think about my internet. It is one of those quality of life things I never would have realized with having someone come and do it for me.

I guess the only thing is some of the ceilings get a little crowded with lights + fire alarm + CO alarm + HVAC in/out + AP, so for small rooms it can be a challenge to figure out where to put things. But in that case I mean ... you don't need one per room. My father-in-law is crazy like a fox ... but he's also a little crazy like a crazy person.

IMO a not-tiny house should have several sub-panels: Kitchen (enough to run the big stove + ~100A, but every outlet it's own 20A circuit), 'lab' / workshop (same idea), laundry room (lock-out breaker near / in room for connecting / disconnecting), etc.

A family member who's doing better in life than I am purchased a house built within the last 5 years, and it didn't even _have_ Ethernet run anywhere. WHY!?! I can't fathom how it's possible anyone would find that a negative.

> A family member who's doing better in life than I am purchased a house built within the last 5 years, and it didn't even _have_ Ethernet run anywhere. WHY!?! I can't fathom how it's possible anyone would find that a negative.

I'm less sure. Are there any 40 year old cables that you'd consider a positive in your house today? 20 year old cables? I wouldn't be too excited about having a house full of Coax, 10Base-T, and twisted pair.

I feel like the much better solution is to run conduit in which you can replace the cable rather than permanently putting in twice as much of whatever is in favor today. The conduit is always better, right?

Yeah, conduit makes sense. The future in homes - from this current vantage point - is likely all wireless via multiple APs around the house that have short range but very high bandwidth. Only us power users will have wired ethernet.

Wireless will _never_ have the bandwidth nor wall-penetration people want. If it has the latter all the neighboring houses / apartment units will bleed through, and if it doesn't even the limited frequency domain won't be enough unless you're in the same room as an AP that doesn't penetrate walls... at which point everyone will want drops running to the rooms they stay in anyway.

Yeah, conduits with pull strings and super-gentle curves (to safely satisfy minimum bends) are ideal... but at least run the lines there!

Re: Copper / Fiber. Fiber's a PITA for all users, even powerusers probably don't want it outside of the rack / enclosed areas. Delicate cables / connections.

5-6GHz is good at covering a house without too much leakage. And with 9 separate channels that each run at a gigabit or higher, you can have very good neighbor avoidance. That seems fine to me for covering both bandwidth and wall-penetration needs.

In a big apartment building you might have to use more narrow channels but I still think the overall picture for 5+6GHz is a good one. Especially because MIMO can squeeze a gigabit into 80MHz or theoretically even 40MHz.

The 6ghz spectrum finally looks useful compared to the DFS tainted (in practice, if you're anywhere near an airport or military air base NEVER use) 5ghz bands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels#6_GHz_(8...

In 5ghz there was only a clean 80mhz + 160mhz block ; while the 6ghz full WiFi 6E / 7 devices can use has 3x full 320mhz (low power only) blocks. However as a negative, a _vanishingly_ small number of OpenWRT devices support either of those standards https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_wlan6.0ghz and worse chances are really good someone's phone / laptop probably doesn't either.

99% of people don’t need the bandwidth. Of devices that can really benefit (mainly games consoles assuming your upstream connectivity is enough to cope), how many even have a copper port nowadays?

> 20 year old cables?

I just bought a new house and the previous owner had phone lines everywhere (bedrooms, kitchen, office, rec room - honestly kind of weird). The house was built in 2002 and I gather that it was common at that time to put in Cat5e and just not use all the pairs.

So all it took was a pleasant afternoon with the circuit toner, a new patch panel, and a few keystone jacks, and now the house is networked beautifully. Sure, they're not in exactly the places I'd have dropped 'em if I'd been starting from scratch, but it's hard to beat cables already in the wall for zero effort!

You are lucky they went with cat5. In my house there are phone lines everywhere, too, but real phone lines. Like in ISDN. That’s 8 strands plus some extra strands (the European ISDN bus needs 4 strands, so for a faked star topology you need 4 to every room and 4 back). It is neither shielded nor twisted of course. Just plain dumb copper wires. On some connections a stable 10 Mbit link is possible. From what I gather the cables were installed around 2000…

Five years ago I bought a house built in 2008, and every room has at least 2 ethernet (cat6 even, good for them), 2 coax, and 2 telephone. I guess this was some sort of transition period where people were starting to understand the benefit of running ethernet, but people hadn't cut their tethers from their landlines yet. The coax is a bit weird, though. Two ports per room? Seems like overkill, but I guess it's better to have and not need than the alternative...

