r/HomeNetworking

This question is for folks in the USA

I just bought a house and wanted to add poe cameras and APs . Had a guy come out and take a look.

Currently the house does not have any Ethernet wiring. House is 2 stories tall. All rooms on the upper floors have attic access. No attic or crawlspace access for areas on the lower floor. I have an office room on the lower floor.

The plan was to run cables from a rack in the office room to the attic and to the corners of the house for 3 POE cameras. Because of the access issues in the lower floor the only way we could think of to get the AP on the lower floor was to get a wire from the attic to the outside of the house and then bring it back inside ( messy on the outside, neater inside) . Upstairs AP would be the easiest.

So all in all for 5 cables I was quoted 900$.

Anyone had this work done before ? Any questions I should ask them, any gotchas etc. just looking for advice

I know next to nothing about this kind of stuff, and you all seem like the experts, so I'm here to ask. I live in a small apartment. My neighbor is only in town a few times a year. He asked if I'd be interested in splitting internet with him. He says he can set up a mesh where he'd be on a separate network, with a unique SSID and password. Is this a normal and safe thing to do? Are there dangers or drawbacks? I'm open to the idea, but my main concern is that because I don't know anything about this, he would be the one setting everything up, and I'd just have to trust that it's set up correctly and nothing shady is going on. Should I consider this?

EDIT: Well, everyone's answer is a pretty quick and resounding no, so I'm going to turn him down. My gut was telling me no anyway, but because home networking stuff is so far out of my knowledge, I thought it could just be my own ignorance giving me reservations. Thank you all!! Who knows what you've saved me from.

I am a complete newbie, but have an idea for what I’d like to do for our cabin. I have a small Dell PC and I have installed a Jellyfin server on it. I have an external hard drive connected to it which will hold all of the media.

My plan is to have the server at our cabin, which has no Internet connection. I would like to be able to have my family connect to the server using a local network ran off of that server. I would like to get Starlink at some point, but that is not in the cards at the moment.

Any recommendations for an easy to use router to accomplish this? It doesn’t even have to be a new router, just something that will work work between my Dell and the users of the server.

I'm a homenetworking newbie and looking to ramp up incrementally. I'm having a new home built. We've got CAT6 run everywhere, but I'm not sure where to start with hardware. I've seen a couple of UniFi bundles for sale on Fb Marketplace for what seems like a reasonable price. What's the risk with such a purchase?

Assuming everything works, can't I do a factory reset on everything to make sure it's baseline before I install it?

Hello, I’m looking to replace my current Huawei EchoLife HG8145V5 router with a custom one since I can no longer access it’s admin controls (Long story, can’t get into it right now)
It is managing multiple broadband networks from the same DNS and same ISP.
It has 2 5G networks and 2 4G networks.

I’ve seen multiple recommendations be thrown around but I’m quite inexperienced at this, so I’ll be asking for help.

Could you help me get a list of Raspberry pi models I can try to order to replace it (going to install the open-source router OS on it)? Need a list based on how well it meets my needs so that I can check for another one if the first one isn’t available around me.

I’m setting up a detached shed as a small workshop/3D printing space. The shed will eventually have a small 10-inch server rack with a NAS/server, two PCs, multiple 3D printers, and possibly a Wi-Fi access point later.

We’re already planning to trench from the house to the shed for power, so I’m considering running direct-burial Cat6 as well, preferably in its own separate conduit.

My planned layout is:

House router LAN port

→ short patch cable

→ wall jack/keystone near router

→ buried direct-burial Cat6 run to shed

→ shed wall jack/keystone

→ short patch cable

→ rack-mounted network switch in shed

→ NAS/server, PCs, 3D printers, optional Wi-Fi AP

I'm looking at a 16-port gigabit switch that fits a 10-inch rack, possibly the MikroTik CSS318-16G-2S+IN. I know it does not have PoE, but I don't have cameras or PoE devices right now, so I could add a PoE injector or small PoE switch later if needed.

Main questions:

Does this layout make sense?

Should I run one Cat6 line or two while the trench is open?

Is direct-burial Cat6 in separate conduit the right approach?

Should I terminate both ends into keystone wall jacks instead of crimping RJ45 plugs directly onto the burial cable?

Since this is copper Ethernet between detached buildings, should I be worried about surge protection/grounding, or should I consider fiber instead?

Is gigabit enough for a NAS, two PCs, and 3D printers, or should I think about 2.5G/10G now?

Here's some details.

