I currently live in a two story, ~3300 sq ft house built in 1998. Our family is a pretty tech oriented one, with numerous smart devices, phones, tablets, laptops, smart tv’s, and 2 high-end gaming desktops. We use Spectrum as our ISP, and currently have their Sagemcom F@st 5260 router providing WiFi to the entire house. The downstairs connection (where the router is located) is usually pretty strong, with rare dips in signal strength/speed. The upstairs however is not so good. There are numerous dead zones, issues with signal strength, speed drops, etc. This is getting quite annoying as we’re have difficulty using the internet on either the 2.4GHz or the 5GHz band.
So in light of the issues we’re having, I’ve decided to come up with a plan for improving the state of our networking solution. I am by no means a network expert, and I have little knowledge in the realm of networking and internet stuff. I’m just a 17 year old teaching himself the basics of networking for this project, so any advice/corrections would be welcome.
My first step in all of this would be to get a representative from Spectrum out to my house to possibly diagnose any misconfigurations with the network. I’ve had issues come up claiming to be DNS errors, but I’ve also heard those could be caused by wireless interference or even duplicate IP adresses. I don’t trust myself enough to figure out what the heck is going on, so I’ll have a professional do it for me.
The second step, regardless of what the outcome of the first step is, would be to install Ethernet cabling throughout the house. There’s currently 3 bedrooms with computers in them, one with a smart tv as well, a 4th bedroom that could have a smart tv in the future, a downstairs living room with a smart tv, and an upstairs game room/loft with yet another smart TV with an Xbox attached. All of these devices I would love to have hooked up to an Ethernet connection, but the main goal is to have both mine and my dad’s gaming rigs outfitted with Ethernet as well as the living room smart tv. I plan to use Cat6 cabling to provide Ethernet while also ensuring some degree of future-proofing over Cat5.
The third step would be to add any necessary additional hardware to the house to ensure ease of use. By this I mean installing wireless access points in specific locations, adding network switches if needed, etc. Again, I’m not too knowledgeable on networking, so some advice here would be very helpful. I’ve been looking into the Ubiquiti access points like the AC-Pro and the AC-Lite, but I’m not sure which would be the most cost effective solution.
Sorry for the wall of text, but that should give you all a solid background for what’s going on. Thank you for any advice you can give me!
