Wired only network advice

[OrdinaryPhil]

So I recently spent the time to run Cat7 cables throughout my entire house. I spent a lot of time planning and organizing things is such a way that every room has a quad-port plate and some rooms have additional ports neat mounted devices such as streaming boxes and other connected things. This layout requires exactly 48 ports and I have already acquired and installed a switch to manage these connections.

That switch is connected to an ASUS router which is the is the lat part of my existing setup to go. I want to replace it with a wired-only option so that I am not needless broadcasting. However I wanted to tap this forum to get some advice on the best wired-only router.

I am fortunate enough to have a 1GB fiber plan, and while not every connected device will use that speed (doorbell, cameras, AppleTVs, etc) both my gaming PC and work PC do, as well as both of my Wife's PCs. I mention this because most of the option I am finding on Amazon are fairly old and only have 1Gb ports, which would represent a significant bottleneck if I am using that port to feed the connection to 48 devices. Any advice is helpful.

[Average Nerd]

3 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

That switch is connected to an ASUS router which is the is the lat part of my existing setup to go. I want to replace it with a wired-only option so that I am not needless broadcasting. However I wanted to tap this forum to get some advice on the best wired-only router.

Can't you just turn the Wifi off in the management interface?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What features do you need in a router?

 

Why do you want to replace the router? Just turn off wifi on the Asus router?

 

5 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

am fortunate enough to have a 1GB fiber plan, and while not every connected device will use that speed (doorbell, cameras, AppleTVs, etc) both my gaming PC and work PC do, as well as both of my Wife's PCs. I mention this because most of the option I am finding on Amazon are fairly old and only have 1Gb ports, which would represent a significant bottleneck if I am using that port to feed the connection to 48 devices. Any advice is helpful.

How would that be a bottleneck? With a 1gbit wan connection the router won't see speeds over 1gbe max. If data is being sent between devices on the lan they won't touch the router.

[OrdinaryPhil]

Just now, Average Nerd said:

Can't you just turn the Wifi off in the management interface?

Yes and no. But hypothetically, even if I could totally disable the Wi-Fi, the router is still an older model with on 1Gb ports, hence my need to upgrade to something more modern.

[OhioYJ]

1 minute ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Yes and no. But hypothetically, even if I could totally disable the Wi-Fi, the router is still an older model with on 1Gb ports, hence my need to upgrade to something more modern.

You could always go with an OPNsense or pfsense box, that would give you plenty of options in whatever LAN speed you need, and no wireless. 

[OrdinaryPhil]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What features do you need in a router?

 

Why do you want to replace the router? Just turn off wifi on the Asus router?

 

How would that be a bottleneck? With a 1gbit wan connection the router won't see speeds over 1gbe max. If data is being sent between devices on the lan they won't touch the router.

Firstly, I want to be clear that I am not a network engineer, so my knowledge is far from comprehensive.

That being said, I am seeing all kinds of problems with the current setup. The ASUS router has 4 ports, one if which is the WAN port (Internet In). One of the remaining 3 ports connects to the switch, which is where all of my devices are connected.

90% of the time, this works well and I don't see any problems. For high bandwidth and low latency workloads like streaming and downloading files, this is fine. With low bandwidth and high latency workloads like gaming or my security devices, they randomly disconnect every 5 minutes or so. And these are micro-drops. They may only drop for 2-3 seconds. It's not enough to even notice when streaming since buffering takes care of that, but a 3-second drops in gaming are terrible.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Firstly, I want to be clear that I am not a network engineer, so my knowledge is far from comprehensive.

That being said, I am seeing all kinds of problems with the current setup. The ASUS router has 4 ports, one if which is the WAN port (Internet In). One of the remaining 3 ports connects to the switch, which is where all of my devices are connected.

90% of the time, this works well and I don't see any problems. For high bandwidth and low latency workloads like streaming and downloading files, this is fine. With low bandwidth and high latency workloads like gaming or my security devices, they randomly disconnect every 5 minutes or so. And these are micro-drops. They may only drop for 2-3 seconds. It's not enough to even notice when streaming since buffering takes care of that, but a 3-second drops in gaming are terrible.

