Advice on WAP in home office please

[Stringman_uk]

Hi all

after hijacking this post

Cat 6 and Wireless Access Points

Over the distances involved cat5 will support 1G quite happily so shouldn't need immediate replacement, I'd not if it involves lifting loads of board etc. You may also find that wireless coverage from one access point in the home office alone may cover the whole garden quite happily so whether...

www.diynot.com

Back story:
we have a house with a 50m garden
At the front we have a fibre set up- Trooli fibre to door 300mb/s
Speeds around the house are pretty good
but when you get in the garden it just dies ( did not use to be like that!)

We are building a home office in the garden 20m from the house and summerhouse 20m further than that..
My wife works from home teaching and does a lot of zoom/teams calls with powerpoint and some video sharing
At the moment I have a cat 5 cable that runs from the router to the kitchen.

1st idea was to barrel the cat 5 to another cable and run that to the office and use an old router to repeat the wifi, then take another cat5 to the summerhouse and repeat.
I now think that seems a bit low grade!

So then I thought of upgrading. this is the idea

Ignore the existing cat 5 cable
Run a 40m cat 7 cable from the router to the office( its about 35m by the time you take in routing etc)
install a poe switcher and then install a wap.
If the wap doesnt cover the summerhouse then i can run another cat 7 to the summerhouse ( I may well do that in any case as once the office is built it will be difficult to neatly run the cable.

Does that sound good ( even if possibly a bit of overkill)
From the previous post someone recommended Ubiquity kit as there was a lot of kit that is sold cheap on ebay from when offices etc upgrade.

So I have found the following

Ubiquiti ES-5XP EdgeSwitch 5-Port
Ubiquiti Networks ToughSwitch PoE Pro 8
and then looking at the wap
Unifi Ubiquiti AP AC LITE
Ubiquiti UAP-AC-HD
or similar

since the office has 70mm foil backed insulation would

Ubiquiti UAP-AC-M UniFi Mesh Outdoor WiFi 5 PoE Access Point​

be better as the desk will be right by a window?
I dont want to waste money but also dont want to compromise too much.
All help appreciated

​

 

[motorbiking]

I think I'd run a repeater from the office to the summer house and use wifi from the wired access points. 40M is getting quite long,

 

[Stringman_uk]

I think I'd run a repeater from the office to the summer house and use wifi from the wired access points. 40M is getting quite long,

thanks for the reply, but I am a little confused by it.
What do you mean by repeater?
an what do you mean by 40m getting long? I was led to believe that cat5/6/7 could all run 100m
I am not that worried at the moment by the summerhouse- its mainly the office at the moment
I have 2 thoughts
run my existing cat5 extended by either a joiner or switch/router to the office
run a new length of cat7 to the office
then plug whatever cable into a poe switch for a hardwire to the office and an outside wap ( which should hopefully cover the whole garden inc summerhouse- which is 20m from the office)

 

[Diver Fred]

Interesting to have a similar thread running at the same time.
See https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/burying-fiber-in-flexible-conduit-from-house-to-garage.612563/
Hopefully that should give some ideas.

Personally I would not rely on WiFi but cable or fibre as much as possible (& yes I know - I'm using WiFi on this laptop for the screenshot) but do have a look at the Screenshot of my Wifi page - Note the '4 Church Mews' signal that house is over 30 yards away and there is 3 walls in my house Plus their house walls between them and I.

Run a cable or fibre in and distribute by cable via a hub/switch.

Hope that Helps.

A final thought - in the screenshot you notice network 'BT-ZKCSR' - that is my new neighbours, When they had BB installed it effectively made my BB unusable as put that router with repeaters next to the adjoining wall. We could only use WiFi next to our router as their signal was that strong. Do think about your neighbours - WiFi coverage is not a competition but a shared wireless resource. If you can use a cabled network please do so.
When I was office bound my employers decided to switch from a cabled network (cause they had ran out of port and cable capacity) thinking it would be cheaper - it lasted less than a month due to the contention in the wireless network.

 

[Stringman_uk]

Interesting to have a similar thread running at the same time.
See https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/burying-fiber-in-flexible-conduit-from-house-to-garage.612563/
Hopefully that should give some ideas.

Personally I would not rely on WiFi but cable or fibre as much as possible (& yes I know - I'm using WiFi on this laptop for the screenshot) but do have a look at the Screenshot of my Wifi page - Note the '4 Church Mews' signal that house is over 30 yards away and there is 3 walls in my house Plus their house walls between them and I.

