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:
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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.
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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!
Power-line tends to be quite slow and error prone. If you have existing coax, that is likely the better option. You can get up to 2.5gbit adapters for it: https://til.simonwillison.net/networking/ethernet-over-coaxial-cable
I think people’s experience with PLE will always be subjective. In the old flat we were in, where I needed it. It would drop connection all the time, it was unusable.
But I’ve had them run totally fine in other places. Noisy power supplies that aren’t even in your place can cause problems. Any kind of impulse noise (bad contacts on an old style thermostat for example) and all kinds of other things can and will interfere with it.
Wifi is always a compromise too. But, I guess if wiring direct is not an option, the OP needs to choose their compromise.
IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.
Most power line adaptors say to keep it on the same circuit. The one I have is running a small VoIP phone and I don’t have issues with call quality.
I have three suggestions for you.
Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.
Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.
Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.
I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.
I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).
Good luck.
absolutely agree with the mesh wifi. Two stations, one at your NAS, one near you. They’ll form a direct high-speed link between each other. Zero effort. Faster than Powerline ethernet, and most other options.
It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.
If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.
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 💛
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.
Woah I wish I had the same knowledge you do about networking haha! Taking notes here that’s for sure, thanks for the input!
I would look into doing a proper cable run. You would need to do a little drilling but if you have a plan and make it look nice the landlord is unlikely to have an issue with it. Just have a proper wall covering and port on each side.
Put the nas and router where the internet comes in at and the just use WiFi for your office and the rest of the house. Thats what 99% of the people do. All the new WiFi routers are really efficient at beam forming and other technologies to get you a decent signal.
At my house, since it is raised up I was able to crawl under and run Ethernet to the living room for the htpc(gaming) computer and it was pretty easy to install a keystone next to a power outlet. Not sure if that is viable in your situation.
But even then I didn’t bother running Ethernet to all the rooms because even streaming 4k video is viable over WiFi. Though I understand it might not work so well if trying to edit on a nas or something similar.
I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.