Do you have 3 cables connecting the router to the switch? Thats a big no no and won't help performane unless you setup bonding for something like this.

 

Are you sure the router is the cause of the issues here, not the ISP or switch?

[OrdinaryPhil]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you have 3 cables connecting the router to the switch? Thats a big no no and won't help performane unless you setup bonding for something like this.

 

Are you sure the router is the cause of the issues here, not the ISP or switch?

No, there is only 1 cable connecting the switch and the router, the remaining 2 ports on the router are unused.

The problem clearly exists between the router and the switch. When connected to my switch, my Gaming PC experiences those micro-drops and I get kicked from games sessions regularly. When I connect my PC directly to the router (bypassing the switch) there are no drops at all.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

No, there is only 1 cable connecting the switch and the router, the remaining 2 ports on the router are unused.

The problem clearly exists between the router and the switch. When connected to my switch, my Gaming PC experiences those micro-drops and I get kicked from games sessions regularly. When I connect my PC directly to the router (bypassing the switch) there are no drops at all.

What switch do you have? This seems more of a switch issue to me than a router issue if bypassing the switch fixes the issue.

[OrdinaryPhil]

Linksys LGS352MPC.

[tkitch]

get a decent router with 1gbps+ ports. and just turn off WIFI.

 

There's no reason to make it more complicated.  

[OrdinaryPhil]

1 hour ago, tkitch said:

get a decent router with 1gbps+ ports. and just turn off WIFI.

 

There's no reason to make it more complicated.  

Gotta get that post count up eh? Please read before posting. Perhaps you can point me to a "decent router" with 48 1gbps+ ports?

[Kilrah]

42 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Perhaps you can point me to a "decent router" with 48 1gbps+ ports?

You seem to misunderstand the situation, you don't need/want that. The 48 port switch handling all your devices and a single upstream to the router (which does not need to be faster than your internet connection) i.e. what you already have is how it's done.

 

If there are issues then yes it's possible the router's performance is too limited. The easiest solution is still a commercial router on which you disable the Wi-Fi if you don't want it, just a newer/higher-end one.

Alternatively you could go something more enterprisey like one of the Ubiquiti gateways, or build your own with a multi port mini PC running something like OPNsense.

[OrdinaryPhil]

17 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

You seem to misunderstand the situation, you don't need/want that. The 48 port switch handling all your devices and a single upstream to the router (which does not need to be faster than your internet connection) i.e. what you already have is how it's done.

 

If there are issues then yes it's possible the router's performance is too limited. The easiest solution is still a commercial router on which you disable the Wi-Fi if you don't want it, just a newer/higher-end one.

Alternatively you could go something more enterprisey like one of the Ubiquiti gateways, or build your own with a multi port mini PC running something like OPNsense.

Perhaps I was not clear.

Using a generic router is simply not an option. There are no consumer options for a router with anywhere near the number of ports needed to connect 40+ devices. Typical routers have 3-5 ports with more "high end" options having 8. That's simply not enough.

The 48 port switch isn't meant to be an alternative to a router - it's a requirement for connecting that many wired devices. There is no workaround for this.

Because I cannot connect my ISP-in (WAN) directly to my switch, I must have a routing device between the ISP and the switch.

[Kilrah]

3 minutes ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Perhaps I was nor clear.

Seems you were, just still mistaken. 

You don't need a router with 40 ports, you need a router with one port that connects to the switch to distribute to the devices like you currently have. 

Maybe explain why you think it should be otherwise.

[OrdinaryPhil]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Seems you were, just still mistaken. 

You don't need a router with 40 ports, you need a router with one port that connects to the switch to distribute to the devices like you currently have. 

Maybe explain why you think it should be otherwise.

The general setup does not need to be different.

ISP > Router > Switch > Connected Devices.

I am looking for a better router. Since I am not using any Wi-Fi, I don't need that feature so I was searching for wired routers and haven't had any luck finding one that fits the situation well. Most of the wired-only options I have found are heavily dated, 10/100 stuff that isn't going to work with the kind of constant uptime and traffic I am working with.

