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After months of problems with a Netgear WiFi extender that's previously given a stable connection, I'm ready smash it into a million pieces.
Plan on running a cat 6 cable out the back of our BT router down the garden in a conduit and into the garden office/fancy shed thing. So I can work with our wondering when the connection will drop.
I want to be able to plug two laptops in at the other end with a wired connection. Then have a local wifi network in the office. What do I need to plug the network cable into at that end? A switch rather than a router? If so can you get one that acts s a WiFi access point as well or do I need to add that separately?
Thanks in advance.
P.s. I've tried a powerline option. It didn't work. I think because office has its own consumer unit.
gigabit switch, go 8 port for futureproof, for when you add an IP phone, TV, server, Zwift... get one with POE too again it makes life a lot easier - https://www.tp-link.com/uk/business-networking/easy-smart-switch/tl-sg108pe/#overview
Then ethernet from the switch to laptop, IP phone (hence POE), Wireless AP (again, POE).
For your wifi, something like this should be fine - https://www.ebuyer.com/707146-tp-link-eap110-300mbps-wireless-n-access-point-eap110 POE powered access point. You'd probably want to have set as a range extender rather than it's own wifi SSID, but you could do that without much issue.
Oh and while you're running your cat6e cable, run another one. Because redundancy. 😀
That's great. Thank you. 🙂
You might have to do a tiny bit of set up on the AP but nothing major, this is my similar 8 port switch in my office, non POE version.
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In from powerline adapter
PC
Laptop
PS5
Pihole DNS server
HP Microserver (when in use)
With 2x cat6 cables you can use one as failover in case something breaks, and better to have a little to much capacity than run out in 6 months.
Just for future reference a router (generally) is purely to connect an internal network (LAN) to the internetz (WAN).
That said you could put a router in the office, plug the cat5/6 and the laptop etc. into it's lan ports and nothing into the WAN port.
That would then supply you with a switch and WiFi in one unit.
POE would be a bit pointless as you've already got power in the shed - so use it!
This would allow you to buy a cheap router off eBay.
I've been using this setup (old Netgear router) to get WiFi into outbuildings for longer than I can remember.
If you don't want to run two Ethernet cables you could either simply run a piece of string or just use the existing Ethernet cable to pull a new one through in the pretty unlikely event it needed to be replaced.
(I've had standard cat5 running around the outside of the house for 10+ years and nothing's stopped working yet).
Running two cables is a great idea
But don’t connect them both up at the same time As it won’t make it twice as fast but will instead give you a layer 2 loop and cripple it.
(Unless your kit supports some form of spanning tree which most home office kit won’t)
Those switches do support link aggregation but I doubt the BT hub does.
POE for me is a good thing to have as some devices are only POE, and there's probably limited power sockets in a garden office.