Etherneting the house

I did. Several years ago. PowerLine adapters and WiFi removed the need for it.

Seems a bit outdated unless you've got walls made of tin foil that defeat WiFi and mesh hotspots 🙂

Start with mesh and see how far that gets you.

Done it recently, I have a switch in the understairs cupboard that feeds all devices downstairs (PoE CCTV, ethernet sockets in all rooms including garage and an access point).

I have a cable from that switch that goes into the loft (via airing cupboard).

In the loft I have another switch that feeds a socket in each bedroom plus the NAS drive (in an enclosure in the loft) and another access point.

I am renovating the house so cables runs have been easy because I have had floorboards up anyway plus replacing skirtings etc.

You cannot beat the reliability of a wired connection. We have some reasonably heavy usage with two grown up sons working from home and each also has a gaming pc and PS4. Streaming TV etc. Some of the sockets may never get used but it is nice to have them in case. Ethernet in the garage for zwift eliminates mid-ride wifi wobbles!

Using a combination of mesh/powerline and it still needs regular rebooting, and is a bit flaky.

And even then need to use an additional booster if I want to Zwift in the garage.

Not thinking a big setup, maybe access point in the kitchen (back at one side of the house) and one in the playroom (other side of the house, possibly with wires to the kids' Apple TV/Switch).

What I don't especially want is to have to re-plaster a load of walls… @eskay how easy was it to do?

First question would need answering is what is your house made off?
Stud walls, concrete floors, is it a bungalow, etc?

I've done it in mine cupboard under the stairs was handily placed for the phone socket.
Luckily it's a suspended timber floor so could run cables to where they were needed.
Also from that cupboard I can get access to the garage then up through a room to the attic.
So it was pretty easy to drops from there to every room.

If it's just to fix deadspots you might be better with a decent mesh system like an Orbi.   I was going to go down the same route as you but it was way easier just to buy a few Orbi's and now we have great wifi everywhere with no faff either in cabling or setting up ap's.   Your solution will be rock solid if you can be bothered though

You cannot beat the reliability of a wired connection.

Based on what . It's not 20 years ago anymore.

I have ethernet in the garage but I still didn't run cables to the garage....

Did mine in 2018, I was doing major refurb at the time, 90% rewired, 95% of plumbing and heating replaced. So floors up and much chasing out walls in progress anyway. Cat 6 and TV coax to most rooms. TV amp and main router in the loft, WiFi got every where ok apart from my favourite chair in the conservatory, so there's now another broadband router in the lounge configured only as a WiFi point.

My desktop cad pc, printers, TV I prefer on wired for best performance and reliability.

Oval conduit was used in the walls, so ethernet wires could be swapped out for fibre-optic or something in future. Unlikely imho, but then I thought micro-b usb for device charging would last longer than it has!

I ran a bunch of cat5 cables when we were renovating and rewriting the house but I wouldn’t make a mess to run them otherwise.

What I don’t especially want is to have to re-plaster a load of walls… @eskay how easy was it to do?

The setup is very easy, just select the hardware and plug the cables in. Depending on your house construction and state of decor, running the cables in will be the biggest pain.

Based on what . It’s not 20 years ago anymore.

Experience. Science.

Sure wireless has got a lot better but it’s far from perfect. For a fixed point to point connection wired wins hands down every time.

I guess your right....if there's a power cut you can keep your music streaming.....oh wait....

Things have moved on.

We didn't run ethernet when we rewired 12 years ago. Don't regret it.
The technology ( and not exclusively wireless provides less intrusive more reactive solutions

This is a repost from another thread but stands good for this too.

You need to think where you have a concentration of wired devices such as where your bt/virgin line comes in, home office, bedrooms, media hubs (where your tv, sky box av amp are), pc games room? And where you are going to run the cables too (mine is in the loft but that’s where the bt line and my switches and ap are)

Copied content:
Everyone’s experience of mesh systems will differ & they tend to be I brought this & it’s brilliant…

Tp-link do a mesh system that uses powerline as the backhaul link between nodes, I believe it’s the deco m9 but you’d have to check.

