Hi there good folk,

The new place i am moving into has the internet come into the house on the other side of where I am planning to have my office + my NAS(which needs ethernet). I much prefer having my stuff connected through ethernet, but not sure what do now, as I cant really run cables across the house. Am also renting the place so cant drill holes in walls etc… As far as I know, there are two ways for me to get ethernet in my office:

  1. COAX to POE: The place does not have ethernet ports in the walls either, but it does have some wallmounted coax sockets. Is it worth looking into coax to poe adapters for either end of the sockets? Not sure how much of a fan I am of this due to the amount of cables this ends up being.

  2. The other way would be to have a WiFi-extender in my office, but i guess this will sacrafice some more speed than the other solution(?). This way I would have a small switch connected to the extender which will get me some more ports too.

I am planning on buying into the Unifi prodcuts, specifically the Unifi Express device as a router. While expensive, I love the polish and feature set and control it brings. What other Unifi devices should I get into, considering probably wont be able to use PoE?

Lemmy know your thoughts, opinions and the rest - am open for all sorts of solutions!

  • Sips'@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Thanks for the write up! 🙌

    I will likely go for either option 1 or 3. I need to reevaluate wether cable is possible or not. If not then I’ll go with a mesh. Only “problem” with mesh is that I really wanted to buy into the unifi ecosystem, but their mesh stuff is above my budget. Bit maybe I could just get the unifi express and pair that with another branded mesh system? The place is only 85 square metres, but on two floors. My office is ofcourse furthest away from where the modem comes into the house. Anyway, I will need to evaluate again when I’m there to see if it’s possible or not to run cables. Thanks again for detailed response 💛

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.

      With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.

      MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.

      However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.

      Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.

      Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.

      There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.

      Good luck.

      • Sips'@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Woah I wish I had the same knowledge you do about networking haha! Taking notes here that’s for sure, thanks for the input!

        • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.

          I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.

          So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.