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Hello all,

Im about to order the equipment I need for my home network. I am stuck how I should run my drops.

1st option:
One 24 port switch
4 drops to every room with 1 drop for a centralized Wifi router = 21 drops

2nd option:
One 8 port switch
1 drop to every room and 1 drop for Wifi = 6 drops
I would add a hub or switch to each room so I can add "X" devices

I know the image shows the hub/switch before the room but the drop would go to the room then I would use another hub or switch to connect the devices in that room.

Any suggestions or improvement would be greatly appreciated. This is my first time doing my home wired network and I don't want to have to crawl through the attic more than i have to. I have heard not to use many switches that is why I mentioned hubs as well. Switches seem better to me.

Just a note I just thought of. My cable modem will have 4 outputs so that should take care of my game room if I install the modem in that room.

Thanks all in advanced for any input. All input is good, I just want to do it right or at least efficient.

Kind regards,
06chargerRt

Hi there and welcome to the forums

Well, the first thing I'd like to say is either of your options will work. The first option is the better one if you can cope with the extra effort of implementing it. It's a preferable solution in several ways: Firstly you need less equipment so it's tidier plus it's cheaper. Secondly, the setup can cope with a greater amount of traffic. With a single drop and switch arrangement the single network cable has to cope with ALL the traffic generated by the devices connected to it. Let's say your drop cable can cope with a gigabit. If you connect 4 devices to the switch then each would get up to 250Mb, assuming they all needed the bandwidth at the same time. With the 4 drop arrangement each would get the full gigabit. Thirdly, if a cable gets damaged for whatever reason then you have 3 others. With a single drop you have no Plan B.

The million dollar question is, would a single drop be able to cope with the traffic? If you take a typical room then you might have a music player, TV, video streamer, games console. Even if you ran all of these at the same time they'd not exceed 1gigabit currently. The heaviest user would probably be the video streamer. If we fast forward 10/20 years then what will the world look like? What devices would need what? I'd take a punt and say the video streamer would still be the most bandwidth hungry but what else will we have?

It's a while since I read about hubs so unless they have changed recently then they're definitely not preferable to switches. They send the same traffic to all connected devices. With a switch the traffic only goes between the devices which are talking to each other. In terms of having too many switches, I thought the issue was daisy-chaining them, not the total number in a network?

One thing you may want to think about is with a single drop you'd not be able to, for example, run HDMI over cat5/6. Although I've not mentioned it on my website I run HDMI over cat5e to all rooms. This setup requires a dedicated cable to each room, it has to be totally separate to the network. Just something to think about.

Has the above helped?

Ian.

Thank you Ian,

Your reply did help a lot. I thought about what you said and in some rooms we will be playing on xbox one and streaming at the same time. This is one scenario so I am now in agreement with you that I should use plan/option 1. I will be ordering the cable and needed equipment to do the job today. I will probably run 2 more unterminated cables in the wall just in case of future needs but at that point i could use a small switch just to add a few devices that are not bandwidth hogs.

Thanks again for the quick response. I just wanted some reassurance that I was on the right track. This is my first wired network and I didn't want to go in the wrong direction.

If anyone else has some input I would greatly like to hear it.

Kind regards,
06chargerRt (Carlos)