Basic Home Network Advice

siross

Hi all,

We're about to move in to our new home after having some work done. Originally my main concern was to get reliable ethernet connections to both TV areas of the house, the open plan room and the cinema room.

The router connection is in the cinema room which makes it easy, I have then got ethenet cable routed to the open plan room. Both of these rooms will have a gigabit switch handling multiple devices.

However, I have 2 more considerations:

1) I've just ordered a BT Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi system to provide seemless Wi-Fi throughout the house. I've got the 3 pack system which is probably overkill but it was a great offer! I was planning on having these:
- Directly connected to switch 2 in the open plan room
- Connected by powerline adapter in the hallway and upstairs

2) I also want to have a play around with CCTV cameras and have ordered a couple of Amazon cameras to have a mess about with. These will be wired in the loft space above the garage, therefore the garage needs a reliable internet signal for this to work properly. I was thinking of having a powerline adapter feeding a switch for ease?

I've made a rudimentary diagram below:
                                                                               

My ultimate question being, would this work?
I know there are better ways of doing it, e.g. wiring ethernet everywhere but at this point that's not an option unfortunately so I'm looking at the easiest way of getting a reliable connection.

Thanks guys!

siross

Actually, I'm not sure the powerline adapter upstairs would work, the upstairs and downstairs sockets are on a different ring circuits so won't work?

mickevh

That shouldn't make any difference - IIRC there's nothing apart from a fuse/breaker between the buzz-bar in the consumer unit and the circuits. It's things like the size of the circuit and the intrinsic noise on the mains that makes the biggest difference, and no-one can predict that for any given use case. You probably will just have to suck it and see.

siross

Oh really? That's good to know.

Presumably powerline adaptors would be better than letting the BT Discs communicate via wifi?

mickevh

For full disclosure, I should probably add that I am an IT professional and not an electrical engineer.

It's much the same deal for Wi-Fi - it's fickel and no-one can predict any use case with absolute confidence. Sometimes when deploying Wi-Fi solutions, even some of the best experts with the best survey techniques and equipment, find strange things happen that we have to "cope with" retrospectively (usually by adding in additional AP.)

The advantage of using powerline over Wi-Fi, is that it means there's less air-time contention for the remaining Wi-Fi devices meaning they can potentially achieve higher throughput.

When designing enterprise scale Wi-Fi solutions, we generally try to get data off the Wi-Fi air-waves as soon as possible and onto much more reliable and high capacity wired ethernet for the same reasons of leaving as much Wi-Fi air time as possible where it's most useful, ie all the phones, tablets, laptops, etc.

Given that you cannot install etherrnet, then I suggest that you plan to use powerline where possible is probably the next best option. But received wisdom suggests it's best to buy your powerline from a supplier with a good returns policy just in case it sucks in you particular use case. Some people report excellent results with powerline, some report dreadful results and everything in between.

siross

Thanks for that, I'm going to go for some powerlines. It's a shame the gigabit ones are so expensive.

Presumably I can have one master powerline at the router and multiple slaves around the house?

mickevh

I don't use Powerline, but from what I've read of the HomePlug standards, then you can deploy multiple plugs. The "master" plug is so called because it arbitrates which plug's "turn" it is to transmit, (and possibly mediates the encryption) but otherwise I don't think there's any need for it be be nearest your router (though it won't hurt.) The actual transmissions go direct from plug-to-plug as required - it's not required for all transmissions to "go via the master."

HP uses the same "only one thing at a time can transmit" paradigm as Wi-Fi, so the more plugs you have, the more data they wish to transmit, the more they compete for "time" on the transmission medium - ie the mains circuit. Thusly, that means there's effectively an upper limit on how many one should deploy before things slow down unacceptably, but that's a value judgement rather than anything that can be attributed numbers. I wouldn't be getting worried unless I was looking of the order of six or seven and up, but much depends on the link rates (ever erroneously called "speed") of the plugs you deploy, what link rates they achieve and how much data you need to transmit. For three or four, I wouldn't be too worried, but I'd be looking to get the fastest plugs I could for my budget.

Also, I'd buy Wi-Fi capable plugs, at least for the "outpost" locations and gain the benefits of more Wi-Fi cells in to the bargain. However, if you have no need of additional Wi-Fi cells, you might trade off Wi-Fi for faster plugs within the budget envelope - another value judgement.

siross

I only need 4 plugs;

1 in the router
1 in the hallway for the BT Disc
1 Upstairs for the BT Disc
1 in the Garage for CCTV cameras.

I've been looking at prices and some of them seem extremely expensive, I was thinking about buying 2 packs of these: Tenda PH3 Gigabit Powerline Adapter Kit UK Plug - Pack of 2

mickevh

I don't comment on particular pieces of equipment because I don't see enough of it to offer an objective opinion. Others here may do so.

Failing that, a US based web site called SmallNetBuilder does a better job than many of fairly objectively testing a good qualtity of SOHO kit and ranks the results by various performance metrics. You could do worse than look there, though if you are outside the USA, bear in mind he's USA based and exact spec and price of equipment may vary in other territories. In particular, the USA has a different electrical mains environment (frequency, voltage, etc.) than the EU nations.