Which setup works best for a small house network?
Which setup works best for a small house network?
Hey everyone, I'm switching from Optimum to GoNetSpeed Fiber because Optimum just kept raising their prices. GNS's fiber plan is 500mbps on top of my current 300mbps speed. To be honest, the Optimum service was great, and I rarely use more than 300mbps down. Their rate hikes were ridiculous; they sent flyers to my mailbox just for new customers and kept trying to keep me around instead of letting go of me. The current setup is: Optimum goes straight to my Arris Surfboard SB6190, then to my Google WiFi Router. From there, I have 4 Ethernet lines coming from different rooms, all connected through a Netgear GS605 Switch before they hit the router. The problem is that the fiber ONT can only be installed in my office because of how the apartment is built with other tenants around it. My current setup is actually in my pantry, which is where those Ethernet lines join together from the other rooms and where the Optimum line comes in. I'm running my PC on a wired connection to that switch right now, and I want to keep both the speed and stability there. But I still want to leave the router and switch where they are because their spot is best for this apartment layout and where all those room lines end up. Is there a way to route both my PC and the ONT to the router without losing any bandwidth? From what I know, splitting an Ethernet connection cuts things down to 100mbps, which is exactly what I don't want. What do you guys think? Best, Butts
How fancy do you want to get? If you physically cut the wire, you only get 100mbps. But if you fix things logically by using vlans, your setup acts like two separate cables sharing 1gbit total bandwidth. You could even buy two 2.5g ports if wall cabling is good enough. Just add a couple of small switches that support vlans to make it work. Tplink has some smart switches with vlan support and they aren't much more expensive than regular ones. Now, why would you keep the router right where it is? You could move the router into the new room and plug the wall cable back from the pantry into a lan port on that router instead. Then just connect your pc directly to a different lan port. In the pantry, you can hook everything up to a regular switch. If you need wifi in the closet, buy an inexpensive router and use it as an access point instead of a main router.
I just tried something, and now I see two big problems. First, my router is all the way in the office, so my living room is totally isolated. With the phone on my computer, I'm getting about 270mbps to it. But when the Chromecast is in the living room while the router is in the pantry, both drop a lot less than expected. The phone gets around 30mbps instead of what it should get if everything was connected properly, and the Chromecast drops down to roughly 20mbps too. That's not good enough for me because I need stable 4K HDR video streaming. Also, my girlfriend is working on her laptop right now, so she's probably getting a slow connection too.
To fix this, should I just move everything into one big room or try setting up a VLAN? How can I check if my current ports and wires are working well before spending money to change the whole wiring? If I want to do that setup, is it going to be okay to connect the ONT (the modem from my provider) and my PC in the wall, put them behind a dummy switch in the pantry, without killing the speed?
It is probably still cheaper to put an AP in the closet because that way you get a router and a new AP, giving you internet signal everywhere. 2.5G models are likely much more expensive right now. If it isn't very long, you can use cat6 for 2.5G; if it's short enough, even cat5e works fine. In your case, you probably don't need that because your home internet is only 500Mbps, so you could run a faster line on the computer network and keep the rest as slow as before. Of course, if you try to copy files from one place to another at once while also using the internet, that will go over the speed limit of gigabits. https://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-SG105E...B00N0OHEMA So let's say you have two networks, call them LAN and WAN even if your computer uses those numbers. You would put port 1 on the WAN line and ports 2 through 4 on the LAN line. Then make sure port 5 connects to both lines using special tags. Plug the internet box into port 1, plug your PC into one of the router's LAN ports (any of 2-4), and plug your wall socket into the other port (port 5). In the room with the new internet setup, set up the switch just like that... To make things easier, you can actually use any port number for any network type. It doesn't matter which physical port is where on one side because of this flexibility. So plug your wall connection from the room with the internet box into port 5. Plug the router's WAN port into the main line on port 1. Then plug a regular LAN port like 2-4 into any network group. These are very basic smart switches that will do the job but don't support some fancy ideas about having two switches connected to each other in case something breaks.
So, I took a dummy switch out and moved it to my office. Right now, my ONT (the modem) and the PC are connected through two LAN ports on the main switch, which is plugged into an ethernet wall port. Now, that connection from the office goes straight to the router in the pantry. When I tested the speed with a normal internet service plan, it works at 500mbps both going out and coming back. Is this way of wiring me limiting or hurting anything on my network?
This shouldn't work right now. Did you connect the router's LAN and WAN ends at the same time to the wall port? If your ONT is actually a router, maybe it works. But if you plug the WAN into the wall port instead of just using the LAN, you'll have two different networks. Using a LAN like an AP doesn't help much either because there are two active DHCP servers fighting for control and that causes problems. Let's say you put another regular switch in the closet so you can connect both ends to the wall port. Then your router will try to give out its WAN IP from its LAN side, which is exactly the same thing as if you plugged a WAN cable into the LAN port first and then added another LAN cable to the wall plate. If your ONT is just a modem without a router built in, it will randomly assign one single IP address to whichever device grabs it first.
I think the ONT just works like a modem. The Netgear switch connects the ONT and my PC together. Then it sends those signals to the router in the pantry. If that makes sense, all my wireless things are on their own network tied to the router, but my computer can't talk directly to devices on that same network? To fix this, I need a smart switch with VLANs that groups all the ethernet cables into one network and sends them straight to the ONT fiber. I haven't had any trouble so far with speed or connection, but where would issues arise if I used DHCP?
I don't know this usually fails if the modem just isn't working right. What IP address does your computer show me? Does it have a public address that everyone can see? What does the DHCP server say its name is? If it's really just a modem then the DHCP server should be your ISP's router. If your PC actually works, check the WAN IP on the router. Sometimes there isn't an IP at all. You usually only get one single IP from the internet service provider and if your computer has that, the router won't have any. If the ONT is actually a router then it gets the IP directly from the ISP and sends private IPs to your stuff inside the house.
My computer has an IPv4 address in the 100.xx.xx.x range, and my DHCP server also uses that same address. Even though IPv6 says "no network access," maybe that doesn't matter here. The ONT is a Nokia G-010G-A if it helps at all. I can't find a WAN IP anywhere on the internet.
100.x.x.x is what people call a carrier grade NAT IP range. It's a special group of private IPs that ISPs use to manage their own networks. The device you have isn't a router, so it gets its IP address from the ISP's router instead. Usually, even with this kind of IP, your ISP will only give you one address. If your router also has an IP like that, things might work partially okay. But if your computer is on the "WAN" side (the part facing outside), it won't be able to talk to other devices inside your LAN. I'm not sure what else to suggest besides saying don't do this method at all. Most often, when you connect two devices straight to a modem or ONT, only one of them will work properly. If in your house you have more than two items connected like that, then the setup isn't quite normal. Besides having two separate networks inside your home, your WAN network makes your machine visible to other people using the ISP. A router acts as a simple firewall. Even if someone tried to reach the IP address you got, the router wouldn't know which of your internal computers should get the data. Instead, they would just drop it all. Without a router, your machine can be directly reached by anyone. It's not as bad as having a real public IP where any user on Earth could attack your computer, but other people from your ISP might still access you sometimes. I'd either use a VLAN solution or just put another router between the ONT and all your other stuff.