Scenario 2 is more accurate for BOTH cases, but not because you used a switch. Scenario 1 is false.

It’s the ISP provided speed that is the limited resource. You have 100 Mbps of Internet service, which can be consumed by any single connection. If multiple connections want to use Internet, that speed gets split up between all the devices trying to use it simultaneously.

It does not have to be in equal pieces. If one connection only wants 20 Mbps of Internet, another connection can use the other 80 Mbps remaining.

Using a switch does not affect the consumption of Internet from devices unless the switch port speed itself is lower than your maximum ISP speed. This isn’t true in your example.

Yo man,

This is your third post about you friggin Amazon gift card. Enough already. Respect the sub.

Replacing or buying your own router is not going to help you game. You need a different method to connect, because if you could wire in with Ethernet, you would have already done so, and probably not be complaining.

People telling you to buy an Ethernet cable are on the right path, but if you really live in a house with 8 people, you won’t get away with laying that cable across the floors.

Try Powerline Adapters. It uses your power outlets to form a wired connection to your current router. They have a bad reputation, but sometimes the work surprisingly well. Just keep in mind that gaming doesn’t need a lot of speed, just good latency. Powerline can often give you much better latency than crowded WiFi with 8 people on it.

And guess what? They are $49.99:

https://www.amazon.com/Powerline-Ethernet-Adapter-Extender-TP-Link/dp/B084CZMYNM/

Just return them if they aren’t good for your room.

Use free shipping from Amazon.

Yes, it’s worth moving from cable to fiber. I’d pay a premium to do so, but it’s often cheaper.

You didn’t specify your fiber provider, but in most cases, they will provide you with an ONT during installation, which is something that converts a fiber connection into an Ethernet connection. They also usually provide some sort of gateway or router too, but that can either be optional or required from them, depending on the ISP. You just need to connect this ONT directly to your existing router, or put their required gateway into “Bridge Mode” or “Passthrough Mode” first and connect that to your existing router.

Either way you usually get a choice to where they put the ONT / gateway. In your case, you can have them install this right where your modem (and router) is at today, right next to each other. As long as that area is accessible, they can probably use the same hole as your coax coming from the outside into your basement.

It’s very likely the install will mean no changes for your network at all, other than retiring the coax and modem, and now using their ONT. If they require use of their gateway, then just put it into Bridge Mode as already stated. Just think of the ONT as your new modem for fiber.

Just be present during install, and show them where you have things right now, and the installer will work with you to put it in a good spot.

You’d do better by finding out more information about your Mexico ISP and what are their requirements than asking here. Find out if you’re required to use their gateway, how that gateway is connected, and whether or not the gateway can be put into “Bridge Mode” or “Passthrough Mode” to support your own router.

Most likely your Cisco is all you need if the gateway can be put into Bridge Mode, OR you have fiber service with an ONT and no requirements to use their gateway (just return it to them). But checking with the ISP is easier than us guessing what is needed from them.

Keep the switch and add a dedicated Access Point in your office to give you a new strong source of WiFi in that area. The Access Point I recommend for such scenarios s the Ubiquiti U6 Lite or Pro.

You can also use any off-the-shelf, all-in-one router like an ASUS or Netgear to do the same thing. Just put this router into “Access Point Mode” according to its manual. You can either just attach it to your current switch, or use the router’s 4 built in LAN ports as a switch and then use your existing switch elsewhere.

Hey bud,

If your PS is going to be wired in, you can get away with just about anything for hardware.

First, find out what ISP you’ll be subscribing to. You never mentioned if you’re getting Fiber or Cable Internet, so find out. Next see what hardware they provide with your Internet plan, and, importantly, see if they let you use it for free, or if there is an additional monthly charge to use their hardware. If there is a monthly fee, prepare to spend some money to buy your own hardware. It’s worth buying your own, as it saves you a lot of money in less than a year.

If they don’t charge, or let you use it free for the first year or more, then try using what they give you while it’s free. As long as your PS is wired in, anything they give you will be fine. If WiFi is too weak, then reevaluate and prepare to spend some money to fix it.

