I'm trying to figure out how to best wire my rooms for Ethernet. How many switches between the modem/router would be considered too many? I wanted to put a main switch connected to the router. Then wire cabling to smaller switches, ideally in each room. The important stuff would be 2 switches from the router. Some areas would come in a lot cheaper if they were wired behind the 2nd switch, but anything connected would now be 3 switches from the router. Would this cause a lot of latency?
Re: Wiring a home network? No. It will work fine. You can stack a lot of switches and not have an issue.
Re: Wiring a home network? Latency would depend on the speed of the switch. A really crappy switch might add 8ms. A good switch .0001ms. I'm guessing most home switches these day don't add more than 2ms per hop which is pretty insignificant. Of course cheap switches will slow under load so if your thinking you'll be simultaneously streaming to 4 media centers at 100Mb on the same switch you may be disappointed. The real issue you may face is dumb switches are kind of dumb. I'm not sure how much trust I'd put into linking 3 $40 switches together. You can get switching loops and broadcast storms. You might need switches that can at least take a basic config. I guess it comes down to how you want to design it.
Re: Wiring a home network? Haha these questions are incoming. I was mainly concerned with getting the wiring done this week. So if I play with the quality of hardware I should be able to overcome linking multiple switches? Is 100ft cat6 good? I read there is loss beyond that... should I use 75ft to be sure? I probably only need a wired connection to the HTPC. But since I'm going through the trouble I was gonna cover everything. Besides if I connect a wifi extender to the smaller switches I'll improve my wifi. Might have to move up to a small business cisco router though.
Re: Wiring a home network? Draytek Vigor routers are quite good and have a lot of features. You could even use 3 of them as the switches, set one to deal with DHCP and have wireless on all 3. They have loads of features these days on the vLAN side. If you don't want to fork out for 3 use one as the main and then get something lower end for the other 2. You can pick up some basic managed 4/8 port switches for not much money these days. With American homes being bigger I assume the wireless radios are given more power in the US and give bigger range but here in the UK I always put multiple switches/routers in when I do work for people with big houses.
Re: Wiring a home network? Cat5 is rated at 280 feet and Cat6 is like 700 or something. Those are idea condition though. If you run those cables through the walls and they cross power cables you might have problems. They’re shielded but that's mostly meant to protect them from other Ethernet cables. What are you trying to accomplish? Seems like you could wire your media center with gigabit then wireless for all else. There are higher end wireless systems as well. Openmesh is just one product/service. You buy access points and manage them on their cloud controller. AP are $75 to $135. You can blanket your whole house for $500. The service is free and you can probably configure the whole thing in 20 minutes from an app on your phone. http://www.open-mesh.com/solutions/modular-wifi.html
Re: Wiring a home network? I have some pretty long old runs of CAT5 (Not even E!) in head office that have never been replaced due to logistics in the old building. Manage to push 1Gb over them OK, one of them does throw up the odd error on the switch but it does the job OK. CAT6 is a bit chunkier and so easier to terminate if you put boxes on.
Re: Wiring a home network? Try streaming a high quality blu-ray rip over wifi. Tell us how well that works out for you. It's 2015 and wifi still sucks shit for anything more intensive than casual web browsing.
Re: Wiring a home network? 1080p streaming over WiFi is easily done these days. 4K is a different matter.
Re: Wiring a home network? I have a $200 router but dont live in a shoebox. There is 2 floors (~ 20ft vertical) plus another 30ft horizontal distance between the router and HTPC. Literally as far apart as could be. I'm trying to prevent this kind of poor planning going forward. I intend to save money longterm in exchange for upfront costs. I can use HDHomerun for 3 TVs and save $45/month in equipment rentals. The reviews all say 1080p is best wired.
Re: Wiring a home network? lol I haven't had TV for 2 years now. But when I do, it'll be $10 + $3/mo cablecard I can stream for free. Also, not all 1080p is the same. I'm guessing your 3 GB iTunes download vs. uncompressed BR perform differently over wifi. You need sit down with Chi and work on your trolling.
Re: Wiring a home network? Do you have the HDHomerun or are you planning to get it? I have it and it's pretty meh.
Re: Wiring a home network? No. I actually wasn't going to get TV at all... but when I went to pick up a modem they offered 50 channels + HBO for $10/mo for 24 months. HDHomerun seems like a good way to offset the high equipment rental fees, I think I can be content with meh.
Re: Wiring a home network? By meh I mean the idea is great and the results can be great but it took effort. Not everything seem to handle the stream and decoding equally. The app for the PC and Windows Media Center work the best. My PS3 had bad stuttering. Tablets and phones did okay in SD but HD usually stuttered but not always. I resolved my Android stutter by using one app to decode and another to play TV. Stutter gets worse over time and the box has to be rebooted to get back to initial quality. I'd have to reboot about every other day. Beware this offer. It sounds like the same one I tried where they stream the TV over the net. The quality was really bad. Like worse than SD. That was my experience anyway.
Re: Wiring a home network? There's no such thing as uncompressed Blu-ray when it comes to the video. It's already compressed on the disc. The iTunes format does have higher compression, but most people aren't going to be able to tell the difference unless they're using 60+ inch screens and sit a few feet away. If you've ever seen online comparisons regarding Blu-ray and iTunes compression, they always have to use extreme zooms to get even slight differences to become apparent to the naked eye. The so-called "uncompressed" BR rips are really just for the audio to be uncompressed.
Re: Wiring a home network? Crap. I never got clarification. Hadn't really considered streaming delivery as a possible option. If that is the case I will probably not bother with cable TV features. I did see the comparisons, and truthfully couldn't see a difference even in extreme blow ups. But I am shooting for ~140" projector and cover all bases.