I've still not found a use for the coax or telephone lines. I ditched cable TV 20 years ago, and haven't had a landline since 2004. The ethernet is super useful, though, for APs (paired with a PoE switch), and to to hard-wire the office, and stuff connected to the TV in the living room.

You can always use the coax for MoCa - but since you've already got ethernet, seems a bit pointless. I've got coax all over too, and, well, it's pretty much useless to me. But maybe someday I'll need a drop somewhere and be happy to have it.

Cat6 is twenty years old and still entirely usable today in a residential setting.

Even cat5 is not only usable but will probably give you 5gig or higher.

Dunno about m-gig, but I don’t like 10g copper as the power use is so extreme. I go for 1g copper or 10g fibre.

Yeah, I considered mentioning cat5 as well but figured cat6 was the better argument since people are still installing it today.

Have 20 years old cat5e. It actually gave me 10g

I was thankful I bought a house full of coax recently - now I have MoCA 2.5 adapters installed in the living room/kitchen/office/den/bedrooms all connecting to a central coax manifold which became my server room - this lets me hit ~2Gbps. Sure, cat6 would have been better, but that was 30 years from being invented when my house was built.

20 years is not that long ago.

30 years ago I was pulling cat5 into office building ceilings. Some of it is still there, still relevant. GigE runs just fine over it (most of it turned out to meet cat5e spec anyway), and very few applications on the desktop need more than gig.

Conduit is always better, but cat5 has proven to have a surprisingly long relevance.

> MO a not-tiny house should have several sub-panels: Kitchen (enough to run the big stove + ~100A, but every outlet it's own 20A circuit)

This seems like crazy overkill. Certainly there are kitchen appliances that devour power, but... what? Assuming an electric stove/oven, you really just need one dedicated circuit for that, and then everything else can run off another circuit. If you expect to use a microwave often, you might want it on its own circuit, but everything else you might have (blender, mixer, toaster, coffee/espresso machine, electric kettle, etc.) will run just fine on a single circuit.

And regardless, you don't need a sub-panel for this. All of these can run just fine as separate circuits off your main panel.

In usa at least in area where i live code requires dedicated circuits for most of kitchen appliances

> Only a single ethernet port in the basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there.

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...

Unless you meant with regards to routing the cables throughout the space, like now it’s on the opposite wall from the port.

I’ve definitely shoved cables under baseboards, but you can also pull them off and the run the cable in the wall behind them. You don’t even need to patch the drywall then. You can also get baseboards (that look nice in a home) then double as cable runs.

> You can also get baseboards (that look nice in a home) then double as cable runs.

Interesting. That would be great in the basement. I will look into it.

Dont forget Powerline adapters - if you have it all on one loop they are surprisingly effective if you have extra power sockets!

If you go that route MOCA over your cable tv coax works very well too!

I recently bought my first house, and there was only one coax outlet in the entire place, and zero ethernet. I wanted to move where the coax terminated, and after some searching around, found MOCA. Had never heard of it before, but a hundred bucks or so later, and it's a fantastic solution.

for those of you using MOCA, what kind of bandwidth do you get? And what kit would you recommend?

I ask, as my brother-in-law just finished a house where he had asked the contractor to put in internet cabling everywhere, and... drum roll... yes the contractor put in coax everywhere. I tried powerline adapters, but could only get ~30-40mbps (he has a 1gbps fiber connection from the ISP) over them.

I use the MoCA 2.5 adapter by goCoax. I won't say I recommend it since I haven't compared it to other adapters, but it appears to do what I want it to do and I get about 2Gbps through the adapters. Every one I could find seemed to be around the same price point ($60-$80 per adapter) so I just went with a well reviewed one.

I would definitely recommend if fishing cat6 is not an option and you would need to open up walls. Unless your BIL has a lot of kids and their friends over who all like to stream different 4k movies from a NAS, I can't imagine any normal user with 1gbps WAN finding 2gbps LAN insufficient.

I think powerline adapters might work very well in the UK, where sockets on each floor are connected in a ring.

