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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Build a Home Network To Fully Utilize Google Fiber?
kstatefan40 writes I am closing on a house next week which is connected to Google Fiber. I am ecstatic to have a gigabit connection, but the previous homeowner had them install the jack in an awful location. I'm going to be in a situation where I am paying for more than I can technically achieve over wireless. I have purchased a couple of 600mbps powerline adapters, but those still won't fully use the gigabit connection. Is there a better way to achieve a truly gigabit internal connection without substantial structural or wiring modifications?
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Man up and wire the house. It's not that hard, CAT5e cable is cheap. And then you can install handy RJ45 jacks in the walls of each room.
...first define where your telecom enclosure or closet will be. Then consider how you want to connect your devices; copper Ethernet, wireless, etc. Then you need to investigate pathways for adding horizontal cables ("drops") to those areas, and you need to look into the equipment side (separate firewall, managed switch, etc) and how you want to define the usage policies.
In my case, if I were in your shoes, I'd install a telecom closet where the old flue for the now-gone basement wood-burning-stove pipes through the ground floor. I'd run two copper Cat6a drops to most rooms, and I'd cable to the entertainment centers at least two, possibly three. To my office I'd pull six. I'd put at least one to ceiling locations in the basement, the ground floor, and the detached workshop, probably digging a trench for a 2" conduit, transition from general-purpose indoor cable to OSP cable when I go outside and back in. I might also put in lightning arrestors that are PoE capable to protect the switch from the WAP or cable being struck; wouldn't worry about protecting the WAP, it'll die if struck regardless.
I'd probably look at a Cisco 3560G 8port PoE switch, it technically has ten ports, eight PoE capable, two not (that can accept fiber SFP transceivers) and there should be at least some L3 capability. Then get a vlan-trunk-capable L3 router/firewall device, put the WAPs on a separate VLAN (and go with VLAN-capable WAPs, for trusted/owned and untrusted/visitor devices) and build rules for the various VLANs, ie trusted can get to LAN devices, untrusted can't.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've tried both wireless client bridges (300Mbps N) and powerline Ethernet adapters for an HDHomerun tuner, and my results were: a) only one tuner could stream over the wireless and b) the powerline adapters were an epic fail. The punch line is that the HDHomerun works fine and dandy over 100BaseT. Between the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum and the poor penetration of 5 GHz, wireless just doesn't cut it for anything that needs throughput.
String some Cat5e or Cat6, and leave the wireless for laptops and tablets.
Cat5e will work fine for gigabit. Cat6 will support 10G, but 10G costs a fortune.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Mod parent up. Running ethernet is the best solution no matter how many excuses you can come up with not to.
I'm going to give a qualified 'no' to this one. I'm a network engineer, this IS my business. The reality is that powerline and wifi both suck balls if you really are *that* excited to have gigabit and you want your whole house to take advantage of it. I've actually heard from hardware engineers that design embedded devices who say that they can't get wifi to work reliably past about 10 meters, and I very much believe them.
Between neighbors doing stupid things (e.g. having the bright idea of making their AP sit on channel 2 when everybody else is on channel 1, not realizing that doing this effectively has them jam your AP and you jam theirs in all areas that they overlap) and the overall noisiness of unlicensed bands in general, wifi sucks for a lot of things. I personally refuse to use it for anything except smartphones and tablets.
Powerline adapters are lame most of the time as well because they work under the assumption that your internal wiring isn't very noisy, which is a very bad assumption to make because the controls for limiting radio interference from certain devices to the power grid aren't very good in many cases, and since you're typically on the same grid as your neighbors, there's fuck all you can do about it. I was lazy when I moved once and I tried a powerline adapter...boy was that a stupid idea. Not only are those things overpriced, but even the best ones don't work for shit in my house. It was rated for 200mbit, and I think in my case it got 2mbit. Worthless.
That said, just wiring ethernet is the best thing you can do. And there's two ways you can do it:
1) Yourself
2) Hire somebody.
There are probably plenty of people you can hire to do it. I personally would wire a five bedroom house for the $150 range plus the cost of materials (usually not much more than $50 for the cabling, ends, jacks, and faceplates, in addition to any switches needed, which my favorite is the Trendnet TEG-S80G, which runs about $30-$40 and is a VERY good 8-port gigabit switch for the price, even has a lot of features and runs so energy efficient that its METAL housing is cool to the touch.) The reason my materials costs are cheaper is because I already have all of the materials, so I only use what I need rather than having to buy in larger quantities than YOU need. Again, somebody you hire is probably in the same boat.
I also do it with all internal wiring so there's no need to run conduit and/or get outdoor grade wiring, and cosmetically it just looks better. Some people balk about going through attics though and will only do external wiring. If the person you're going to hire either doesn't want to do that or demands extra for it, find somebody else (Which by the way, I'm overweight AND work in Arizona's typically 120F attics.) Anyways about an hour per room would earn me about $30 an hour. I think other people would be willing to do it for even less than that though.
If you're doing it yourself, you can probably do the job equally well as I can, but you'll need to go down to home depot or lowes and get the cheapest RJ45 crimper you can find (about $20) maybe a 300 foot spool of cat5e wire (as cheap as $20) a box of RJ45 terminators (about $20) modular jacks (about $5 each) and modular faceplates (about $1 each.)
Go spend about an hour on youtube to see how to crimp RJ45 ends (it's actually easier than it sounds) and stick with the 568-b standard for all ends. Don't worry about crossover, straight through, etc. Every time I hear people try to be "smart" and talk about doing it "right" I kind of chuckle, and here's why: Part of the gigabit ethernet standard (that is, to receive IEEE 802.3 certification for gigabit) the switches AND the ethernet ports MUST provide the auto-MDIX feature, so fretting about crossover is pointless.
As for the jacks, they're really easy to wire, just follow the little instruction manual, they even include the little plastic punch tool in the box (at least, I haven't seen any brand that doesn't include it.)