Wifi network design for a new house

My daughter is building a new construction home and I offered to help with the wifi and network design and am quickly realizing that I'm over my head as my data is old. The home is a two story standard colonial design with a 40' long by 30' foundation. The basement will be unfinished and we will worry about the network there later. The house is in Grafton MA.

I was looking to design in a Cat 6 wired connection in each room and then stumbled upon the UniFi line by Ubiquiti Networks. The ceiling mounted access points look great but then I saw their wall mounted AP internet jacks. I'm a bit confused by Power over Ethernet and what other components will be needed. I want to put in a rock solid wireless solution with wired access points but have a system that a normal smart person can manage without being a super tech geek.

The builder knows zero about this stuff and the electrician maxes out a running cat 6. Can someone point me to a site where I can learn more or a service that will help with design?

Thanks in advance, there has always seemed to be a bunch of smart tech people in this forum and I'm calling in a favor here.

 

The challenge at this stage of the game is designing future proof physical infrastructure. Choice of equipment, management, etc. all comes a bit later.

Keep in mind that a house is supposed to have a minimum of 40+ years of functionality. Most networking equipment about 3 years. So, whatever get picked for the install is probably going to be changed out 10 times or so before the roof gets redone.

Today it is WiFi, but what will it be tomorrow? What happens when the new USB-Q over soggy kite string with 32.5x the throughput of WiFI comes out? What happens when manufacturers don't bother putting WiFi interfaces on their equipment any more. It is/has already happened with wired ethernet in some cases.

My point is that 10 years ago, RG-6 for CATV was "standard" in a faceplate. Today not so much. 10 years from now, perhaps not at all. Outside of residential, CAT 3 for phone was common 10 years ago. Today with IP phones, it is all CAT 6 network cable and an analog phone jack is an exception.

I would suggest at least one 4 3/4 box with single gang mud ring installed in each room, piped with 1 inch EMT down to the basement. Since the basement is unfinished, end the pipe at the basement and use J-hooks or some other means of support to traverse the basement to the equipment. There should be as few turns in the pipe as possible.

Now, each room has a fairly large box that you can pull whatever you need in and out of as the technology changes. Today it might be CAT 6 and CATV, 10 years from now you pull the CATV out since everything is streaming and pull in the soggy kite string. Want speaker wires? Pull them in. Need another network cable or two because WiFi causes acne? Pull them in.

Somewhere in the basement there will need to be some sort of patch panel to handle the other end of the wires. They make some wall mount, swing out rack panels that would work. Where ever you put that, there should be outlets near by because the equipment will live here. It should ideally be near where cable, phone, or fiber enter the building. If those all come from different locations in the basement, it might be easier to run them to the equipment rather than put the equipment where they are.

Remember, before the walls are closed up, running pipe or cable is cheap. Once the walls are closed, it is really expensive. Data cable has a finite life span due to insulation changes, damage, and technology changes. Technology changes fast. Old tech is disposable. Design for flexibility.

I forgot to add, get a real data guy to do the network wiring, not just an electrician. There are things that have to be done right on network cable or they don't work right/well/long/at all. If you have an electrician stapling CAT 6 cable to the studs the same way you handle romex... well that is probably asking for problems.

 

run at least 2 cat 6 cables to each room.

Also run cat 6 to ceiling positions in the upstairs hallway, the main living area and the garage or entry hallway. The ceiling positions are for the APs you’ll get. They work best mounted on a ceiling

Put in a POE switch and hook up the UniFi ubiquiti APs and call it a day.

Run a bunch of cat 6 to the areas where you may have a TV. One for the TV, extras for gaming systems or Apple TV or sling or whatever.

If there is an office. Run a bunch there too for printers, NAS etc.

