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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?
Just put ethernet everywhere, it's not that much work. I asume the house you're moving into will be empty anyway.
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, go plug your laptop in via ethernet in the awful location, and admire the glorious bandwidth.
Second, use your powerline adapters and/or some 802.11ac routers to get internet in the rest of your house. I'm almost certain there is no real need for you to use the full gigabit connection, so for now just don't worry about it. Of course this is not the answer you want, but it's the practical solution.
...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!
I have Google fiber. I wired my house with Cat5E, and I have a nice Extreme Networks gigabit switch tying it all together.
You will never put a DENT in Google Fiber. I've only found two speed test servers that can even come close, and one of them is hosted by Google right on the Fiber plant.
The KC Startup Village (http://www.kcstartupvillage.org/) got some early hype because they leased a home with Fiber and loan out the rooms to various hackers. Even they can't do more than momentarily scratch the surface of a gigabit connection. When they do, it's only by performing ridiculous stunts like playing 63 YouTube videos at once.
That said, it's still a great service. The upload alone is worth it vs the other cable and DSL choices. The TV service is pretty good too. Wire out your house if you're willing and able, but don't obsess over "fully utilizing" the connection. Many businesses can't even come close to saturating a gigabit internet link.
The rest of the internet just isn't fast enough yet. There are no apps or services that exist or will exist in the next several years that could fully utilize this. Even Google has said they didn't build this network for today. They built it for 10 years from now.
Seriously it is super easy to run cat5e in a house; even if you rent you can do it in a way that does not damage anything.
What the hell has happened to Slashdot when people can't be arsed to run a bit of cable?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I can already fill a gigabit connection pushing stuff around the house. Having a local gigabit ISP would just allow me to expand this to friends and family.
A cloud backup without the cloud would be a good start.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the answer is an unqualified 'no.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'm sure glad the world doesn't rely on your imagination.
Maybe I just bought NBA 2K15 on my PS4 and I don't want to wait until next Tuesday for the 46 gigabyte download to finish and I want to be able to stream an HD movie from Netflix at full quality while that's happening. And Steam's downloading 10 gigs of game updates on my computer while working on 12 gigs on the kid's computer. And my kid's streaming some educational video. And the wife is taking an online course in underwater basket weaving and she's in a video conference with the rest of the class.
Just because you have a limited imagination doesn't mean anyone who could make good use of a gigabit connection is a pirate.
I would wire up the house in places it's feasible. Trunk smaller subsystems with GBit switches back to the main entry point if needed to prevent having to run home-runs everywhere, but home runs would be best if possible.
I think you'll need to look for a decent main router/firewall pretty hard, I'm not sure about some of the newer home based ones, but I've heard many consumer routers, even ones rated for GBit internally, won't do GBit on the WAN port to the ISP. So you're going to want to make sure you spec in something that actually supports GBit on the WAN side hitting the fiber point. I wouldn't skimp this part if I wanted to fully utilize the network.
For areas that are to impractical to hit with physical wire, I would use WAP's for. You would probably want to use multiple WAP's so you don't get saturation on one particular wap, and the load is distributed out better, making for faster connections on the devices connecting wireless (less sharing of bandwidth). Also, make sure you get good WAP's that can do B/G/N seperately without degrading. Some cheaper versions will only go as high as the lowest device connected to them (something I didn't realize for quite some time). These basically can do N speed if everything is connected with N, but once 1 device connects that only supports B/G, then all the connections get knocked down to B/G. I think this is due to only having 1 radio in the AP rather than a separate radio for each speed protocol.
Just remember, while your wireing the house, it may be a pain in the butt, but just keep repeating the mantra that 'it will be over soon', and 'if you do it right the first time, you only have to do it once'. That helps me on big projects where cutting corners starts looking like a good idea just to get the project done. LOL.
Break the bread and get the rare earth magnets made for the job. Or hack up a similar solution. Spherical magnets for the end of the wire. Big Strong honking Magnet for your hand.
Unless the house is lath and plaster. Then you're just fucked. Take key walls down to studs and upgrade everything, day 1.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.)
