Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Home LAN options?

I’ve got 12 hard wired Cat 5 locations (wall plates) in the house. All are home run back to my office and I landed them onto a 12 port Cat 5 block. I really didn’t know what I was doing, so I sorta ‘winged’ it.

I am currently using a Linksys five port router and I use short Cat 5 cables from the router to the Cat 5 12 port block to heat up the needed room wall jacks.

Well I’d like to heat them all up and I figured I’d just pick up a router with at least 12 ports. I wandered into an office max yesterday thinking I’d get something off the shelf, but was quickly confused. There wasn’t but a couple routers that were not wireless and they only had four or six ports.

I just did a Google search on these things and of course I was overwhelmed with the options that popped up, including brand names.

Can one of you IT types recommend a router solution? A buddy of mine told me to stick with Linksys, although I don’t know why. They are definitely more money…..

I have a space limitation too. I need something pretty small to fit in between wall studs and all the other ‘stuff’ I foolishly crammed into this spot.

If you already have a Linksys router, then I would go with two 8 port gigabit switches for growing room. Just route your twelve connections from the punch down block (PDB) to the switches and then feed the two switches from the Linksys router. Since you are using one port on each switch for the router feed, you'll only have seven open on each for the PDB connections.

Everyone has their preferences, but I tend to stick with Netgear and Linksys. Here's a Netgear 8 port switch on Newegg that is fairly popular and at a decent price.

Netgear switch

Agreed. You need to plop a switch (or two, which may be cheaper) in between the punch down block and the router. Most switches need zero configuration and will just work. That's how it's done.

A router is designed to link up multiple "sites" across a WAN (Wide Area Network). That would be you as "Site A" and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) as "Site B". Now if you want to hook up more devices (or just make jacks live) at one of these sites, you would add a switch (old days it was a hub) to your router. This essentially adds more ports for you to plug in to (won't go into detail about what a switch does exactly, because as far as you need it, you know enough now).

Now, just follow the other guys' advice and you will be all set.

That is basically what I have. My internet comes in my house via cable. Goes to my cable modem, then to my Vonage router. Now, I do have another router in my mix, but it is for wireless, so we'll ignore that for now. Then I have multiple switches feeding the approximately 38 Cat5 network lines in my house (talk about a lot of wires). It was cheaper to pick up five 8-port switches and daisy chain them (they had dedicated "uplink" ports so that I could still use all 8 switch ports for my network runs) than to buy a single switch with enough ports to support 38 lines.

Now, if I could just get all of my cable TV runs into a powered distribution box of some sort, I'd be set (I have 1 cable run for each network run and for each phone line run). To do that would cost a small fortune. The phone lines aren't important because we use cordless phones.

Good luck!

umm, hey, Nick, whatcha using 38 Cat5 network lines for? Does homeland security know?

You would need a 10/100 switch not a hub, you can get a good deal from e bay for a Cisco catalyst or switch. A hub sends all traffic out all ports except the port it came in on. The switch only sends traffic from port a to port b which releives congestion. I also suggest a wired/wireless router just in case someone wants to use wireless the wired part would go into the switch. You shouldnt worry about gigabit ethernet for home use, 100 mbs fully duplex is good enough. Hope this helps

Drew

I’ve got wall plates all over the place. I don’t see a need for any wireless, but one never knows…. For now, I’d rather just keep it all hard wired.

Those 8 port switches look like the ticket (and simple). I’m afraid they are a bit too big though. Are there any compact options?

I’d post a picture, but I’m embarrassed to do so. It’s a rat nest. I’ve got all my coax, phone and LAN cobbled into this little piece of wall stud space reality.

I had hardwired my old house and then I tried wireless. Wireless is the way to go, no doubt about it!!!! Forget all that wiring!!!! In my new lakehouse, I will use nothing but wireless going from the room where I have the router.

But, don't forget to use the encryption. You don't want others using your stuff!!!!

It seems that your security is faulty. Someone is adding extra exclamation marks after your sentences.