I've had fun the last couple of days setting up the networking. I had them install the network, phone and CATV wiring as if it was a commercial installation, using the pantry as the utility room. Since we have 10 foot ceilings, I have a board mounted up near the ceiling above all the pantry shelving, out of the way. There's 41 RJ45 jacks in the house, all wired CAT6 for future-proofing. Any jack can be patched as either Ethernet or phone, which is how most commercial installs are done nowadays. I'll never actually use ALL these jacks - but it's easy, and not much more expensive to run 41 cables versus 12 cables so yeah - each bedroom has 3 jacks minimum. My office has much more. There's even one out in the garage.
Here's the pantry utility panel with the switches and router connected. No modem yet because Comcast has been dragging their heels. I have a wireless virtual Ethernet connection to the old house (see below) so the two houses are networked together and, for now, I'm mooching Internet from the old house. All the COAX on the right is for cable TV (again, multiple outlets in every room, but I'll just patch what we're using). Comcast will mount a splitter/amp on the board whenever they get around to installing my cable:
There's two Gigabit switches (a 24 port and an 8 port) because I've setup two VLANS (Virtual LANs) using a Tomato Router. The main "secure" LAN will be on the 24 port switch. There will be a second "untrusted" LAN on it's own separate network segment (using the 8 port switch), isolated from the main LAN, that will only be for the guest Wifi, a very few IOT devices (like a Ring Doorbell), and one untrusted jack in my office for working on client's PCs, so there's no chance for anything nasty on their PC to send a worm into my private network (the red CAT6 patch cables on the panel are all on the "untrusted" network). I'll have two seperate Wifi networks - one trusted and one untrusted.
Comcast has kept me hanging for 6 weeks now. The utility pole is 500+ feet from my house, so they need to bury a cable across my property. They keep scheduling a burial crew, and they don't show up. It's a sub-contractor and my theory is they're too busy going for lucrative contracts in Puerto Rico and South Florida after Hurricane Irma. I have signed a burial waiver which allows them to just run the cable across the ground (heck, if push comes to shove, if they lay the cable I'll rent a ditch witch and trench it myself), but still no joy.
However I have setup a virtual Ethernet connection between the two houses using a pair of Ubiquiti NanoBeam 5AC 16 units: https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/nanobeam-ac/
The NanoBeam consists of two small dishes which comprise a Point-to-Point wireless connection. One dish is at my old house and is configured as the Access Point (although it's completely arbitrary which end is the Access Point):
The other dish is at the new house and is configured as a Station (there are use cases where you can have multiple stations - this is how people in rural areas setup their own wireless networks):
The dishes just need to be line of site, and at this range aiming doesn't have to be very precise. I didn't bother using the signal strength meter in the control panel, I just eyeballed it. This system is rated for 450mbits at 6 miles, and since my houses are barely 700 feet apart, it's pretty much overkill. Signal to noise ratios aren't a problem at this range. It's rural enough out here that it's not picking up any interference. Because of bandwidth overhead for encryption, I'm actually getting slightly less than 350Mbit, but that's fine. That bandwidth is shared between upload and download. Configuration was EXTREMELY simple. The biggest bitch was crawling around the attic to run the cable. I'm getting too old for that crap. It's a regular Ethernet cable that goes to the dishes. On the other end is a POE (Power over Ethernet) box that connects to the network. I ordered a couple of outdoor rated CAT5E cables (very thick insulation) to connect the POEs to the dishes. The old house was easy since there's a large crawl space underneath. The new house was a bit of work. The garage has a huge attic above it that I ran the cable through, but getting the cable out the the eave with low clearance was a pain in the arse. I'm not as limber as I used to be. It was a lot more fun crawling on ceiling joists when I was in my 20s than it is now. Probably should have hired some skinny kid, but I'm stubborn and determined
Configuring the units is very easy. You log into them like any access point or router. Assign each one an IP. One gets set as the access point, and one gets set as the station. You define an SSID and password for the access point, and that's it. It takes care of everything else itself. Only other thing I had to do was to turn down the power on both units because they were hitting each other too hard. Ideally you want to have a signal strength of -50db and they were getting hit with around -40 db. Too much signal overloads the receiver and introduces noise, which equals dropped packets. I had to dial down both units to 60% power:
Here's a bandwidth test between the two units showing I'm getting right around 311Mbps. I could actually improve that by increasing the radio bandwidth, but the trade-off is you lose the ability to have multiple connections: one PC can hog the whole network. I'm using the default bandwidth setting which is the recommendation:
My only issue is that one of the NanoBeams is defective. It TRIED to connect to the LAN at 1GBit and fails and then falls back to 100Mbit. So although the two units can communicate between themselves at 311Mbit, I'm not getting the full benefit because the 100Mbit LAN connection is choking it. It's a known hardware issue on their forums - it's a defective chip. I have an RMA replacement coming. However, even at 100Mbit I have no problem watching videos from my server or NAS at the old house on a Media Center PC hooked up to a TV at the new house.