One of the benefits of living alone is that you completely control Internet usage. With that in mind you can get the lowest cost ISP speed and easily game on it if it’s not DSL. You could get away with a Internet package as low as 25 Mbps Download and 5 Mbps Upload and be fine as one person living alone. Most ISPs don’t even go that low. Starter packages usually start at 100/10 speeds, which is easily more than enough for one person, by a lot. Just plan your game downloads Intelligently, because it’ll take a little while. But even at 25/5, you can game and watch 4K movies in the background with no problems at all.

And remember, upgrading speeds is just a short phone call or online order, and it upgrades instantaneously. So start with the lowest package at least 25/5, and you can always upgrade later if it’s not enough.

Also, look into the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which every ISP participates in. It’ll give you $30 a month off your ISP bill, and is incredibly easy to apply for and receive. It’s not just for low income people; plenty of students, middle class families with a lot of kids, seniors, and guy getting started like you qualify. You can do it all online with your chosen ISP.

If you need or want your own router, right now, the very good, mid-tier ASUS AX68u is on sale for $99. That’s a steal, usually $130:

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-WiFi-Router-RT-AX68U-Compatible/dp/B08S7CK5T5?th=1

But see if you get free hardware with your ISP.

The Netgear router wifi will only recognise the devices that are hooked up to it, meaning all wired devices in other rooms will not be picked up in same LAN.

You can fix this by putting the Netgear into Access Point Mode, and letting the ISP AIO act as the only router. You can even turn the AIO router’s WiFi back on, even if it’s poop, and everything connected to either the AIO or the Netgear will be on the same network, wired or wireless.

But something tells me you’d rather buy new stuff anyway, because it’s more exciting.

Because of the small form factor, the EdgeRouter X is a practical choice. It can do 1 Gig total, meaning 1 Gig download, or 1 Gig upload, but not 1 Gig in both directions simultaneously. If you wanted to try maxxing it out in both directions, it’d do 500 Mbps each way simultaneously - thus 1 Gig Total. It’s rare that you need 1 Gig in both directions simultaneously though. It’s usually one way or the other, so the ERX is pretty good in real world usage. I have one for my 1000/1000 Google fiber line, and I extremely rarely get bottlenecked by the ERX. I don’t BitTorrent though.

You need to enable Hardware NAT to hit 1 Gig on the ERX, which takes two seconds, just Google how to do it.

You will drop down a lot of throughput if you enable QoS or any kind of IDS / IPS. QoS should be unnecessary with a 1 Gig symmetrical line. Just manage your clients usage so nothing saturates the line. IDS / IPS is a waste of time and resources on a Home Network, IMHO. There is just a total and complete lack of history that shows home networks are being targeted for hacking.

So your plan to put the AIO into modem only mode, and then connect it to the ERX is good so far.

Then, My List would be:

EdgeRouter X, $60

Ubiquiti Switch 8 Lite PoE, $110

2x U6 Pro, $160 each, $320

That’s $490, under budget.

If you need 3 APs, exchange the 2x U6 Pros with 3x U6 Lites, $300. Total would be $470 with Lites, but 5 GHz WiFimight be under 500 Mbps, though it would be close, depending on the client and positioning.

$2 a foot? You’re hired! I’ll even fly you in at that price.

This is charity level pricing.

Replacing one mesh system with another rarely changes the effective range. All home equipment has a cap on transmission power by law, and just about every one of them uses this max limit, as it’s very low and extremely easy to accomplish by any manufacturer. They also often use the same chipsets. They do often have different antenna patterns, so you will see some differences here and there, but it will not be drastic.

Rather, you should experiment with the placement of your Orbi nodes. Place them closer together than you might think. Do not place a node directly in a dead spot, but rather in between the dead spot and your main Orbi router. A good strategy is to place the secondary node in the center of your house on the same floor as your main Orbi, or on a different floor, but directly above or below your main Orbi. Often, just changing the angle of attack is enough to change a dead spot into a usable one.

If you’re using wireless backhaul, try reducing the number of nodes to the minimum. Most houses only need two Orbi units at most, three for unusually large or weirdly shaped houses.