Currently my setup is

ET12 -

2.5GB WAN WAN | 2Gb Symmetrical Uplink

2.5Gb ET12 LAN | 8 Port switch 2.5Gb Switch SG108-M2 | PC A : x870e-e Gaming PC 5Gb Nic PC B : x870e-e Gaming PC 5Gb Nic Server A 5Gb Nic Server B 10/5Gb Nics

1Gb ET12 LAN | 8 Port switch 1Gb SG105-M2 | 5x Retro Consoles @ 10/100 Series X PS5 Pro

Legacy Wireless network for IOT Devices

My ISP has offered me 5Gb Symmetrical at a BARGAIN price of £60 a month WITHOUT The eero pro max, but £90 a month with. Id rather not use Eeros as my partner can finally use Asus's wifi app to limit the children's internet access at bedtimes. ( She's not technically savvy at all )

So my question is, what would be my upgrade path? With these stipulations.

Minimum: 1x 5Gb WAN 1x 5Gb LAN 1x 1Gb LAN WiFi 7, as most of our devices have WiFi 7?

At the minute, Bq16 is winning but £900 is more than wife approval, BT10s are cheap at £475 but the ET12 has better backhaul?

And one last question, if moving to 10Gb Nic 8 Port, what is there under £100 thats worth it?

TLDR : Router + Mesh to replace ET12 x2, Without losing too much COMPARED to ET12

So i currently am connected to 2 networks I have wifi and ethernet. I only have an internet connection on wifi, I use the wired ethernet connection for my nas and an access point I use for wireless VR. Every so often my wifi drops off for a second and it switches to my ethernet but won't go back unless I unplug the ethernet and even sometimes that doesn't work and I need to restart my pc.

Is there any way to make it So it only ever tries to use internet on wifi, but I can still keep my wired network for nas and access point?

I've tried changing the network metric, but it hasn't seemed to help since it will still switch to ethernet when the wifi drops.

Hello all, I come to you in a time of great need, and frustration haha.

So, I have a fiber WiFi setup like most people these days, moved to a new space recently but ISP and everything stayed the same.

I am having a problem where the WiFi is really, really touch and go. So most of the times it tends to work fine on smartphones but laptops and desktops struggle a lot. All LAN cable connections work perfectly and never give issues, its just over actual WiFi where i encounter the problem.

Problem - Devices connect successfully and sometimes even say "connected,secured" but cannot browse the internet. This happened mostly on laptops and desktops and very rarely on smartphones. From my own knowledge I have tried everything - factory resetting the router itself, I decreased the DHCP lease time so IP's get handed out faster(not that our DHCP pool is too small btw), I tried looking at our DNS server and all looks to be working fine. ISP is Afrihost (I am based in South Africa) and Fibre Provider is OpenServe. I have tried logging tickets with their technicians and have only been met for weeks with service tickets and no actionable help or steps have been taken, other than the ones I took myself.

I do actually work in IT so I will be able to answer all technical questions - PLEASE - if any of you have an idea of any fixes, comment or DM !!!!

(Thanks in advance)

So this is the approved list of Modems for my internet service from my ISP. I don't need phone so I marked off the 2 with phone... which should I get? Most reliable? Does it really matter? Also to note... I think a few of these are all-in-one modem/router... No need there either unless it's worth it. I currently use a GL.iNet GL-BE9300 (Flint 3).

https://preview.redd.it/g06y09vs2jbh1.png?width=474&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecdf3c8435250d567a4169333a09b64e672e266f

So my mom works from home we switched to tmobile internet a couple years ago and we are constantly having issues with it like internet wise the gateway itself shows no errors or anything when trouble shooter and we had issues like this before and we even had to get our gateway replaced and that didnt work the problems disappeared for a while and now they are back again tmobile didnt help the last time what should I do

I have a faulty Ethernet cable that I’m going to replace. But I’ve noticed it gives only 10mbps when plugged into something directly, but when plugged into a switch it gives 100mbps. I just want to know why this is?

Hey all,
I recently ran a 30m Ruipro fibre optic HDMI cable through my house so I can game at 4K 120Hz HDR from my gaming PC on the other side of the house.

Everything has been working great overall, but during longer gaming sessions I occasionally get very brief dropouts — the screen and audio cut out for a second or two (black screen), then immediately come back.

I asked in another thread and a few people suggested it could be the cable overheating, or possibly something related to my GPU under sustained load. Has anyone experienced this before, and if so, were you able to fix it?