In my small apartment in Denmark, with new wiring, they are terrible. I get about 30-50Mb/s rather than the advertised 1200Mb/s. I assume the signal has to go back to the distribution board to get between my adapters.

Take a look at orac decor. They have special baseboards for this

That's why pretty much every office space/building over here has cable trunking/channels on the walls instead of fixed wiring, eg:

https://www.elba.si/izdelki/parapetni-kanali/

https://www.obo.si/izdelki/izdelkiinstalacije-v-zgradbah/bis...

Need one more outlet? Remove the plastic cover, insert cable, insert outlet, cut the plastic cover to make space for outlet, and you're done.

That would be fine in the garage, but few people would want this anywhere else in their home.

There's a wood effect version, but I suspect it would make a home look like a 1980s office: https://homemaster.techinfus.com/en/kabel-kanaly-vidy-i-razm...

In the us wiremold is the equivalent product.

> Only a single ethernet port in the basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there.

Just drop a switch down there.

I have, but now I have cable running along the base boards. That isn't optimal. Also I have 10G networking, so the ethernet switches are hot and expensive.

You don't need an expensive switch. Five port 2.5G + SFP+ with poe can be pretty affordable and shouldn't run very hot.

That downgrades transfer speeds though to just 2.5G.

Which is fine? It's getting capped to 3 at your modem anyways... And the difference here is reaching the "doesn't matter" phase.

Like - 50GB at 3gbps is ~130 seconds, ~160 seconds at 2.5gbps, and ~400 seconds at 1gbps

You're always waiting at least a couple minutes, and never more than 10 for that download.

Personally - I have a couple 10gbps switches that run my backbone in my house (NAS, k8s cluster, HomeAssistant, etc) and I have a 2gbps symmetric wan, but all of the offices (my wife and I both work from home, plus the media room, plus the kid's playroom) all just run 1gbps switches.

They're cheap, normal office work basically never saturates those speeds (even multiple conference calls with video is a-ok), and there's just not enough value in bumping up to 10gbps across the whole house compared to the equipment cost.

The 10gbps switches live in the basement and just connect those zones.

You are completely right that I can always just wait. I prefer not to though... there are a lot of times when it is amazing to have 10G between my main machines.

The devices attached to the 2.5G switch, will be limited to 2.5G per connected port. There won't be any slow down on any other connections. If you still want 10G in the basement, put in a 10G SFP+ switch (they can be had for $15-20 per port and use DACs to control the heat some). You'll only have one shared 10Gbps to the rest of the house, but that is really unlikely to be saturated.

I was thinking about this and it is very expensive. And do I need 10G really? I do not think so. I did calculated few things when I was thinking about 10G and most probably I will not saturate 1G for few years. And with phones ans laptops mostly WiFi is used anyways.

So can I ask you what is the advantage for using 10G equipment in your case? Even something really dull like network card costs around 100€.

10G is awesome for (1) downloading steam games - many are +50GB these days, (2) downloading Ollama models, (3) downloading ISOs, (4) downloading app/OS updates and (5) I have a NAS also on the 10G network for media backups.

I have symmetric 3Gbps fibre to the home via Bell Canada and it reports 4.5Gbps via fast.com.

If I get this new job I'm definitely upgrading everything to 10G.

My PCIe5 SSD can do 14 GB/s, or about 112 gbit/sec.

Did some research. 10gbe cards are about $30, 100gbe qsfp28 cards are about $300, 100gbit 100m transciever about $100.

I’ve got Virgin cable and can pull 6Gb a minute from fast.com. Your hypothetical 50Gb steam game would take a whole 9 minutes assuming steam can saturate my connection. So that’s like enough time to hit start download , make a brew and come back to the pc. Why bother.

    > Also I have 10G networking, so the ethernet switches are hot and expensive.

I never understand why anyone needs anything faster than 1G (other than to flex for Internet points). Seriously, how often do you need to move data faster than 100MB/s? Almost never. FYI: A 2.5G switch should be fine. There are many fan-less options here: https://www.servethehome.com/the-ultimate-cheap-2-5gbe-switc...

DLT drives can saturate a 1Gbps link. Makes it hard to prevent shoe shining when backing up file servers.

If you have a NAS, for one. Fill it with SSDs and you can even saturate 10Gbps.