Run a cable or fibre in and distribute by cable via a hub/switch.

Hope that Helps.
View attachment 307798

A final thought - in the screenshot you notice network 'BT-ZKCSR' - that is my new neighbours, When they had BB installed it effectively made my BB unusable as put that router with repeaters next to the adjoining wall. We could only use WiFi next to our router as their signal was that strong. Do think about your neighbours - WiFi coverage is not a competition but a shared wireless resource. If you can use a cabled network please do so.
When I was office bound my employers decided to switch from a cabled network (cause they had ran out of port and cable capacity) thinking it would be cheaper - it lasted less than a month due to the contention in the wireless network.

thanks for the reply
not sure about the relevance of burying fibre- I definitely wont be using fibre or burying cables.
As I said the office itself will be run on hard wire. The reason for the wifi was to reach the summerhouse (40m from our house 50+ from the neighbours) and to be able to use our echo in the garden, It shouldnt interfere with the neighbours at all

 

[Lucid]

At the front we have a fibre set up- Trooli fibre to door 300mb/s
Speeds around the house are pretty good
but when you get in the garden it just dies ( did not use to be like that!)

Your wireless (Wi-Fi) speed and range has nothing to do with how fast a broadband service you've bought. In fact, you can run a home network without having any sort of broadband connection at all just so long as you don't need to access the internet.

Wi-Fi is simply an alternative to a piece of cable for connecting a device to the central hub (the router) in your home network. If any and all content you ever wanted to access was stored on a central hard drive, say a NAS drive in the home office, then your wired and wireless devices would talk to that. Further to that, if you set up your desktop and laptops with file sharing, then any information on any device would be accessible to other devices, and that data would pass through the router.

The reality is that access to the internet has become the prime activity. For those who need it, Cloud storage has replaced the NAS drive. But all of this - all of it - is only possible because the outside world connects to your wireless router, and it's that device that handles communication between the outside world and your devices.

Loss of Wi-Fi range is a common complaint when someone has switched a new broadband supplier. The change often involves the supplier providing a new wireless router (YMMV). It's not uncommon for them to quote fast Wi-Fi speeds. This is often based on the 5GHz and may be based on 802.11ax system marketed as Wi-Fi 6, or if they're particularly slippery, they might even quote Wi-Fi 6E speeds which is 6GHz band wireless only available in the US. The bottom line here is that the speeds quoted for wireless are best-case scenarios of lab condition set-ups. They don't resemble real life situations.

It's worth checking your wireless router. This would be to see if 2.4GHz has been turned off. This happened a lot with BT hubs based on wireless 802.11n and 802.11ac standards. They'd hobble the backwards compatibility by switching off 2.4GHz so that slower wireless speeds weren't available. The catch was that 2.4GHz has better range and better penetration of walls etc.

Wi-Fi 6 has come back to using 2.4GHz because of the range benefits, but it often the case that the common 1, 5.5 and 11Mbps data rates used by 802.11b/g/n devices are switched off in order to 'make room' for the different signal coding of the newer formats. IOW, 2.4GHz might be on, but not sending a signal that your non-Wi-Fi 6 devices can understand. Look up the compatibilities for all your other devices.

We are building a home office in the garden 20m from the house and summerhouse 20m further than that..
My wife works from home teaching and does a lot of zoom/teams calls with powerpoint and some video sharing
At the moment I have a cat 5 cable that runs from the router to the kitchen.

Cat5 or Cat5e? The difference is important.

With Cat5 the maximum data speed is 100mb/s. That's 1/3rd the speed of your broadband service. Cat5e was launched in 2001. This increased the data speed to 1000mb/s. That's over 3x faster than your broadband speed. If most of what you're doing is using the internet, and bearing in mind that any bottleneck in speed is likely now to be the servers out in the world rather than your 300mb/s broadband and the 1000mb/s of Cat5e if you have that, do you really need to install a 10Gb/s cable when you have no bits of hardware that are going to anywhere near requiring that speed?

To put the speeds into perspective, if you're streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, BBC iPlayer etc in UHD quality, then all you need is 20mb/s to do that for a single viewing device. Live sport in UHD needs more bandwidth because the signal goes through a fixed compression method rather than dynamic with stuff that can be converted before transmission. Still, UHD live sport needs just 40mb/s. You've got 300. A Cat5e cable can handle 1000.

