Home Network Setup Advice (WiFi & home server)
Home Network Setup Advice (WiFi & home server)
Hey everyone,
There is no real "homenetworking" community like there was on reddit so I thought I would try my luck here.
I live in a 130m^2 house (~1500sqft) that is being completely stripped. That means I am putting in 12-14 Ethernet jacks in the rooms that might need it and have to completely redo my home network setup.
It is a house from the 1950s in belgium, so 21cm thick internal brick walls, a bit thicker concrete floors on the 2 levels. It is essentially a square (8m x 9m outer dimensions), and most of the advice on the internet is built for sprawling American wood houses which have completely different absorption of wireless signals. It has central stairs and essentially 4 rooms, 2 on either side with the kitchen in the back being bigger.
The little advice that I have seen is "brick walls -> get a bunch of access points" but that doesn't sit right with me.
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Currently we are using a Proximus (our ISP) modem/router in the northwest most far corner or the house and still get weak signal (enough for lower quality videos like Instagram reels) all the way in the southeast corner on the 2nd floor. It goes through 2 brick walls, a concrete floor, and a door and we can still use WiFi 6. Intuitively I would then set up something like an Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 mounted to the staircase wall or in the hallway in the center of the house. I don't know if that would be strong enough to reach everything we need, but it seems better to me than a router in each corner and blasting channel noise at our neighbors' houses since in belgium there isn't much side-garden if any.
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I have a home server running a variety of local and internet-facing services for myself and family. Due to ease of wiring, I would prefer running modem -> TP-SG1SG016DE -> Wireless Router and using an Asus router. Would the TPlink kind-of-managed-switch be able to isolate the modem fron the rest of the network and just run it to my router to use the LAN of the router for the rest of the ports on my switch? It has port isolation functionality, so I assume so. Then I don't have to run double Ethernet to the hall.
I want to go with Asus because I hear that they generally have more features than other brands. I for sure need port forwarding, QoS, disabling PnP, assigning static IP, and NAT loopback if possible so that local access of services doesn't have to go through cloudflare and can go directly to my reverse proxy. My TPlink Archer A7 that I use now can't do NAT loopback and it makes any file transfers limited by my 5:1: asymmetrical upload speed. Also having VLANs for any cameras would be great, but I think you can do something similar via parental controls on an ASUS (restricting a certain device IP's internet access.
Would the Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 have the festures that I would need for my simpleish home server?
Thanks for the help!
Edit: Tl;dr since nobody reads this long of a post:
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I am running Ethernet (cat6) to every room. Modern laptops as well as phones have no Ethernet port, so I need wifi
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I am looking at 1 wireless router, no "mesh" bs at all. The advice of overstuffing a small house full of a dozen access points is overkill and detrimental to performance without power and channel usage tuning.
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I have specific features I want in a router, can one of the listed ones do all of that like NAT loopback?
I believe normally you would run the modem into the router and then connect the router to the switch on separate ports. That will isolate your modem and send all out/in-bound traffic through the router. Is there a reason you would want the modem on the switch?
The Asus looks like it has what you would need - I think most APs do these days. Are you going to do a 'mesh' to the satellite APs or are they going to be on the LAN (you mentioned re-wiring). Either way they should be acting as bridges to the the main network to that it appears as though you have one big network no matter which AP you're connected to. If you're doing a mesh just be sure each AP will work with each other and that they have multiple 5GHz radios so that they can communicate to each other on a 'private' frequency.
is there a reason you would want the modem on the switch?
The reason was to only have to run a single Ethernet cable to the hall instead of a pair, but I realized that wouldn't work anyway because there is port separation on routers for external and internal to the LAN.
Are you going to do a 'mesh' to the satellite APs or are they going to be on the LAN (you mentioned re-wiring).
There would be no mesh. I think the house is too small for it. My mother's house is 50% bigger and 3 floors instead of 2 with the router in the basement, but in a wood house. With no mesh only 1 room had no WiFi until she put an AP in the opposite corner. Now there is trouble with stability in 50% of the house as the power wasn't reduced and they overlap by probably 40% or so. Frequent service freezes until it can resolve the correct point to switch to.
That's interesting. I have a couple eero's operating in a mesh in a smallish wood house myself where I have pretty significant overlap without any noticeable stability or performance issues.
Unfortunately it's an area outside my expertise. One of my other APs had a configuration for "band steering" though which tries to direct clients to connect to one of multiple available wifi signals (to distribute load). And I did see issues with an older Chromecast not being able to connect to that network with it on. I wonder if that might be related to what you were seeing in your mother's house?
If you have the ability to easily add wires, I would go with a system that allows you to wire everything together, rather than depending on a purely wifi mesh. Personally I'm running unifi ceiling mounted access points for this. They run on power over Ethernet, so you just need to get one cable to each. You can control them with their free software controller if you are into that, or something like their dream router.
Run 3-4 of those access points placed throughout the house and you'll never have a weak signal again.
The little advice that I have seen is "brick walls -> get a bunch of access points" but that doesn't sit right with me.
- Currently we are using a Proximus (our ISP) modem/router in the northwest most far corner or the house and still get weak signal (enough for lower quality videos like Instagram reels) all the way in the southeast corner on the 2nd floor. It goes through 2 brick walls, a concrete floor, and a door and we can still use WiFi 6. Intuitively I would then set up something like an Asus rt-ax58u or a zenwifi XT8 mounted to the staircase wall or in the hallway in the center of the house. I don't know if that would be strong enough to reach everything we need, but it seems better to me than a router in each corner and blasting channel noise at our neighbors' houses since in belgium there isn't much side-garden if any.
4 access points would be chaos of overlapping channels, noise, devices never knowing which access point to connect to and choosing the worse one or WiFi on the phone/laptop completely freezing service until a reconnect, and blasting RF noise all over our neighbors' houses.
My mother already has thowe problems bad enough with one wireless router + 1 access point. That's also why she sees 15 networks on a street of 20 houses far apart from each other.
I think that 1 wireless router in the middle of the house would reach every corner, but I wanted to be somewhat sure before I drop 150-200€
Fortunately that's not how it works when you have all the access points controlled centrally, like with unifi. Yes there is limited frequency space, but this is much less of an issue on 5ghz. There will also only be one ssid, and handoff between access points is pretty seamless.
3-4 is probably overkill, but the attenuation situation sounded pretty dire. I run two in my house for redundancy mostly, just standard American stud and drywall construction.
I am very happy with every ASUS router I have ever had. I’m particularly happy with my current XT8/ZenWifi AX. I have a large, older house that requires two access points, and I found the advanced settings on the ASUS (particularly after installing the Merlin firmware) made balancing device transfers between the two access points very smooth.
Whatever your use case may be, I think you’ll be happy with the ASUS.