Suggestions For Broadband Networking At Home. Options

[Cooldude]

Hi folks. Howdy.

I've just finished with the purchase of my new apartment. I have started with the flooring & interior civil work for now.

I need to plan the electrical wiring of my new house. The house includes four bedrooms & two living rooms. I need all rooms to have a broadband connection that can used for accessing by plugging a laptop. One bedroom would have a desktop. There shall be two broadband connections provided by the local cable operator. I need these connections to be accessible in all 4 bedrooms by means of an ethernet cable & in the 2 living rooms (one above the other, separated by a floor) by Wi-Fi. I plan to keep two Wi-Fi routers respectively in the living rooms for wireless access.

To begin with, what sort of cables should be used to distribute the broadbands to all rooms? Secondly what hardware would be best for me wherein the two broadband connections (from the cable operator) would be plugged in, which in turn would be distributed to all rooms? By saying hardware, I mean a gadget similar in lines of an EPABX system that distributes one or more telephone lines to multiple locations. Here instead of telephone its broadband.

I also wish to have site filters, parental controls & the provision to block internet access to any room at anytime.

Please guide me here. Thanks.

[nodens]

Hi folks. Howdy.

Hi,

I've just finished with the purchase of my new apartment. I have started with the flooring & interior civil work for now.

I need to plan the electrical wiring of my new house. The house includes four bedrooms & two living rooms. I need all rooms to have a broadband connection that can used for accessing by plugging a laptop. One bedroom would have a desktop. There shall be two broadband connections provided by the local cable operator. I need these connections to be accessible in all 4 bedrooms by means of an ethernet cable & in the 2 living rooms (one above the other, separated by a floor) by  Wi-Fi. I plan to keep two Wi-Fi routers respectively in the living rooms for wireless access.

So that means 1 plug in each room; and 2 in living room (wifi AP + ethernet). You may find an AP that does switching as well, so you would need only one.

To begin with, what sort of cables should be used to distribute the broadbands to all rooms? Secondly what hardware would be best for me wherein the two broadband connections (from the cable operator) would be plugged in, which in turn would be distributed to all rooms? By saying hardware, I mean a gadget similar in lines of an EPABX system that distributes one or more telephone lines to multiple locations. Here instead of  telephone its broadband.

for the cable : it's a matter of distance. If you keep it short (the theory says 100 meters, in practice, you shouldn't try more than 50m), then standard cat5 ethernet cable, shielded, (UTP) would be OK.

For distribution of the two broadband computers, you should find SOHO routers able to handle 2 connections, and minimal switching, with filtering ability. You may want to add an ethernet switch for distributing the network properly across all the rooms.

I also wish to have site filters, parental controls & the provision to block internet access to any room at anytime.

Site filtering and so on should be provided by the router. I'm not very well versed in the SOHO hardware router stuff (I tend to use software routers, firewall and proxy on a standard machine with a linux or a freebsd installed), so I'm not sure here.

Anyway, my network knowledge is rather enterprise oriented so YMMV

Have fun.