 

When we built our home I pre-wired with Belden composite cable. Residential Composite Cable combines Cat5e, Coax and Fiber in one saving installation time It isn't cheap nor is it a guarantee of future proofing. You can get two cat6, two rg6, and a pair of multi-mode fiber in a bundle. As others mentioned your best bet is a sleeve of some sort with a pull string if you can't access an area after the home is built. You may also want to consider entertainment center speaker placement. If those need to be prewired with a fairly heavy speaker wire. Ubiquiti makes great gear. They also make the Amplifi home wifi router system that is super easy to set up and maintain. AmpliFi Wi-Fi

 

I agree. Ran some 1 inch plastic conduit a long time ago, as well as catv3 I think Ethernet. Well that conduit really was useful ten years later!

As far as entertainment center, some speakers end up on the ceilings in modern systems, so run those wires and just let them dangle behind the sheetrock ceiling for future use

 

After following home networking installation stuff for going on 20 years now - I'd say what you want to concentrate on is ACCESS.

And by that I mean - design around the conduits you will need and the boxes (for the faceplates) you will want in the walls - so that you can pull the wiring du-jour of whatever is needed going forward.

10G networking is becoming affordable - so it WILL end up in the home sooner or later, even though it's expensive now.

I looked into the Residential composite cable that Choctaw mentioned quite some time back - I'm glad now that I never got far enough along to install it. Because Cat5e is already going obsolete.

If you come up with a conduit plan - and a plan on where you want to put the boxes for the wall plates so you can plug in computers and/or wireless access points - then the wiring is something you can worry about later.

IMHO what you DO NOT want - is wiring embedded in your walls.

What you DO want - is conduit installed in the house so you can run whatever wiring you want. Have the conduit run back to a central point. Either have a "data closet" - or run it all to some point in the basement where
you will have your cable modem and router/firewall and other networking gear located.

Networking speeds keep increasing. The higher speeds run on wire only. IMHO at some point networking speeds will outrun the ability of it to even go over wireless AT ALL.

From what I can tell - the fastest in-home wireless routers are the 5Ghz stuff - which runs at 1300Mbps. Gig ethernet runs at 1000Mbps , so the 5Ghz wireless stuff exceeds (with perfect conditions) - the speed of 1G ethernet.

The next jump up is 10Gb ethernet. It's already filtering down to the point where it's affordable for "home" use. Netgear has 10g copper switches that are only $400-$500.

I give it 5 years tops before 10G ethernet is going to be common.

I doubt you're going to get 10G ethernet speed out of wireless.

That means that sooner or later you're going to want wired connections in your home.

Plan around conduits - not wires.

 

You''ll spin yourself into the ground trying to figure your way around all the different technologies while trying to come up with a plan for the builder.

Concentrate instead on a plan for running the conduit - and that at least simplifies the decision making process greatly - and gives the builder a *physical* problem he can solve. Then you can concentrate on what wiring technology you want to pull thru the conduits later.

Figure out things like where you will want a wall plug in every room - you'll want a conduit run to each box in the wall where a wall plug for network jacks will be installed. Don't undersize it - either the conduit or the wall boxes. Better to have more room in the conduit for the wires you want to run - than less.

Conduit for network wiring is typically orange (there's nothing special about the conduit itself it's just color coded that way to distinguish from electrical wiring conduit).

There's multiple types available. There's rigid - just like the electrical conduit, there's also flexible conduits available to make it easier for snaking into hard to reach places.

You want sweeping bends instead of tight corners or pulling wires will be a bitch later.

If you're unsure about this stuff there are companies that specialize in residential network wiring who are familiar with all the products available and can do the install.


If it was me, I would start first with a room by room survey of where you might want to have a wall plate with network jacks in it. Then figure out where you might want to install wireless access points in the house. Come up with a plan for that - and then a plan for how to run the conduit can be generated from where you want to have the wall boxes.

Powered ethernet is a system that supplies power over the same ethernet cables that are used for networking. It requires a switch that supports powered ethernet - and can be used to power wireless access points, cameras, and IP phones.

Which makes me think of another thing to include in your overall plan: make sure you have conduit and boxes setup in places where you might want to install a security camera. A lot of the security systems these days is IP cameras. So if you had the conduit and box available you could setup a security system later using PoE and a suitable switch and camera setup.

