I finally tackled my home networking distribution!
When we bought this house, it had a crazy amount of built-in wiring. The former owners worked from home with two separate businesses and two separate offices. The guy was also loved music so the house included:
- Wiring for a home security system (never installed)
- A telephone switchboard/answering machine thing with multiple phone wires around the house – even a phone in the master bathroom.
- Cable TV coax cabling in every room
- Computer network jacks in just about every room
- In-ceiling speakers throughout the house
Our utility room looks like something from the movie “War Games”. In two of the rooms, we had what we called “the firehouse of wires” coming out of the wall. The firehouse consisted of wiring for a home theater, coax wires, phone wires, FM antenna wires, computer networking wires, and even infrared repeaters for stereo systems.
With wireless technology, cell phones, and other updates, many of these wires became obsolete. A recent remodel removed the phone in the master bathroom, and I moved my home theater away from an awkward wall.
One thing I’m keeping is the network cables. More reliable and faster than Wifi the hardware Internet distribution throughout the house is handy. It also allows me to move some bandwidth-hogging resources such as music and video streaming off of the Wifi so I can use it for Smart Devices such as my Home Assistant and Alexa-controlled plugs and switches.
Part of my master plan was to finally get a network switch with a lot of slots. I ended up with the reasonably priced TP-Link 16 Port Gigabit Ethernet Network Switch
- Desktop/ Wall-Mount
- Fanless
- Sturdy Metal w/ Shielded Ports
- Traffic Optimization
- Unmanaged
Ethernet switches like these are truly plug-and-play. Plug in the power cord and then you run an ethernet patch cable from the WIFI router, in my case an ASUS ZenWiFi AX6600, and then plug in all of your other ethernet cables.
No software to run. No drivers. It simply sends the Internet around the house and lights up an LED if that circuit is actively using data.
This replaced an eight-port switch I previously had – which didn’t accommodate all of the ethernet ports I have spread around the house.
Now my new home theater location didn’t have a network power nearby so I ran this excellent white, flat ethernet cable from the utility room to the media console.
The old ethernet switch box, a basic D-link 8 Port Gigabit network switch box, is now over in my home theater where I have five ports used:
- Network in from the other switch
- TV – Sony XBR85X850F 85-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV
- AVR – Onkyo TX-NR7100 9.2-Channel AV Receiver
- DVD – Panasonic Streaming 4K Blu Ray Player with Dolby Vision and HDR10+ Ultra HD Premium Video Playback
- Streaming – Roku Ultra | The Ultimate Streaming Device 4K/HDR/Dolby Vision/Atmos
I also have another small switch box that provides “power over ethernet”. This is a Steamemo PoE switch box (power over ethernet) needed for my “no batteries to change” video doorbell – the REOLINK Video Doorbell PoE Camera.
That’s the STEAMEMO 5 Port AI PoE Switch (4 POE Ports +1 Uplink)
Easy and not too costly, this project now brings reliable hardwired Internet connectivity to all of my audio-visual components and frees up bandwidth space on my wireless Internet.