6 GHz actually has worse wall and floor penetration than 5 or 2.4 GHz, so that won’t help you.

Finally, look carefully to see if you can potentially wire in some of your Orbis. If you have coaxial cable or old phone lines, they can often be converted to Ethernet. Doing so will allow you to wire in Orbis in many locations, giving you excellent WiFi coverage.

Your plan should work. MoCA is a great alternative. Those GoCoax Adapters are what I’ve used and recommend the most.

You need to either get a MoCA PoE Filter and connect it to the feed line coming from your ISP if you use cable Internet, or disconnect the feed line from any cable splitter if you’re using fiber. All coax splitters between the adapters need to be MoCA compatible.

Also note that you can attach a switch to any MoCA Adapter in order to wire in multiple devices in the MoCA locations. Wiring in devices, especially in the office, gives them the most reliable results, and also unburdens your WiFi, which helps devices using WiFi.

As for an Access Point recommendation, I generally recommend either a Ubiquiti U6 Lite or U6 Pro if you want to spend a bit more and want a dedicated Access Point. But anything can work as an AP these days: my Ubiquiti recommendations, or another router set to Access Point Mode, or even a single mesh node set to Access Point Mode. It’s not difficult or very different using any of these as a new Access Point.

Travel routers are built for this. One of the leading companies in travel routers is GL.iNet, go look at their product line.

Be happy for those pink cables.

Right now, you got your modem/router in the Family Room, and it’s doing well covering the first floor. You also have a CAT5e Family Room pink cables there too. Logically it should be right next to your router.

All you need to do is plug one of your 4 LAN ports on your router into the Family Room CAT5e. This connection then leads back into your wiring cabinet (the picture you provided).

Second, buy a small switch, and install it into that cabinet. A 5 port or 8 port switch will do, as you only have a few pink cables. Then plug in the CAT5e from the Family Room, Room Room, and Master Bedroom into that switch. You can leave the Demarc cable unplugged, because that cable probably goes outside.

Having gotten this far, your Room Room and Master Bedroom Ethernet ports (RJ45) are now active and are a part of your network and have Internet flowing in their veins.

So you can now attach other switches to these active Ethernet ports and connect wired devices to them. You can also connect an Access Point (or two!) to these connections to give you a new source for WiFi coverage. If you give this Access Point the same WiFi SSID and password as your current Netgear, then devices can potentially “roam” between them when moving from one floor to another.

Hopefully the Master Bedroom or Room Room is upstairs, and can thus cover the second floor.

Instead of buying a separate switch and Access Point for your new connection, sometimes it’s simpler to just buy another router and set it into “Access Point Mode”, which is like a switch and WiFi Access Point combined into one. Any router can do this. This sub favors buying a separate switch and dedicated Access Point, but for a simple setup, I don’t mind just getting a second router and using that instead.

So you need some Ethernet cables, at least one switch for the cabinet, maybe one or two switches for the other rooms, maybe one or two dedicated Access Points for new WiFi, OR maybe one or two additional routers set to “Access Point Mode” to act as both a switch and an Access Point.

With your setup, if two devices want to communicate, and their ports and the ports on the switches they connect to all supports 10G, then they’ll communicate at 10G.

If any of the ports is 1G, even if every other port is 10G, it’ll drop down to 1G for that particular communication pathway. That drop down does not “spread” to other pathways.

Having a 1G device plugged into a 10G switch does NOT affect anything else on that switch. Each connection has the “right” to connect at 10G as long as everything along the communication pathway supports it, and is not affected by other concurrent connections that are happening alongside it. Switches can compartmentalize each connection as its own.

Get a Protectli box with a very good CPU, 4 Ethernet ports, install OPNSense, and have at it.

I’m surprised the UDM Pro cannot route 2x 1 Gbps on two WANs. I thought it was rated higher than that.

Your test might be running into the 1 Gbps limit backplane problem on the built in switch for UDM Pros.

Maybe he’s just testing something temporarily. Like something he bought is having trouble connecting, probably because he’s using the same SSID for 2.4 and 5 GHz, but the shitty IoT device can’t handle that. So he’s messing around, trying to get it to connect.