Personally assuming you have power in your loft I’d consider running a ethernet cable from your router/modem to the loft and install some tp-link Omada access points and a small poe switch in the loft.

Because the ap’s are suspended well above the walls it allows the wifi radios to form a beam that radiates downwards through the ceiling and floors more evenly rather that being blocked by walls.

For example we have a 3 bed, detached 1900’s property with a open plan gf with a rear extension at least three sizeable steels and most internal walls are brick.
I cover the whole property & garden with a single tp-link eap225 ap along with a few other switch/router bit of kit.

Let me know if this kind of installation is of interest. The Omada range is very much the logical equivalent of unifi but with a much lower price point & they also have external ap’s

Oh and re your external access point question, unless you have provision for a water proof external power source your drilling a hole for power at a minimum.

Ethernet is still faster than WiFi nowadays, WiFi can also suffer bandwidth problems if you have lots of heavy users.

IMO if you’re going all-in with industrial style networking & home automation kit, you will definitely benefit from being able to hard wire it. Otherwise, as mentioned, WiFi is pretty reliable these days!

Personally I have no problem with running cables in fairly discreet trunking. Only if I was building from scratch or extensively renovating would I bother to hide them.

No your confusing me with edukator.

And to be fair if your going to stealth edit your sarky first reply you obviously realised it was a complete non post.

But either way yes I concede they are faster.....but what are you trying to stream that needs to get there before you sent it.....

How crap are the modern alternatives you've tried that your maxing them out in a domestic setting ?

@trail_rat - our WiFi is fine (virgin fibre 300 or something plus) but when we moved into this shell of a house i decided that I wanted hard wired connections. We still get occasional wifi dropouts but the hard connection powers through. My two avid gaming sons do not use the WiFi because of the speed advantage of hard wired (even with our fast broadband WiFi).

It is also convenient for using a single cable for PoE devices.

Moving large files around the network/Nas etc is much quicker over my ethernet.

There are added security benefits (not that was major concern for me).

I didn’t edit anything other than a typo.

wifi is great but it’s not perfect.
wired is great but it’s not flexible.
a combined system works better.

wifi is great but it’s not perfect.
wired is great but it’s not flexible.
a combined system works better.

Pretty much my view - wire everything you can so for me my workstation, Sky Glass, music streamer, PlayStations etc and then wifi anything that moves - phones, tablets etc. Works very well for me.

My house is meshed up to the hilt and full 5g wifi but still prefer a wire if the device doesn't move and will take one 🙂

If I were to have the house re-wired (unlikely sadly) then I would have ethernet ports plumbed into every room for sure.

I had it done when rewired the house. Better for gaming for my sons.
We are in France and with a 1gb fiber connexion straight inside the house.

If you can get cables into the loft, then that's by far the easiest way to get an access point at each end of the house neatly.

I just ran one cable up the stairs, nailed to the skirting, and stuck a router at the other end of the house. Great reception everywhere now, even in the garage.

Work PC also hardwired in, though it doesn't make a difference compared to wifi now theres a router up here too.

Something I noticed when doing all this is how few items actually have ethernet ports in! Had to get USB-C hub adapters for my PCs.

Mesh covers 90% of the house, but my office is at the diagonal opposite end of the house. I’ve taken a cable outside and round the house and then in through the wall of the office.
I’ve not had much joy with power line adapters, but that maybe because my office is in an extended bit of the house with its own wiring circuit.

If you can get cables into the loft, then that’s by far the easiest way to get an access point at each end of the house neatly.

when we had our rennovation done, and they put in power and water to the new garage/shed, i dropped in a duct with a Cat5 in it. Got a wifi Access point down in the garage, which is pretty useful, though it does have the problem of my devices not being able to decide which one to connect to, when youre in the middle. For that reason, i turn it off when im not down there.

Got a wifi Access point down in the garage, which is pretty useful, though it does have the problem of my devices not being able to decide which one to connect to, when youre in the middle.

Should be seamless as long as they’ve got the same SSID and password?