Are you saying here that 1) You don't punch both ends with the proper wiring (straight through) (you also seem to think it doesn't matter) and 2) that you are seriously suggesting wiring wallports to RJ-45 ends as opposed to a proper patch panel?
1) No, he's saying wire all the ends into the 568-b standard colors that will be clearly marked on the RJ45 wallports, and follow the 568-b pinout on wikipedia for the RJ45 plug ends.
2) Yeah, I read that too... I've always done the 'patch panel' end using standard wall-ports and a 6-gang wall plate. It fits in much better in a home environment than a 1RU patch panel. But he is suggesting not doing sockets at the far end, just getting one of those wall plates with a big hole and terminating them as plugs to go straight into a switch/router. I wouldn't do it that way, but if it's in a cupboard out of the way, it is the simplest and cheapest option.
What you do in a domestic environment is different from commercial.
I'm a bit amazed (well, then again, not at all) that no one asked what you actually want to DO with Google fiber. Who cares if you can't use its full speed over wireless when all you're doing on your PC is the usual /./FB/email-stuff.
Put a small server (probabkly those NAS based things that run full-blown linux) next to your fiber jack. Have it handle all those big downloads that actually profit from the external fiber speed. Run a network cable to your TV and if you're using a desktop machine, to that machine.
For everything else, use wireless. Your tablets cpu will be slower than even the wifi anyway already.
bickerdyke
Are you saying here that 1) You don't punch both ends with the proper wiring (straight through) (you also seem to think it doesn't matter) and 2) that you are seriously suggesting wiring wallports to RJ-45 ends as opposed to a proper patch panel?
For your first point, he's saying don't bother with wiring the house with crossover lines, just use straight through cable to go from your jacks (which if you noticed the next line after what you quoted, he is running jacks in the room, not RJ-45 crimps) in each room to the central switch. Don't forget that this is for residential use: One jack per room is usually sufficient. He is right that using a Gigabit Ethernet switch should automatically change the port operation from straight-through to crossover depending on what device it's being connected to, therefore it technically doesn't matter; it's just a better practice to treat it like it does. In my own residential setup, I ran straight-through to one jack in each room, up into the attic space, and plugged them all into a gigabit switch mounted near the access door. If any of the rooms has multiple computers in it, I would just plug a crossover patch cable in the jack and run it to another gigabit switch in the room, and have all the computers connect into that.
There are two ways that your second point can be interpreted. You either think that he's crimping an RJ-45 end on the cable where it comes out of the wall and leaving enough cable in the wall to be able to pull it out and make the connection in the room (not what he's doing; again, read his next sentence after what you quoted.); or you think that he's wiring the jack in the room back to a switch that he's connecting into using an RJ-45 connector (this is exactly what he's doing), and don't understand why he'd do it this way as opposed to running it to a patch panel.
While patch-panels are a veritable necessity in your large environments where cable runs can be complex and need to be labeled as well as quick changes to network topology can be facilitated, in a residential system where there's most likely only going to be 5 - 10 single line runs that aren't going to move or change much it's an added cost and complexity that doesn't necessarily need to be purchased when each run can be directly connected into the mounted switch and left alone. Also, every time you jump from cable to patch panel to cable to device there's a performance hit on the network. Granted, over the residential runs we're talking about this hit would be nigh negligible, but if it's part of a network plan that adds a touch more complexity that isn't needed and poses no real benefit, its just one more reason to do direct-to-switch runs. Remember, we're talking about spaces where you have a single line coming from the switch and you can most likely easily trace it to the room it's running to just by standing in one place in the attic and following the line with your eyes.
I would add:
You don't have to go nuts wiring the whole house, (although that would be ideal). You could have one or two rooms wired, and use slower wireless elsewhere in the house. It's not like you always need gigabit. I have two desks in two different rooms where I can plug into the ethernet, Elsewhere, I just use the wifi. Not that I even have gigabit internet - I'm a Time/Warner Monopoly slave.
-- sudon't
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