Unless he’s a good friend, I’d just ignore it. You make a comment to the typical person about his WiFi, and he’ll become super paranoid about why you even noticed.

Then we’ll get a post on this sub from him on how his “creepy neighbor” is hacking his hidden SSID and 60 key password. And now his IoT lightbulbs are now dimming on their own.

And so goes the flow of this sub.

The bitrate of 4K from streaming services like Disney and Netflix is much, much lower than your UHD Blu-ray rips. They recommend having a 16-25 Mbps connection to stream 4K, but the average bitrate is even lower. It’s closer to 6-8 Mbits. They just recommend a higher Internet connection because of how streaming works (small bursts of higher rates with a lot of idle time in between).

You can calculate it accurately by just downloading the movie (if the streamer lets you, like premium subscriptions do) to see the file size, and then dividing that size by the length of the movie in seconds. That will give you the average bits per second by definition. You’ll be surprised how low it is, because streamers use compression, while “pure” UHD Blu-ray avoids compression to satisfy purists.

As to how much data a streamer uses, it’s immense. It’s a huge chunk of the data on the Internet at any given time, with estimates in 40-60% range for all the streamers in aggregate. Look into “Content Delivery Networks” (CDNs) to see how it’s delivered on a global scale. It’s actually very impressive.

There is no set answer, because everyone’s environment is different. You’ll just need to test it for yourself and see.

First, do speed tests with and without the secondary mesh node. Run a dozen in each configuration to get a usable sample size. Use different speed test sites too.

Then do a continuous ping test to your Default Gateway (your router’s LAN address, for example 192.168.1.1 is common, but just check) with and without the secondary mesh node. Run that test for an hour each or more during busy network times, like in the evenings. Compare the results.

Then see which you prefer.

The placement of your mesh nodes, test computer, how busy your WiFi is in general, and layout of your home will determine test results. So there is no set answer.

I will say that, with wireless backhaul, you should just use the least number of nodes you need for full coverage. Four seems excessive. Most homes need only two mesh units to cover everything, three for bigger or unusually shaped houses.

Fooling someone into installing malware is far, far more effective than someone trying to penetrate your firewall with a frontal attack, or brute forcing passwords, or faking certificates, man in the middle, or anything “hacking”.

Ransomware, one of the proven successful cyber attacks, is pretty much just trying to get a secretary to click on an email attachment that is malevolent. Or faking an ID badge or uniform and just walking into a company and installing ransomware off of a USB drive. Or promising you a new iPhone if you just install this little file to verify you’ve won. Or pretending to be the IT department and asking someone for their passwords.

Social Engineering has always been magnitudes easier to do than any kind of “using computers to break into other computers” that we normally think of when “hacking” is mentioned.

Installing pirated games is a known and common tactic for getting malware behind your firewall, no direct hacking needed. Just set the bait, and the fish hook themselves.

Just having a basic firewall, which all routers provide, has proven to be enough for home users. Whether it’s because no one cares to even hack a home user unless the door is wide open (because he’s worthless), or a basic firewall has proven very difficult to bypass through “frontal attack” means, regardless of the reason, home users just aren’t being hacked to any significant, measurable degree. If they were, it’d be the central focus of every government and law enforcement agency because of all the money, and political motivation of the outraged people, to make it stop.

Instead, we have almost literally everyone on the planet using the Internet to move / trade large amounts of money every second of every day. There isn’t even rumors about anyone we know getting hacked and robbed that way, because Social Media would explode with those kinds of legitimate stories. Unless you are a big or key technology corporation or a government, you simply aren’t worth any real skilled hackers time at all, and that’s the truth of it.

If you’re getting a fiber plan, you don’t need a cable modem at all. Save that money. You just need a router of some sort.

1500 sq ft can usually be covered with just one router usually, depending on the layout of your home. If your townhouse is tall and thin, then where your ISP connection is located will determine if you can just use one router, or if you need more coverage.

Before committing to any system, I’d look at what kind of wiring is already included in the house. Often, coaxial cable (using MoCA Adapters) or old telephone wiring can be converted to Ethernet. If this is possible, it not only reduces the need for WiFi (perhaps you can cover everything with one router and 2.4GHz WiFi in the extreme corners because everything important and demanding is now wired in, so that’s good enough), but also opens your choices up tremendously on what system to buy into not just Orbi.

