I have finally renovated my home network

Joined
Dec 7, 2012
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3,386
Moved into our house in late 2019. As soon as I moved in, I really wanted to cable the whole place and do a nice home network setup. I quickly learned that after you buy a house, things can take time. So for the past couple of years, up until recently, I've been living with a working, but half-baked solution. My main ISP feed comes into my basement, and my Home Office in on the 2nd floor of my house.

So what I had, was the RG6 for my Spectrum broadband coming into my basement. From there, I had the Spectrum modem connected to a Powerline Ethernet adapter. That, through the wiring of the house, was bringing the WAN to a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X in my office. My EdgeRouter X had an uplink to a 24 port Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch Lite. Also, in this upstairs office was a Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC Long Range. In the living room behind my TV was another Long Range UniFi AP AC wirelessly uplinking to the Office AP.

This setup for the couple years worked OK. The WiFi would always drop here and there -- and not a signal strength drop, a 'no traffic passing' type of drop. I could only ever get about 50-60Mbps out of the Powerline Ethernet adapters -- which was pretty respectable considering the length of Romex they're going through. So it was no doubt time to for something better.

I saw a guy on Facebook selling brand new Aruba Instant On 1930 switches. An 8-port PoE and a 24-port PoE. We worked out a great deal and the fun began. I figured if I could mount the 8-port in my upstairs attic and use the attic as a distribution point for the upstairs, that would serve me well. In addition to my office upstairs, I have one other bedroom. We plan to eventually put an addition on upstairs above other parts of the house and make that our bedroom. Presently the attic is pretty center of the house.

Now my thoughts turned to uplinking the upstairs switch. I had thought about some CAT6/6A runs, but as we plan to be here for a long time, I wanted something as future proof as possible. I settled on Single-Mode Fiber. I ran 4 individual SMF LC to LC fiber cables (I used simplex as I had some spots where it could be small). I found a cavity that just so happened to go pretty straight up from my basement to the floor/wall of the upstairs attic. I ran 4 (2 fiber runs) for future expandability and in-case anything happens to the main one. I kept the majority of the fiber 'slack' in the basement as someday I'm sure I'll have my main DEMARC and server equipment in a rack in the basement. Fiber was cheap and I figure this will do me well for the future. If SMF can hit 10-40-100GB speeds now, that should surely do well down the road.

So now my setup consists of such. RG6 in from the street into an Arris Surfboard SB8200 DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem, that connected to a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP via a 1ft CAT6 patch cable. A 1GB FS.com SMF LC transceiver with (2) x LC to LC SMF Simplex cables ran up to the upstairs attic. Then in the attic, both fiber runs go into LC to LC keystones. Then a 1ft LC to LC SMF patch cable goes into another 1GB FS.com SMF LC transceiver in one of the SFP ports of the 8-port Aruba 1930 switch. The office and upstairs bedrooms are cabled with CAT6 and all drops turned up physically. Also, I have two CAT6 runs going from the patch panel to a single-gang box with two drops for an Aruba Instant On AP22 WiFi 6 access point. Love the Aruba Instant On access points, they're great.

In my office, one drop feeds my 24-port Aruba 1930 switch which my PowerEdge T320 VMware environment sits along with my MbP and my Ryzen desktop, printer, NAS for Veeam backups, etc.

While I am feeding this 24-port switch, somewhat strange, it works for now as this office up-here isn't permanent. Some day the 24-port will be feeding the lowly 8-port guy.

Down the road I also plan to have some PoE cameras off of the 8-port in the attic. Just last week I added a SiliconDust HDHomeRun and an antenna in the attic. Things are so convenient when you have the switch and ability to link it up.

Overall I had a lot of fun and I'm stoked I can get my full 230Mbps down in my office and throughout the house. I still love my Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, but I can't stand behind the UniFi APs anymore, the Instant on Arubas have blown them out of the water for performance and reliability. The UniFi controller too is at times too confusing between the old and new UI and what appears to be feature depreciation between controller versions. Good hardware, but needs more consistency in the software IMO.

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Nice.

I ran Ethernet 10 years ago with 20 drops which was best move. Cheap Electrician thought I was crazy. Made hookup a mesh properly dead easy with our Google Wifi with 4 pucks.
 
I am not familiar with the Aruba AP’s. Do they support Mesh networking? If so do they need an external controller?

I run Opnsense on a PC as my Firewall & router, with a single wireless AP. The Wi-Fi signal is marginal in a few areas and I have been considering mesh setup.
 
I am not familiar with the Aruba AP’s. Do they support Mesh networking? If so do they need an external controller?

I run Opnsense on a PC as my Firewall & router, with a single wireless AP. The Wi-Fi signal is marginal in a few areas and I have been considering mesh setup.
Yes they mesh, no they don't require a controller. The older Instant series had built-in controllers and were managed with a webUI. You would cluster/mesh them using that interface. The new ones, InstantON, use an app and they are wickedly easy to setup, though I expect under the hood, the operation is probably similar if not totally the same.
 
Yes they mesh, no they don't require a controller. The older Instant series had built-in controllers and were managed with a webUI. You would cluster/mesh them using that interface. The new ones, InstantON, use an app and they are wickedly easy to setup, though I expect under the hood, the operation is probably similar if not totally the same.
Yeah spot on. They are really good devices for the price. I know some may not care for the fact that the controller is app/cloud managed, but they have been nothing but reliable and strong performers. I have one AP22 in my attic blanketing my 1500 ft/sq house and the performance has been excellent. I have a couple areas where the iPhone shows 1-less bar of WiFi signal, but the throughput and performance is no different. I've learned that 'bars' are very inaccurate over the years and that your only true measurement is RSSI. Additionally, a lower than 'top-tier' RSSI doesn't mean it won't work well.
 
Yeah spot on. They are really good devices for the price. I know some may not care for the fact that the controller is app/cloud managed, but they have been nothing but reliable and strong performers. I have one AP22 in my attic blanketing my 1500 ft/sq house and the performance has been excellent. I have a couple areas where the iPhone shows 1-less bar of WiFi signal, but the throughput and performance is no different. I've learned that 'bars' are very inaccurate over the years and that your only true measurement is RSSI. Additionally, a lower than 'top-tier' RSSI doesn't mean it won't work well.

Thank you for the information. I found a great deal on some open box Aruba AP15's and a POE switch, just hooked it all up. Very easy setup with the app, and great performance. I plan to pull some cable out to my workshop 100' away and install another AP out there as well.
 
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