I've done it due to refurbing my relatively new build (14 years old) that was built by people that wish they could be called cowboys, it's that bad.

On the subject of a mesh system, I looked at the reviews of the Orbi (wifi 6 and previous) and it was so up and down based upon the need to reboot them quite a lot. Was this a known issue and has now been rectified with firmware updates? I need to get a signal to the shared drive to put in a wifi or poe external camera, so I could put a mesh unit in the garage and then connect up the cat6 I have from outside ready or if the wifi signal is strong enough, use that. I can't get any ethernet into the garage from the house unfortunately due to how the garage is attached so mesh is the next best thing potentially.

Should be seamless as long as they’ve got the same SSID and password?

Depends. With traditional APs some devices have a real love of trying to cling to AP A for every last drop of signal even though AP B is coming through much more strongly as you move through the zones. It can be a real PITA.

With Mesh it proactively hands off from AP A to AP B when B is the more preferable in terms of signal strength.

Depends. With traditional APs some devices have a real love of trying to cling to AP A for every last drop of signal even though AP B is coming through much more strongly as you move through the zones. It can be a real PITA.

With Mesh it proactively hands off from AP A to AP B when B is the more preferable in terms of signal strength.

It’s more complicated than that, the majority of the logic for wifi roaming remains within the client device. Prosumer ap’s such as Omada & unifi have controls that let you tune the minimum signal strength for a client to connect among other parameters, mesh systems generally have the same type of setup but might not expose the ability to tune these parameters.

We extended the house upstairs and down a few years which included a rewire so I got the sparky to run cat6 for me. I ended up with a dumb switch in the meter cupboard and the following cabled to it:

Living room: double wall socket for sky box and virgin router (in modem mode), another double wall socket other end of the room for the main google wifi AP (one cable cross-overed to the virgin router, the other as backhaul).

Study: 2 sockets for laptop and wireless AP, 2 currently empty

Kitchen/diner: 1 socket for Sonos (wireless always drops out) and 1 empty

Garage: 1 socket for wireless AP (smart bike, iPad, etc) and 1 for sky box.

Main bedroom: 1 wireless AP and one to sky box

Both boys now have Xbox's in their rooms and one has a gaming PC, wireless was dropping out etc so I recently ran two new cables to each of their rooms. We did a speed test from one of the Xboxen, on wireless it was getting about 30Mbps, wired it's getting well over 300 (virgin broadband is 350).

It was pretty easy to run the new cables - lift carpet and floorboards, drill through some joists and run cables. Originally I was going to chase the walls and put flush faceplates but I ended up with wall mounted boxes sitting just above the skirting board and just ran the cables over the front of the skirting and into the bottom of the box. Boxes are placed under desks so you don't notice.

So I've got a nice hybrid model, with wired to the devices that need bandwidth and wireless to those that need mobility. Access points are backhauled over wired connections.

If you can do it without too much trauma and mess I'd say crack on as there are definite upsides.

Edit to add: When I ran the extra cables recently I also put a patch panel in the meter cupboard. Now it looks much tidier 🙂

@dannybgoode I though that handoff between APs was covered by 802.11k?

@tonyd I think that’s what I need - effectively using cable as the backhaul for the mesh.

My 'adult' kids gaming setups are ethernet. Used 'flat cables' up the side of the understair's cupboard door edge, then under carpet to switch in son's room, then another cable out to daughter's room. She also has one of the mesh discs in her room.

Another cable over to another switch in the lounge, running TV, media PC and a backbone for another mesh disc. Final disc is in garage, which is backboned with a power line ethernet as the zwift PC is on the powerline ethernet. Takes the media heavy devices off wifi - gaming PC's, media PC and Smart Telly. The rest connect to the mesh. Cheap to do.

All ethernet ports on the BT hub are used (4)

ui.com AP’s, router/firewall + ethernet will beat mesh if you’re doing anything critical. If milliseconds count go wired. If your just streaming Netflix just take a consumer mesh setup.

It looks like Draytek mesh APs support wired backhaul, which is good.

