Bought our dream house! Looking for advice

[Nonprofit]

My family will be moving into a new house this month, a much larger house than we currently have.

5 bedrooms, 3 floors, and lots of acreage outside.

I want to make sure the technology I have available to me right now will do the job, and if not, I want to acquire the proper technology to get the job done.

Primary concern is range
Secondary concern is speed
Tertiary concern is future proofing

Clients will be two laptops with N adapters, a Roku3, and iphones/ipads and other mobile devices, etc.

Here is what I have available to me:

An E4200 v1 (n900)
A WRT160N (with DDWRT installed)
An Airport Express (n)
Netgear Powerline Adapters

At our current house, the E4200 covers everything. The WRT is set up as a 3G hotspot backup (mifi) and the Airport Express serves as a wireless range extended and provides access to a speaker system. The Powerline Adapters are unused.

At the new home, I was thinking of keeping the E4200 as the main router, on the middle floor, on one side of the house. I would then use the Powerline Adapters to connect to the WRT, on the middle floor, on the other side of the house... and extend the network that way. I am not sure what I would do with the Airport, probably just plug it in somewhere to give me access to the speaker again.

Does that sound like an ok plan?

Would you suggest another solution? Should I upgrade some, or all, of the equipment?

Any thoughts at all would be much appreciated!

 

[stevech]

cat5 or cat6 to every room. More cat5 in fam rm, etc. Home run to central place, perhaps telco closet or garage.
Use WiFi only for mobile devices. Have extra cat5 for WiFi access points to optimize coverage.

 

[Nonprofit]

Hey stevech,

Running Cat would be my choice!

Unfortunately, this is an older house and I've already been told that wiring these rooms/floors would be prohibitively expensive. Well, the guy didn't use the word 'prohibitively' but that is how I would describe his quotes!

So we'll be stuck with wireless and powerline, for now. I just want to make sure I am using appropriate wireless and powerline products and combinations.

 

[stevech]

consider too,MoCA.

Is house on raised foundation or is it slab?
If the former, it can be relatively easy.

 

[Nonprofit]

Hmmm, yes. Moca. I hadn't considered it.

The house does have coax runs to the main areas I am concerned about (for TV)...

Would the Actiontec product work? (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008C1JC4O/?tag=snbforums-20)

This would replace the powerline adapter in my scenario, correct?

But I'm having some trouble conceptualizing how.

So, in one room I have a cable modem and my router. Across the house, in another room, I have a coax run and a TV.

Do I need one adapter, just in the room with the TV? Or do I need one next to the cable modem too? And if I do, what does the Moca adapter connect to, the cable modem or the router?

 

[Nonprofit]

Oops, I guess this explains it!

http://cdn4.thetechjournal.net/wp-c...-mcab1001-moca-coaxethernet-adapter-kit-2.jpg

And I think I found an old post of yours where you mention that Moca outperformed Powerline for you. Is that true? And any idea if that is typical?

 

[RogerSC]

Another MoCA user here. I never bothered with powerline networking, since the wiring in my house is kind of funky and odd. I did test MoCA between my cable modem and router and the entertainment center in my living room, and found that it's throughput was about 85Mbps consistently. I don't think that powerline networking would do that well, especially in my house...if there's noise on the power lines due to appliances, tools, etc., then that decreases the throughput of powerline networking as well.

You could actually try both, but I predict that you'll get better, more consistent results with MoCA than you can get with powerline networking. I'm very happy with MoCA here.

 

[thiggins]

You don't have to wire the whole house with CAT5e. Even running a few cables to key locations from a central point could help.

Locate your router and APs as centrally as you can. If you can't move the cable modem, use powerline, MoCA or Ethernet to connect the modem to a relocated router.