Cameras would want to be inside and outside (potentially)

 

Wireless doesn't work that way, there's too much overhead. a 5G wireless link rated at 1300 is probably more like 600 in the real world. Maybe in the next generation of WiFi sure, but now? that assertion is laughable. Is a really good wireless setup good enough most of the time? Sure. It's come a long way. But it's still f***ing garbage, fundamentally. It's still inferior to a switched GBe wall connection from 15 years ago.

10G is common in enterprise and stuff like that as it is, or (larger) business apps, but at the home level? That's laughable. We've been hitting law of diminishing returns for a long assed time now and I only see that sinking more. There's no killer app (yet) in most cases that needs that much bandwidth most of the time. A gigabit of bandwidth, at line speed, is still a shitload of data. A huge portion of home internet services are still nowhere near a gig yet, either. They don't need to be, most people don't have those kinds of demands.

The only way you will ever see 10G in common use in a home is if someone comes out with a copper cabling spec that will get you 100M of easy to install cabling running over "Cat7" or whatever it is. Even then, if a 1G chipset is even 10 cents cheaper, in some product, guess what's going to get chosen? The 1G chipset..... Hell not all that long ago, some of the skinflint laptops sold at retail only had fast (100M) ethernet chipsets in them, because they figured that nobody would ever notice. They were right. The only reason they switched is because the price of the realtek crab chip they used probably came within like 5 or 10 cents or they stopped making the FE one... lmao.

Food for thought- I just logged into an aggregation switch at work that has like dozens of gigabit desktop switches hanging off it (most of them connected @ 10G, although some are at one) and the uplink port to our core is
10G. Even the uplink, as I look at it, is only doing about 500-600 MBps. And most of this traffic has to cross the core to get to anywhere meaningful, which means it's going through that uplink....

Most of the people that come trotting into my office wanting a 10G uplink for their shit don't actually need it. They never needed it. They just don't want to admit that their array or whatever it is is slow or that the disks are f***ing slow. It's pretty funny when I tell them to run a test and then paste them the stats from the port...

The assertion that it will be in common use in a home environment is just silly, absent some huge presence of some killer app for it, that doesn't exist yet. It's like saying "everyone should live in an airpark, because practical to own flying cars are coming".

-Mike

 

What DRGRANT said.

Unless you have plans on running a shit ton of streaming INSIDE the house, you'll need 802.11AC. But if you stream from OUTSIDE like Netflix and Hulu, don't worry then. Unless you have 1Gb FIOS, you'll never have to worry about how fast our wireless is INSIDE the house.

Like others said...RUN CONDUIT EVERYWHERE to future proof the house.

 

Yup, with or without conduit involved, at least run Cat6 everywhere. I tell people "2 drops per box" and a small bedroom should get at least 2 boxes in it on opposing walls, anything bigger than that should have
more. It seems overkill, but I get thanked later when people rearrange shit. Adding extra drops while something is under construction is dirt cheap.

AV/TV stuff is a whole different ballgame. If you were going to run some kind of a conduit to move cables in and out of, whatever your big TV setup is, etc, that would be the place to do it,, if someone isn't putting all the crap
near the TV set.

-Mike

 

Re: the wireless thing, you're making my point. Even at it's *rated* speed - it's not going to keep up with wired connections.

Re: 10G in the home.

I remember people making the exact same arguments about 1Gb ethernet in the home. Who needs that!!?! What kind of stuff are you throwing over your network anyway?!!!?

My point is that 10G is following the same adoption and price point path that 1Gb ethernet followed maybe 15 years ago. Sooner or later software bloat and streaming media within the home will easily eat up 1Gb network bandwidth and 10Gb will be commonplace. It might take 10-15 years - but it will still get there. When 10G switches are available in the $400-$500 range - which is where we are at now - then 10G is at an affordable level for people in their homes.

This won't be for the average AOL level user.

