JamesES

1. How many computers do you have which need to be connected by wire? 1 PC to manage/act as server for the internet cafe 6 Client PCs for the cafe 4 MISC employee PCs 1 PC for Point-Of-Sales system 1 connection for our security cam system 2. Do you have any other services which work by the network? Printing... We want to control/monitor the printing for the internet cafe through the server/manager PC. 3. How many clients do you expect to connect wireless? Hmm...the only wireless connections we should have are employee cell phones and tablets, maybe a employee printer or two. 4. Do you need to seperate guests from a production wireless network? At least for now, wifi access is employee only...so no guest access needed. 5. What kind of logging do you need? Don't know if I fully understand this question. We at least want to block certain sites on the client PCs, as well as log traffic. 6. What kind of outbound connection(s) do you have? Not sure I fully get this one either. We are not really connecting to any servers outside our office. 7. What kind of gear do you have already? Comcast modem, and their wifi router. There's also 2 802.11g crap routers in some box in our basement. 8. Where (which country) is this located? United States 9. What is your budget? The frugal bastard in me wants to say $350, but if it requires more, it's no problem.

QoS? Yeah...I'm definitely a network layman. We're trying to build a high quality establishment, a setup that's reliable and fast is needed. Generally I'd just hire a pro to set us up, but the guy we'd use has gone on vacation till January...and has gone radio silent on us. Now I'm pretty much trying to acquire the necessary equipment, so when our friend returns, he can have us up and running in a day or two.

Maybe you could elaborate on the network tuning part. It's an internet cafe, so generally you'd have one computer managing all the clients comps with cyber cafe software. Then I was told it's better to have the POS system on a different network from everything else. And of course our cameras are connected to the wifi router as well, so we can view our office from any device via the cloud. Is a switch still good enough, and reliable enough for all that?

So we're opening an Internet Cafe/Print Shop, got everything almost ready, only to get stumped on the networking aspect. I don't know what equipment to buy for our setup, and networking is far from my forte. Some of my employees have better experience with it, but their butting heads on what equipment to buy( router, switch, wifi router). Including our computers, POS system, security cam setup, we currently have 13 devices that need to be hard wired. So at least 13 LAN ports and wifi access is required. Right now all we have is Comcast's modem and dodgy 4 LAN port router. Any suggestions?