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.

[Da_Blitz]

not sure what you mean by distributing the two lines, do you mean bond the lines together for high avalability and or more bandwidth, if so some of the zytel modes support this (i have one here) you basically hook one up to each line then designate one as a secondary link and set it up on the primarys web based setup page, this gets you high availability but not load balancing

as for cabeling, cat5 is the way to go, if you want gigabit and you have long runs then you may need cat 6 but most of the time cat5 is pasable (you can test it by laying it down before hand

so to sum up you need:
Cabel (cat5)
wall jacks for said cabel
a switch
a router
a modem (or two)

note that the switch, modem and router can be combined into the one item (like the linksys boxes), the plus with these is that they have basic filtering, if you need something better then you could replace the router with a linux boxes and one of the security distros, they are point and click these days (over a web interface) but its a good idea to have a firm understanding in networking and linux beforehand

anyway to answer the originol question about distributing the 2 broadband connections, once you have them sorted out about how they will talk to eachother and do what you want (HA or load balence) then thats it, you iwll only need the one jack to each room and the switch/router will take care of all the multiplexing of the data to the right line

btw, do you need 2 lines? if so of what type are they

[Cooldude]

not sure what you mean by distributing the two lines, do you mean bond the lines together for high avalability and or more bandwidth, if so some of the zytel modes support this (i have one here) you basically hook one up to each line then designate one as a secondary link and set it up on the primarys web based setup page, this gets you high availability but not load balancing

as for cabeling, cat5 is the way to go, if you want gigabit and you have long runs then you may need cat 6 but most of the time cat5 is pasable (you can test it by laying it down before hand

so to sum up you need:
Cabel (cat5)
wall jacks for said cabel
a switch
a router
a modem (or two)

note that the switch, modem and router can be combined into the one item (like the linksys boxes), the plus with these is that they have basic filtering, if you need something better then you could replace the router with a linux boxes and one of the security distros, they are point and click these days (over a web interface) but its a good idea to have a firm understanding in networking and linux beforehand

anyway to answer the originol question about distributing the 2 broadband connections, once you have them sorted out about how they will talk to eachother and do what you want (HA or load balence) then thats it, you iwll only need the one jack to each room and the switch/router will take care of all the multiplexing of the data to the right line

btw, do you need 2 lines? if so of what type are they

Thanks for replying.

Sir, I earlier used only one ISP for my browsing purpose. But faced frequent outages due to some problem from them. I hence use two ISPs now so that in case one is down, the other would be accessible for uninterrupted browsing & downloads.

The broadband lines that I mentioned above are a 2Mbps line (primary) & a 512Kbps line (secondary). Both services would be from two different ISPs, but the connection shall be provided by a common cable operator. The ISPs shall be providing their respective static IP settings that shall be used to access their services individually.

In my existing home I am using the Linksys WRT300N for Wifi & desktop use. I however have the additional secondary ISP connection hooked to my desktop incase the line connected to the Linksys goes down.

Thanks for the tips about the cables. I need a secure router that can handle two connections & enables switching between the two & distributes them effectively to the desired locations as explained in my first post.