Bearing in mind I have as much talent for DIY as a pig has for rollerskating, who would you get to run the cables?

Our house has a big steel in the middle which means a single AP can't reach the entire building, so we've one AP bottom right, and a run of cat5 outside the house (along guttering, so it's basically invisible) to another AP top left.

The APs are Orbi with wired backhaul, so they mesh/handover/etc nicely. That gives us full strength wifi across the entire house and cost about £100 for a local aerial/networking guy to install the wire and wall sockets in a morning.

The only places we have a WiFi issues are the far corner of the garage and out in my garden where the missus would like to "WFH" on nice days (and I know she's not going to get on well with a 30ft ethernet cable), so both places a long way from the router with a few walls in the way.

I think I'd prefer to just boost the WiFi locally with one of those cheapy plug-in boosters at an appropriate mid-point, seems far easier.

A wired home network seems a bit redundant these days, more of a "circa 2004" solution TBH...

I had a hybrid of powerline and wireless mesh.
It wasn't cheap, and pretty terrible for high load stuff (gaming and work stuff).
Only solution offered to improve the system seemed to be spending increasingly more on "better" hardware, most of which i ended up returning.

Now have ~50 meters of 5e, 3 Ethernet switches and 3 relatively cheap router/APs.

Everything works perfectly, and fast, zero drops. Zero security wobbles from work stuff.

I think I’d prefer to just boost the WiFi locally with one of those cheapy plug-in boosters at an appropriate mid-point, seems far easier.

Sure, but they're typically a bit crap. They use double the bandwidth as they need to receive and retransmit, handover between them is typically bad, and so on. My inlaws have them as extension means lots of steels, but the repeater in the kitchen is turned on and off 'on demand' as it's not reliable enough.

Being the inlaws, they won't listen when I just tell them to harass BT to get a mesh setup...

I have as much talent for DIY as a pig has for rollerskating

Deserves more recognition.

The answer for a lot of people is just a decent quality router.

@mert I think you were in the same boat I’m in now.

Probably, yes.
Upgrade €300 worth of router/mesh/powerline to €700 worth of "better" kit and still have issues.

Or Ethernet and WiFi mesh at ~€450 ish that is flexible, fast and reliable.
(Recently added another AP, took an hour and covers the garden, shed and a good chunk of the rest of the plot I'm on.)

My house has it in every room. Based on the fact i havent once considered using it i would say no but then my broadband has never slowed, stopped working or has any deadspots even if i go out into the garden.

I’ve retired an old house and new built from scratch with cable to every room.

In both cases actually ended up using a hybrid model because even if you get cable to a room it’s only any use if it’s actually in the place you want to use it.

Cable used in
living room (AV kit)
Kitchen (AV kit and ground floor WIreless point)
Office (printer and computer)
Plus cable to a basement workshop access point (steel/concrete between that and ground floor) and to a wireless point mounted high and central on top floor.

None of the Ethernet points get used in the bedrooms

I've had some wires in our house for a while, and added when we did our kitchen extension recently.  Cable under floor of living room to cupboard under stairs, where I have a few devices and a switch.  1 cable up to loft from switch, another to kitchen.  Another cable goes out to the shed (CNC & 3D printer etc).  The primary wifi is in the lounge but doesn't stretch very far, so I have 2 more access points, one in the kitchen, another in the loft, all wired.  Glad we took the opportunity to do so, and during the loft conversion and kitchen extension were the perfect times, cables under a solid concrete floor are tricky!

Aye, I think we’ll be doing ours during some renovation.

Router is in the front of the house (which is probably why it doesn’t teach all that far) but I reckon one in the kitchen and one on the playroom would do (house is vaguely triangular and that covers the corners).

Ideally would like cables to the living room and playroom but that might be a bridge too far.

I did my house. I put the router ontop of a wardrobe upstairs, then ran 4 ethernet cables up into the loft. It's a challet style house so was easy to drop 2 cables into other rooms. The 3rd cable down a disused chimney for a tv, the 4th cable provides a 2nd router in the kitchen to provide enough WIFI for the garden.