Somebody earlier in this thread said "plan 40 years ahead" - I think that's too short of a time span. My house was built in 54. I've ripped things out right and left but *most people don't*. The houses on either side of me have both been renovated - but they didn't rip out interior walls and they may not even have done the electrical over. So that's more like a 64 year window. If you're planning out a house - I'd say plan on more like a 60-75 year window before the house gets seriously ripped apart and done over.

That's why I said conduit.

Somewhere within 30 years or so - you're going to be running 10Gb ethernet in your house.

I just got rid of the POTS line at my house earlier this year - only because they forced us to. When did POTS lines come into being ? I had to go look it up ............. 1876. The wiring on the side of my house was ORIGINAL (1954) up until about 4 years ago when the service started getting flaky.

People who think residential homes are on a 20 year or even a 40 year renovation cycle are high.

 

Speaking to internet access only, not TV or speakers, a good 802.11AC router will cover the house just fine. I'd still run conduits to each room but without cable unless the owner decides they want it later. I would run PoE-capable Cat6 to security camera locations after discussing those with the owner.

 

You can do 5 gig Ethernet today wirelessly, but it would either be 70 ghz, or some sort of wireless optical. It will NOT like going thru walls

 

You still don't even need 1G in the home, the only reason it's there is because it just happened organically and most of the cabling happened to be compatible. It was a cost free forklift upgrade. People got it because
their router literally burned out and died and the hardware got changed, etc.

The same cannot be said for 10G, at least not at present. There is no free forklift upgrade for it.

Lol no it's not, particularly considering that most PCs and Macs don't even have motherboards on it that will do 10G copper or an SFP+ socket out of the box.

15 years ago I could buy a 1GB NIC for a PC for relatively short money and just install it. Good luck doing that with 10... (ETA: some exist, but most of the better ones aren't common. And there certainly aren't a lot of onboard chipsets with10G
PHY's, either. )

Why? What is the application? Your argument is like saying "people will no longer need just a big hamburger, they will have to eat an entire steer at dinner. And it will be normal.."

As an aside, 4K TV sets for example have been out a couple years or so now. Guess what- most people still don't give a shit. Most of the TVs still do 1080P tops. And even at 4K you're using like 25-35M a set. Even if you add 10 TVs in the house all streaming 4K at once, you'd still only be using a few hundred megs of bandwidth.

Are you channeling elon musk or something?

Lol, nope.

Nobody is going to pay extra for it, because they simply don't need it. They're going to get a 24 or 48 port gig switches and run that for the next 10-15+ years easily.

The only way 10G will show up over copper is if the port cost comes way, way down, and everything is fully forward and reverse compatible. (it currently isn't. )

Of course not, but most people are "average" though, One might argue, though, having a house with even a half dozen ethernet drops in it these days, is well above
average, but that STILL doesn't mean they need serious bandwidth. The cabling is for reliability more than anything else. You could put FE switches in most of these
homes and nobody would notice.. Not now, not even a few years from now.

I agree conduits and pathways for cabling are good things, if you can pull it off. Then you can just change shit if you really need to.

Only if an really cool application exists that requires it, or I end up getting it for "free". Because I ain't going to be busting my ass running new cabling for it, and neither will most
other people.

-Mike

 

Do we know the use case for this network? I'm sitting here wondering why a young person would/should spend potentially thousands of dollars for running cable and putting in jacks in this day and time?

I'm using Google's home mesh wifi router set. It works beautifully.

Google Wifi - Mesh Wi-Fi Router - Google Store

Minimal wires required. Coverage all over the house. Simple and inexpensive.

YMMV

 

Because WiFi sucks and you need the cabling to support APs and other devices. It won't cost thousands, either. Especially if the drops are just run and the only terminated as needed. The bathroom sink will
probably cost more to install than all the ethernet in the house will.

Then whenever that WiFi spec changes (or the devices fail, and they will) you can just easily pop the new ones in.

I guess I'm old school and don't trust that stuff, I don't see how running a whole bunch of APs that chat/repeat with each other over RF can possibly be good. Maybe I am wrong and Google has figured it out. .