Routers in general are not the most computationally capable devices. They tend to use older dual or quad core ARM CPUs that are easily overwhelmed by the clunky integrated OS and "tools" that are running by default. And the act of routing is actually quite complex. The more devices on your network, the more work it takes for the router to shuffle loaded and unloaded packets to and from my ISP. My hope is that be moving to something nicer I will alleviate any potential stress points and congestion.

I don't mind spending more for something more business-appropriate since I do work from home, but I just haven't had luck - hence my asking for aid here on the forums.

[Kilrah]

Hence giving you the example of ubiquiti stuff:

 

https://ui.com/eu/en/cloud-gateways/compact

[OrdinaryPhil]

15 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Hence giving you the example of ubiquiti stuff:

 

https://ui.com/eu/en/cloud-gateways/compact

Thank you! I'll pick up the UCG-Max and hopefully that will alleviate the issue.

[LIGISTX]

Something to remember which others have said, any routing within the same subnet never hits the router at all. And any switch worth its salt can do switching across the subnet at full gigabit speed since that’s pretty easy to do. So the only potential issue is if all devices are talking to the internet at once and the router simply can’t deal with all the connections. That said, any modern router should be able to handle that without issue. 
 

UniFi stuff is solid, but it is a bit more prosumer grade. Which is good, but you may want to watch some YouTube videos on how to set it up and use it. 

[E-waste]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If data is being sent between devices on the lan they won't touch the router.

Are you absolutely sure about this?

 

Why would data not always go to the network gateway then back to the destination, that's not how networking works?

 

If I have a wi-fi router, but all intended transfers are wired conenctions on the router, and it is the only network device except for the isp modem / fiber box, would I be correct that all traffic must pass through the layer 3 part of the router and not just the switch built into it?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, E-waste said:

Are you absolutely sure about this?

 

Generally in a single L2 home network this is the case, but there are a lot of possible configs. The switch will send the packet to the port with the associated MAC address. it will go to the gateway(router) if there isn't a port with the mac address that it needs to go it. You can look at the port usage stats on your switch and see that the data doesn't go to the router when your doing a lan transfer.

 

1 minute ago, E-waste said:

 

If I have a wi-fi router, and it is the only network device except for the isp modem / fiber box, would I be correct that all traffic must pass through the layer 3 part of the router and not just the switch built into it?

Those boxes typically have all the lan ports on  a internal L2 switch, so they data won't touch the actual route part of the device. 

 

 

[Kilrah]

27 minutes ago, E-waste said:

If I have a wi-fi router, but all intended transfers are wired conenctions on the router, and it is the only network device except for the isp modem / fiber box, would I be correct that all traffic must pass through the layer 3 part of the router and not just the switch built into it?

See how most basic switches are 5-port and basic routers have 4 LAN ports?

Yup, that's because the routers just integrate the same kind of 5-port switch chip of which one port goes to the actual router. The local traffic is just switched, and essentially the only thing the router is involved with if they don't talk to the internet is DHCP.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

6 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

Are you absolutely sure about this?

Yes, traffic that doesn’t need to traverse the firewall (anything within the same subnet) a switch will direct directly on its own via MAC address. If you for example have a router plugged into a switch, and data from one pc on your LAN is trying to get to another pc (or streaming box like a plex client), this traffic will never even touch the router. It will get the switch and the switch will pass it to the port to get into the right place. Router won’t even know it happened. 

[E-waste]

3 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Yes, traffic that doesn’t need to traverse the firewall (anything within the same subnet) a switch will direct directly on its own via MAC address.

I always wondered how that worked, I must have read it in a networking book, but it doesn't seem like a switch has software on it, but it must have something to read all the data.  I thought switches sent all data to all ports and whichever ended up being the right port / recipient, the other device would pick up the data, and the other devices would discard it.

 

Is that what a hub is, vs a switch?  And so an un-managed switch still reads mac addresses and directs traffic?

[Kilrah]

6 hours ago, E-waste said:

Is that what a hub is, vs a switch?  And so an un-managed switch still reads mac addresses and directs traffic?

Correct