New Home Purchase - Wireless and Wired equipment

[Last]

I hope this is the correct location for this request for help.

I am purchasing a home that has four floors: Basement, 1st, 2nd, and an attic. The basement and attic are unfinished, but I would finish the attic in the near future.

I want to have wireless coverage initially in the 1st and 2nd floors.

I am having an electrician quote installing ethernet cabling through the house This Tuesday:

1st floor - Family room and den room
2nd floor - all 4 bedrooms
3rd floor - attic

Currently the cable comes in on the first floor den room to the modem/wireless router.

What I would like to do is move the incoming cable internet to the basement, into a cable modem, then have a "switch/router" that then distributes to the rooms through wire.

So I need help picking the best "switch/router" for the basement and then the best "wireless system access points" so that I can place one on each of the three floors to grant wireless access. Also, is Cat 7 the ideal cable choice?

My research had many pointing to Ubiquiti, but I do not understand all of the different types of equipment.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Last

 

[L&LD]

Unless the 'electrician' you hired is actually an experienced Ethernet LAN specialist (with the proper testing tools to verify his work), don't give the job to him.

Cat7 is marketing. Don't fall for it.

Buy and install quality Cat6 cable instead, from a brand that is known for Ethernet (@Trip, please help here! ).

I would suggest running more than a single run of quality Ethernet cable to each room. With the main router location and any future AP's to have at least five to ten Ethernet runs for full flexibility in the future (you may want a direct connection to specific client devices to specific AP's, for example).

I would also suggest getting multiple quotes from more than a single contractor that specializes in data cable installs.

 

[elorimer]

A house is not an office, and a wired connection in every room is inevitably going to be on the wrong side of the room. It was not so long ago that new construction featured living rooms with dedicated alcoves for rear projection TVs and plasma screens, with component cabling. Then there was integrating wiring, where phone, cable TV and ethernet went to each room. That seems quaint now, even if a wired connection is much more stable than wireless. Whatever you wire now will underwhelm you in 10 years.

Twenty years ago I put in a Cat5 ethernet cable backbone from one end of the house to the other, at that has served me well, with three switches in the mix. But I am eyeing now 10gbe, and I foolishly don't have access anymore to run it.

While you have access from the basement to the first floor, and from the attic to the second floor, I would focus first on a conduit from the basement to the attic, and from one side of the house to the other, to places where you have power, so you can run ethernet now and later fish 10gbe backbones. Not so sure about running multiple ethernet cables though, not when 10gbe switches are coming down into the $100 range. You may in the future reverse everything with your main router in the attic on dual cable/5G connections,

 

[Last]

Ok, so I spoke with a networking guy and he told me to do this:

Have the cable internet come into the basement.
Then, have the cable internet cable go into my Motorola cable modem.
Next, have the cable modem ethernet cabled to my Netgear XR500.
Then, connect the Netgear XR500 with Ethernet cable to my Netgear S8000 switch.
Now, connect all of the wired rooms (Cat 6A cable) into the Netgear S8000 switch.
Finally, I will buy two Netgear EX8000 extenders and place one on the 1st floor and one on the second.

This should give me all the rooms wired internet and full house, full strength WiFi.

Thank you all for your assistance.

 

[Trip]

@Last - Welcome. Pretty good advice so far, albeit a few areas need some attention.

Cabling:

ISP (WAN) - In through the basement.

In-house (LAN) - Quality Cat6 is all you'll need for 1Gb, multi-gig and even 10gig under 180 feet (see my previous post for the particulars). Presuming that suffices, start with a 24-port patch panel, placed in the basement right next to the ISP demarc. From there, have your cabling guy run at least one Cat6 drop per inhabited room, plus a ceiling drop on at least two rooms per floor that make the most sense as wifi broadcast points. Also, consider any corner eves that might play host to an IP camera and/or outdoor wifi AP. Extra un-terminated Cat6 runs can be coiled and hidden. For inventory and mapping, label every cable run at BOTH ends, TWICE, once at 10" and once at 24", in case you cut the jacket past the first marker.

If you wanted to be ready for in-house fiber, per @elorimer's suggestion, install conduit or smurf tube in the main artery between all floors and across each floor, to areas with 120V power, and either run pre-terminated bend-insensitive fiber patch now, or leave pull tape inside, with ends coiled and ready.

Gear:

Overall, I would strongly urge you skip the consumer stuff and run SMB-grade discrete components (wired router, managed PoE switch and controller-based wifi APs). Your network will run more like an appliance or carrier-grade utility and less like a toy.

I'd start with a wall-mounted 6U (or taller) telco rack in the basement, right next to where the internet feed comes in. Rack contents from top to bottom: patch panel, managed PoE+ switch, wired router, shelf with modem, multi-plug PDU and/or UPS battery backup. Here's a mockup:

Modem: Broadcom chipset (no Intel Puma), Docsis 3.1 for max future-friendliness (Arris SB8200, Motorola MB8600, or Netgear CM1000/1100/1200
Router: 2Gb/s NAT capable, for simple, a Cisco RV340; for more complex a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, Mikrotik, or PC hardware running pfSense or Untangle, etc.
Switch: Managed, PoE+, enough ports for growth. I prefer Cisco SG/CBS, but TP-Link or Netgear will suffice just as well for less cost. UniFi Switch only if you use their wifi.
Wifi: Controller-based (ie. a single "brain") for central management and seamless roaming. I'd highly recommend Cisco CBW, which has the controller embedded in the APs, for simplicity and reliability. They have both ceiling and in-wall models.

Budget: Probably $500-700+, but your network will be noticeably more reliable and higher performing than the equivalent consumer stack.

Any questions, feel free.