All Cat cable though is sensitive to mishandling. Bend it too sharp, crush it, clip it too tight and you can find your 1000 or 10,000mb/s cable reduced to 100. Worse still, buy the cheap CCA network cable and have one of the 8 connections fail and your speed drops to 100mb/s.

 

[Stringman_uk]

Lucid,
Thank you so much for your in depth reply.
The router I have does output 2.4GHZ . It used to output it as a separate signal because the eufy cameras would not lock on to the single(combined?) signal. I say used to because I can no longer see it (Trooli have been messing around with it because the wifi that used to reach 7m in the garden now wont even do 1m! maybe they reset that part- I will chase them up)

Going to the cable I am pretty sure the cable is cat5. So rather than mess around with joiners or switchers I might as well buy a long length of cat5e ( is there any benefit in going to 6?) external cable and do one long run to the office.

going to the switch: the more I get into this the more I feel that the ubiquity may not be for me, I have seep tp link poe switchs for £25
and I guess i can use any (48v) wap with that.

As usual I am getting carried away with myself in that I havent even built the office yet!! and all I really need to do is run the cable as I build.
so (for the moment) you have answered my questions.
Many thanks

 

[Lucid]

If you're going to run POE then Cat6 has thicker core wires, so is a better choice because of reducing the heating effect and so reducing power loss a small amount.

Cat6 is a thicker cable. This makes it a little more challenging to terminate. Also, if you want to maintain the benefits of the higher bandwidth (250GHz vs 100) then you need to make sure that the plugs and wall plates are Cat6 rated too.

Whatever you decide, don't go with the cheapest Cat5e or Cat6. The quality of the cable construction is important. Those twists need to be at a specified number of turns per unit length in order to minimise crosstalk between the cable pairs. They're different rates for each of the pairs. A run of poorly made Cat6 won't perform better than Cat5e.

 

[Stringman_uk]

If you're going to run POE then Cat6 has thicker core wires, so is a better choice because of reducing the heating effect and so reducing power loss a small amount.

Cat6 is a thicker cable. This makes it a little more challenging to terminate. Also, if you want to maintain the benefits of the higher bandwidth (250GHz vs 100) then you need to make sure that the plugs and wall plates are Cat6 rated too.

Too be honest I was just looking at a 40m ready made cable, the poe will hopefully just be a short run (5m)

Whatever you decide, don't go with the cheapest Cat5e or Cat6. The quality of the cable construction is important. Those twists need to be at a specified number of turns per unit length in order to minimise crosstalk between the cable pairs. They're different rates for each of the pairs. A run of poorly made Cat6 won't perform better than Cat5e.

Good advice Thanks
I was looking at something like

Outdoor External CAT6 COPPER UTP Network Cable GigaBit Ethernet Patch Lead 40m

Outdoor PE Jacket Cat 6 Gigabit Cable with snag less ends to avoid damaging the latch. 24 AWG High Quality FULL COPPER cable. Outdoor rated cables are suitable for burying or being left exposed to the elements due to the jacket... [see below for full description]

www.kenable.co.uk

or

https://www.comms-express.com/products/cat6-external-grade-rj45-utp-moulded-booted-lead-black/?50~Metre/

or

External Cat6 UTP LDPE RJ45 Patch Leads | Cat6 Ethernet Cables

Connectix Cabling System External RJ45 Patch leads are available in lengths from 10mt to 75mt. Designed to run externally, these patch leads are

www.cablemonkey.co.uk

Any one particularly better than the other

 

[Lucid]

TBH, I wouldn't buy any of those long pre-made patch cable for what you want to do. You've no idea whether the finished cable actually performs to spec despite them all quoting an impressive-looking roster of standards: ISO/IEC 11801 & EN 50288 & TIA EIA-568-B.2-1 ETL/3P Verified.

There's a company in the US that I trust a lot. It's Blue Jeans Cables. They take cabling seriously and they test competitor products to see if they're up to standard. Very few companies do this. It's even rare with review sites. The equipment required to do it is very expensive; tens of thousands of Pounds.