If you or your partner already have a router from your past home, consider using it for the first month until you evaluate your wiring situation correctly, and then make a hardware choice.

You should look at the postings on this sub. Many (especially ones with pictures) are all about converting coaxial cable into Ethernet, or rewiring old phone lines into Ethernet. Read some of those and you’ll start to see a lot of possibilities for your home network.

It’s a sophistry to geoblock China on security grounds and recommend and upvotes that advice, but then recommend Chinese hardware like TP Link Omada for the bedrock hardware for your home network. Yet I see TP Link Deco and Omada recommended on here every day, and upvoted into positive numbers too.

How could you possibly trust that geoblocking on Chinese hardware even works on their hardware? They get firmware updates from servers hosted in the USA, which in turn get firmware images from China. Obviously TP Link servers in the U.S. don’t block China. So how effective is geoblocking if you went ahead and bought your hardware from a Chinese controlled company to save $100?

Same goes for Chinese security cameras. Everyone talks about using VLANs to isolate them, so their being compromised will not “spread” to the rest of your network. But if a compromised Chinese camera has the ability to crack the “root” account on Linux, Android, and IOS, and the “Administrator” account on Windows if left on the same VLAN, then why would it have any difficulty at all cracking the “admin” account on your router, rendering VLAN separation useless? What makes the router OS so much more resistant to takeover from that compromised IoT device versus other OSes?

It’s the logic gymnastics that “security experts” on here must do to justify geoblocking China, but then recommending (or upvoting) TP Link Deco and Omada to save $100 that’s hard to take seriously. Are they a threat or not? If so, how can you allow the recommendation of China owned company hardware to users with a straight face? Where is the precaution now?

What about smartphones? Smartphones all have GPS tracking, a camera, a microphone, and an Internet connection that’s pretty much always on. They are the ultimate spying device that everyone carries voluntarily, even after experiencing events like talking about a certain product on the phone to your mother, and getting ads for that exact product as embedded ads hours later.

We might trust Alphabet and Apple not to sell our information to China and Russia directly, as they actually want to comply with Western laws. But isn’t it also logical to believe that Alphabet and Apple sell personalized ad information to “reputable” buyers, who in turn sell it to a company that is degree less reputable, who in turn sells it to another company that’s two degrees less reputable, and so on, until it gets to a seller that doesn’t discriminate against any buyers, or are a front for the Chinese and Russian government itself?

They might not even need to buy this information through layers of middle men. TikTok has over 100 Million users in the US, mostly as an App on smartphones. TikTok is a Chinese owned company, and are very much a target for a complete banning by the U.S. government, but not quite there yet for everyone else (maybe due to foreign lobbying efforts?). Even with all these warning signs, 100 Million US users do not care or take it seriously, and film you and your family on their App behind your geoblocking firewall.

What about hostile governments using services that are completely legal in the U.S. directly? The same Intelligence agencies that recommend you geoblock Chinese inbound and outbound traffic have also warned that China and Russia use platforms like Facebook, X / Twitter, Instagram, and even Reddit as giant Propaganda and misinformation machines to influence politics and thinking in the West. Even now, these foreign influences still propagate unchecked, with only token “moderation” attempts to combat it (and how do we know we can trust these moderators?). The EU is currently threatening to de- platform X because of lax moderation efforts, right now, in real time.

So go ahead and geoblock China and the rest of the evil countries if it makes you feel better. But it’s as effective as trying to keep your kid from looking at porn by blocking his MAC Address on your home network. There are so many other ways for access that you do not control that your single act of defiance is essentially meaningless in the bigger picture. Your personal information has already been packaged and sold to every available buyer, because we were all asleep at the wheel at the dawn of Social Media and smartphones, and did not control that information at all. Anyone and Everyone with an App or cookies were tracking and packaging you. Only recently have smartphone OSes begun to lock down your personal information, but it’s far too little a decade too late.

The toothpaste is out of the tube.