Hi, thanks in advance for your advice and guidance!
I am in the process of setting up IT equipment in my home and having researched the subject, find myself going around in circles and in need of some advice of what networking equipment I actually need. Hopefully someone here will be able to lend a hand/their opinion.
The general requirements/background info:
I do wonder also whether, given the cat5 cabling, it makes more sense to go down a more traditional router -> switch -> AP model... but I guess this would require an expensive managed switch for VLAN support...
Thank you for reading this far and any advice is very much appreciated.
I am in the process of setting up IT equipment in my home and having researched the subject, find myself going around in circles and in need of some advice of what networking equipment I actually need. Hopefully someone here will be able to lend a hand/their opinion.
The general requirements/background info:
- 2500sqft house over 4 floors with reasonably thick walls
- The house has cat5e cabling throughout
- Internet access is via 100MB fiber
- The network needs to accommodate simultaneous streaming on multiple devices. I work from home and require a stable connection to my work network (which should be simple given the fiber connection!)
- Multiple smart-home/IoT devices will be connected and accessible within and outside the LAN: e.g. Nest Cameras, doorbell, Zigbee hubs & lighting throughout, alarm, thermostat - I will set up HomeAssistant on a RaspberryPi 4 to manage these devices
- For security, I would like to segregate IoT devices on their own LAN or VLAN (they will connect both via WiFi and Ethernet). If the set up has VLAN support, I would also want to set up a guest wifi network.
- When accessing the network from outside the home, e.g. to set thermostat, I would prefer to do this via VPN rather than port forwarding to various devices - I'm not against setting up a VPN server on the RPi or having this integrated in the router.
- As the house has Cat5e cabling, I will use this to connect some bandwidth hungry devices (Apple TV, etc.). It also makes sense to use this for wifi extenders/APs or Mesh router nodes if I go down that route.
- Basic ethernet switch
- Router which supports VLAN (at least to some basic extent)
- router with VPN server capability (ideally and for convenience)
- Extendable wifi or mesh system supporting ethernet backhaul
- I would prefer local config rather than systems which force you to use cloud hosted services.
- Google Nest Wifi - i liked the simplicity and supposedly good performance. I was ultimately put off by lack of more advanced features, inability to connect nodes via ethernet and the need to use google's cloud service for all config.
- Linksys Velop - again i liked the simplicity and reasonable feature set. I backed away from this as the "guest wifi" only represents very basic VLAN support which can't make use of ethernet connections, anecdotally wifi performance is so-so for the price. Again put off by the need to configure via cloud service
- Netgear Orbi - very impressed but given the high price tag, the focus seems to be on strong wifi and not a rich feature set (e.g. vlans and VPN).
- This is obviously a business router and i appreciate much of the functionality is probably overkill for home use
- I like that it supports 4 VLANs for home users, IoT devices, guests and admin
- I think documentation could be better - I'm still struggling to determine if the VLANs include devices connected via ethernet and if the nodes support ethernet backhaul
- I like that it has a built in VPN server
- It's very expensive to use as a domestic router.
I do wonder also whether, given the cat5 cabling, it makes more sense to go down a more traditional router -> switch -> AP model... but I guess this would require an expensive managed switch for VLAN support...
Thank you for reading this far and any advice is very much appreciated.