Admittedly a lot of it is just crap APs hardware etc. The comcast and verizon kitchen sink WiFi devices being the worst. It doesn't take much for those stupid things to go into a coma and either "lose a band" just hang, or
any other number of failures Strangely enough though the hardwired side of the devices never or rarely dies. I get calls from skinflints who can't seem to remember that hard cycling their router is the way to fix the
problem. They also don't like me telling them "Well, if you want to spend the money, we can make this happen 95% less" but most don't want to. So they just sit there and suffer with this crap..



I really just want to take a whole bunch of these (maybe 100 or so) and like duct tape them together in a huge log and just machine gun the piss out of them.

Then again on the other hand I've seen enterprise grade crap fail randomly, too. Like I have 3 big buildings worth of enterprise cisco WAPs and the WiFi usually works 98% of the time in these buildings. It's still not nearly as reliable as the hard cable plant is though.

II will admit that I am just biased against wireless crap. It's great at being convenient. It completely sucks at everything else. It's also a pain in the ass to try to explain to a user or customer about why their WiFi sucks today but seemingly it was fine yesterday. Someone can literally move a file cabinet a couple of inches and throw the entire thing off.

Also when I arrange to have hardline ethernet installed I never get a callback about that stuff. It just works. And keeps working.

I also love using other commercial enterprise WAP systems where you can associate with the AP and then you get redirected to a login page or whatever in a "garden" but then the auth server they have is broken. So while their wireless net technically isn't down, the portal that authenticates the users is down.....


-Mike

 

That's where I was going, setting up a Ubiquiti UniFi network and a couple of hard wired Ethernet port in main rooms. Again I wanted something simple that a normal smart person can run. I just didn't know how to plan for the UniFi installs but I guess you run a cat 6 cable to a box in the ceiling. I figured two UniFi units one on each floor.

 

Check out Google's mesh wifi routers. Hard wire the master device to the Verizon/Comcast home router and the rest of them work on WiFi. it just works. I bought a 3 pack and the house is well covered with wifi, including the back deck.

 

I'm seriously considering this as an alternative to having someone run wire in a log-cabin style home we're purchasing. I'm a bit worried about gaming and 4K streaming though...

 

A few WAPs, a switch, a router, a modem. Dual data drops in the rooms is smart- extras in bedrooms will save you a headache. WAPs that support POE either come with a power injector or get a switch that has POE built in. Really not much to it.

 

What do you use your internet for? There's no comparison between the quality and reliability of wired vs WiFi. Google isn't doing anything magical with their router that's going to suddenly improve the devices that connect to it.

 

Gaming I'd suggest wired. I don't seem to have any issues streaming video at all at a variety of formats.

 

So I know very little about this, but did get a bit of an education today about cat 6 cable. I was unaware that the geometry of the wire is critical. No plastic wire ties, no sharp turns and the jacket of the wire should be as close to the termination point as possible. Also, proximity to florescent lights etc can have an impact.
We just built a new suite of offices and showroom and our IT guy was telling me what a shitty job the electrician did and why he insisted on the Belkin cable.

 

IT guy was just mad he didn't get the chance to squeeze you for the cake and hack your cabling in himself. Don't be fooled by what others tell you unless they are an engineer a basic tech doesn't really know too much about the cable or it's limits they usually base it what they were told. Unless he actually does a full blown test showing the discrepancies of the cabling it's all BS and chances are you'd never now the difference if there was..

 

Run the cat6 like I mentioned to ceiling spots where convenient and centrally located. If the house layout is weird, then sure add an extra... too many APs is bad too though Becuse of interference. You can adjust the power and channel so they don’t overlap but you only have so many non overlapping bands so more than 3 APs and you’ll have some. how much bandwidth do you really need in a dining room or laundry? Put the main floor one between the kitchen and main living area. Make sure they can cover the front and back doors if you plan on using a camera doorbell like ring.

I have 1 ubiquiti AP on each floor and one in the garage. I have great signal in every corner of my house and the front porch and back deck/patio.

Run Cat6 to the corners of your house for cameras.