"I never understand why anyone needs anything faster than 1G".

i just upgraded my home network from 40g to 100g. g, not m. Anyone who does video knows the pain of 10g.

"Anyone" is of course a shorthand for "nearly everyone, but of course there are some exceptional people with exceptional needs".

I don't think your situation is common.

XikeStor SKS8300-8X costs about 100$, can do L3 routing, has 8 10G SFP+ ports, no fan and consumes ~9W. I'm running it in my homelab without any issues.

Friendly reminder: newer modem, router (especially for wireless), cat cable and fast speed switches really make a difference. I had the fastest speed my ISP could provide, but then discovered I needed to upgrade some of my equipment. It made all the difference in the world, especially cat 6e cable.

"(running fibre in the house isn't practical yet)"

What does that mean? I assume you are saying most builders don't offer fiber?

Running fiber in a house is entirely practical and easy to do. Cheap as well.

Might as well, but most end devices you’d want to connect would be copper. Most devices I physically connect are poe anyway. Sure my nas and desktop are fibre/10g, but my aps are all Poe copper, my laptop is copper unless I break out my dongle (although it’s rare ok not on wifi), my backup pihole is copper (I like having a second dns server in case the main vm on the nas fails)

These are great and common regrets in house wiring. I'm actually recording a video series on this exact topic right now. There are some things in electrical that are so easy and cheap to do but just get skipped over. Electricians are typically very very cheap (in a good for you the consumer way). However this tends to lead to under-building in a modern tech house.

Wow, we recently built a house and this reads just like my regret list!

I think because there are less code specifications for the garage, builders just don't bother.

Why 4 ethernet ports? You can just add switch later if that is the problem. I have this setup behind TV for Apple TV+TV

If you have any way to pull cables between floors, try pulling DAC cables. They give you 10+G, require no splicing (hardware can be found cheap now), and generally just work as you'd expect.

With a 10G backbone, you can get away with basement->main and main->upstairs in a three-floor house, with a small bridge on your main floor.

> If you have any way to pull cables between floors, try pulling DAC cables.

Many of my devices take 10G ethernet, like MacMini and my MacBook Air docking station. Is there an easy way to convert from DAC to 10G Ethernet? The desktop has an SPF+ card so that will take DAC no problem.

Unfortunately there is no way to pull an any cables easily. But someone else suggested replaceable baseboards that hide cable runs, I should look into that.

I don’t know any media converter that would work for that but you can get a Thunderbolt SFP+ ethernet adapter. For example: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/solo10g-sfp-tb3/overview....

10G media converters are available for < $50 USD, but TBH I've never used one.

Why DAC cables over Cat6a or Cat7

They are the lowest power way to connect SFP. And they are cheap.

Though I'm not sure I would pull them as they tend to max out at around 6-7 meters. I use them to connect systems within the same rack/room.

Floor to floor in a house isn't too bad with 6-7m, but I suppose there's always the AOC cables that are 20m+.

10G Ethernet seems to be really hot, all my SPF+ connectors are hot, my TP-Link 10G switch is hot. It seems not be efficient anymore in that regards.

While my 10G fiber and 10G SPF+ DAC cables are perfectly cool.

I hope this is temporary but 10G Ethernet seems hot. I haven't seen anyone write on this topic yet but it is my findings.

It is well known that copper 10G runs hot. Use DAC or fiber if you want run cool

There is no reason to pull DAC when fiber has gotten cheap. Singlemode fiber is cheap enough now that isn't worth doing multimode fiber. You can get pre-terminated fiber that is easier to pulling whole DAC transceiver.

DAC is still useful for within rack.

True, though what I like about DAC is that there's far less risk of optical surface damage.

Sure there's ESD risk but I find that much easier to manage.

> running fibre in the house isn't practical yet

I think it is. A pair of switches and a single run isn’t that expensive and it’s truly beautiful.

But… I still wish I’d put in 2 cables and not one.

> Only a single ethernet port in the basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there.

Is it so bad to put in a switch?

It does sort of suck because I have cabling running along the baseboards. Also I have 10G networking so the switches are costly and hot at least this generation.

How would multiple runs have helped you with that problem? Either they’re all in the same spot, and a switch would solve it, or they’re on all different walls and you’d still likely have to run cables to the things.