Suggestions For Broadband Networking At Home.

[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.

[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]

Hi,
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.

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.

Merci beaucoup Monsieur. Thanks for your suggestions. Very informative & I really appreciate them.

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 did scour the net & found something that would meet my requirements partially:

The Linksys BEFSR81

This Ethernet router does have most have the features I am looking for.  However, I need a similar gadget that would support two broadband connections instead of a mere one connection as in here. Could you suggest a model that would have these features?

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.

Merci again.

[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
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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 [a href=\"http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1175236661542&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=6154239789B01]Linksys WRT300N[/url] 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.

[zmiq2]

For easy cabling and wiring, I'd suggest that all cables in all rooms go to a patch panel, where the routing equipment should be located, so you can easily ditribute what goes where. I'd put at least 2 ethernet jacks in each room, probably one to be use for old plain phone, the other for lan.

HTH

[speculatrix]

I use an adsl modem in "half bridge" mode at home, so that my linux router/firewall gets the real IP address.

A while ago when my heating system needed replacing I also wired whole house with cat5e - I used foil-shielded twisted pair (STP) as it's tougher and keeps down interference - FM radio here is not so strong. I've even managed to push composite video down it and S/PDIF digital audio with some degradation! The cost of a 305m box of STP was instead of UTP was perhaps US$40 or so extra. I'm not using shielded patch leads or patch panels, but at least the option is there.

My wireless is on an isolated network (DMZ) completely separate from the cabled network, as I have wifi devices that can't do WPA, so they get a different set of access permissions. If I need access to the main lan I can either tunnel over ssh or use openvpn.. but mostly I just jack in to the nearest cat5e socket!

Since everything has to go through the linux box I can be totally fascist with network control:
* squid proxy with everything logged
* local smtp server with TLS enabled
* local imap server, using fetchmail to retrieve email from provider
* nothing allowed to talk directly to outside world except s-imap email and s-pop.
* nothing comes in except from my work IP address, or openvpn traffic, unless I use port knocking which opens SSH temporarily.

I could even stop Skype connecting (which is quite a feat) until I specifically mapped some ports for it for individual PCs.

Any linux will do for this, but since the PC will be on all the time you want to use something as low power as possible!

Paul

[Da_Blitz]

as i said most of the good zytel modems allow for a backup wan line, you basically need one of them and another modem that automatically logs in on the modem side and gets an ip from dhcp on the lan side

you the zytel where the backup wan line is (ie ip address ) and if the line drops it reroutes packets, note that this can be a BAD thing with long running sessions as your external IP address will change meaning things like msn, yahoo chat, ssh, skype and ongoing SIP calls will drop

in the case of ssh once the primary line comes back up as long as you didnt close the sesion all will resumae as nothing happened but its best not to rely on that

[Cooldude]

Thanks for the replies folks. Very informative indeed.

I did manage to locate two devices that have the ability to accommodate two (Dual) ISP broadband connections for load balancing and failover protection. Both devices have the provision to distribute the broadband connection to 8 locations. However I am still undecided which would be best for me. The devices are:

1) Linksys RV082 router

2) NetGear FVX538

Both devices have firewall with filtering capabilities, but no parental controls.

Any suggestions on the above would be helpful.