 

Reminds me of Bill Gates saying noone would ever need more than 640k of memory or Ken Olsen saying people would not have any need/use for computers in the home.

 

The difference is when those proclamations were made the fundamental nature of computing was changing pretty rapidly, on a regular basis. Now not so much.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely. Or rather, it's unlikely that it'll be needed. I have no doubt that it might trickle into consumer grade network hardware in the
future. Everyone wants to put fancy 10G stickers on their box or whatever. Still doesn't mean it'll actually be needed, or even really utilized by most.

-Mike

 

I did my whole house with UniFi gear, it is the best stuff I have ever used, nothing else has come close. For WiFi I have two of the AC PRO access points, one upstairs second floor and one on the first floor, mounted in the ceilings. They provide fantastic coverage even outside. They act as a meshed network, so as you move around your device is switched to the one that has the best signal, seamlessly. It appears as one wireless network everywhere. I stream 4k movies wireless to one TV that is difficult to run a hard line, using this gear (Xfinity into the house) and never even a stutter.

For wiring, put two Cat6 lines to each room location where you need them going to a patch panel (like desk location, or TV location, etc), then patch to the Ubiquity managed switch, which is connected to the security gateway, which is connected to the WAN (your cable box). So two lines to the TV Locations, Desk/PC Locations, and two lines in the ceiling where you will mount the wireless access points. For entertainment centers, I put a decent small local switch (fed by one Cat6 from the main switch) and feed all of the AV equipment from the local switch in the AV setup (or behind the tv), $30 switch like a DLink or similar. And for those who tell me you don't need a managed switch for the main house switch, it is way worth it in the ubiquiti ecosystem as the degree of automation for setup and managing is just out of this world. Doubly true if building a house with the infrastructure.

The wireless access points are powered through POE, or power over ethernet. This can get tricky, so stick with the same manufacturer gear. The ubiquiti powered switches will sense what you have and auto configure to power the access point, it really doesn't get any easier. In addition, with a couple of mouse clicks, you can set up a visitor WIFI setup on a different subnet with a different password that is segregated from your home network. Ubiquiti provides Unifi software, which is very easy to use and very good. This setup you can manage from your PC very easily, even if you are not a network expert. You pretty much get pro level hardware and performance with little input needed from the user. I don't necessarily agree that everything needs to be in conduit (which I would tend to want to do more for AV cables than Ethernet), maybe at strategic locations, but it is typically wired in when doing the electrical work. As long as they test the cables after termination, I doubt you would have too many issues, that is why you always run 2.

Here is the gear you would need to cover a house. If 24 ports isn't enough, get two 24 port switches, or a 24 and a 12

Switch with POE+ (will power Wireless Access Points)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OJZUQ24/ref=psdc_281414_rv_t1_B01DKXT4CI

Security Gateway
https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Uni..._rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=DBTX72GZHQ42QMSSXWCP

WiFi Access Points (2-4 depending on the house), you can't have too many as they mesh, there are good instructions on the Ubiquiti site for planning this out.
https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Net..._rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=J2A5S0QGHX19RJMQ2GBX

 

Just a point of clarification, the Ubiquiti access points automatically adjust channels so they don't step all over each other, so interference shouldn't be an issue.

 

At the risk of agreeing with watchman, your IT guy might be blowing smoke, unless there's something aesthetically bad about the install (like crooked plates, or jacks being put in upside down, or shoddy installs like manually crimped ends not in a patch panel) how is he going to know? Usually it takes quite a bit of effort to actually ruin a cable pull. And poorly installed circuits are usually self diagnostic- they just don't work.

Back when I actually used to install runs of ethernet cabling on a more regular basis (lots of 5, and 5e) I never had a run that was punched in correctly within the typical distance limit (100M) that didn't work right.

Also, short run lengths hides a lot of sins. On short runs you could strap those things to a light ballast and it won't care. I'm being facetious obviously, but I've seen stuff work that "wasn't supposed to". And even passed noise checks on a cable tester, etc.

-Mike