They did such a test of 20 Cat6 cables. These were all cables that made the same standards claimed by the patch leads in your links. The results were shocking. 80% failed to meet Cat6 standard, and even more surprising was that 55% failed to meet just the Cat5e standard. That means the cable becomes an unseen bottleneck to network speed. LINK

Looking at the list of cable you were originally planning to buy, you were proposing to hang up to £550 worth of gear off a £30 random bit of Ethernet cable. Worse than that, there's a 90% chance that you'd be left wondering why any of the gear you install might fail to live up to the performance claims. The reason wouldn't be immediately apparent. After all, cable is cable. Right? Except it isn't, but no one has an easy means to test it, and it's often overlooked when things don't work as they should. So you'd spend all this money building an office, but when it comes to the crucial Zoom meeting the kingdom is lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Blue Jeans will supply to the UK. In the grand scheme of the overall budget, their cables are a drop in the ocean. You would have to run the stuff through trunking though before taking it outside.

 

[Stringman_uk]

Thanks Lucid
there must be some cable sold in the uk that is of acceptable standard surely (??)
I was just being lazy and trying to avoid terminating my own cables.

 

[robinbanks]

I think you're letting the theory of this (and the endless possibilities) run away with you. At this rate you'll be looking for IEEE to invent CAT9 gold plated wire that you'll then have installed and terminated by Tim Berners Lee himself..

I've got a run of nasty ass cheapo 5e cable, about 60m long, plugged (via an RJ45 plug from a multi pack I bought in Aldi) into the most basic TP-Link gigabit switch I could find on the one end and the other end terminates in a patch socket I got out of a skip, with another short length of pre-made lead to go an extra couple of metres to the server room.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the wire itself lay on the floor for long enough that it was walked on repeatedly and split, spilling its twisted pairs everywhere. Despite all this adversity it somehow still maintains a gigabit link..

End of the day, I'm sure you'll settle on something; you know some of my recommendations already. I don't think you need CAT7+ for your use case, and I do think that the existing wire you've got will work. You'll lose nothing by trying it

I'm delighted with the UAP-AC (yep, the most basic one) second hand saucers I bought 8 years ago for 30 quid a pop, and run on the PoE injectors bundled with them. They've been absolutely rock solid and haven't been rebooted in years. Out in the garden, both me and all the neighbours 100m away appreciate the UAP-AC-Ms I put up..

I do think you might regret buying cheap consumer grade wifi kit - buy some second hand ubiquiti WAPs (don't need their switches), plug it all together on the kitchen table/hang it on a nail outside and check you're happy with it (I'm sure you will be, as will your guests when they use your easy-to-get-on, bandwidth-limited guest wifi network) before installing(burying) for real

And don't lose sight of Zoom's bandwidth requirements being just 4 megabit in the worst case (highest video res)..

 

[Stringman_uk]

Robin
Thanks for that, Its a case of wanting to do it right ( for my situation) but asking people who do this for a living so expect the best and can provide the best. And really I am running away with myself here.
I used to use cat to run 1080 video down long runs so cant help feeling that the cable in the uk cant be all bad. To be fair I generally use fibre now ( wish I had "lost a 50m " on a job now lol.
I have learnt lots and my ideas/plans keep evolving.
At the moment my plan is to run cat6 external cable from the router to the office and maybe run another from the office to the summerhouse before I insulate and clad the office.
I will run in a couple of cat 6 wall plate cables in the office and a further cable to the outside of the office. Then I will actually insulate and clad the office. Then I will look at whats around. I suspect it will be a tp-link or similar poe switch and a ubiquity wap.

thanks to everyone for their help

 

[robinbanks]

The ubiquiti you're looking at tend to use 24v PoE and it's more likely a TP-Link switch will use 48v PoE. Don't buy a PoE switch just for the APs; you can (and probably will automatically) get PoE injectors for them. If you have other things that will use 48v PoE (IP cameras?) then crack on..

If you're buying one big switch, and a 1000 ft box of cable, and ducting the garden, you might consider to run many cables from a central point rather than one cable to the office and having a switch in the office. A 5 watt appliance translates to about £13 a year running cost at 30p/kWh

It is also possible to get inline voltage changers to run 24v PoE kit on 48v PoE, but it did always worry me that the white outer casing of the ubiquiti ones was burnt to yellow at a particular point

 

[Stringman_uk]

Rob
thanks again.
I wont buy the switch until I know what AP I am getting.
I am only going to buy a small ( 4 or 5) switch for the office as we want to run that wired from a couple of wall plates.
The house just uses the trooli router for the hardwire items.
I was only going to buy a 5om drum as that will get me to the office and the summerhouse.
Cant really use ducting due to the course of the run.