What goes into a good first class home network?
Now a days we are working from home and we rely on our internet connection. The home is an extension of the world wide network and needs to be reliable if we are to maintain our work and play environments.
The opportunity to improve my home network when Google Fiber started digging in my neighborhood. I wanted to set up the home network right. The complete system consist of the following:
1) a Gigabit Google fiber modem and network box. [~$70/mth]
2) A 24 port gigabit switch, and several 8 port gigabit switches where needed in the office and downstairs entertainment center. [~$130 ]
3) A mesh network using Ubiquiti access points so everywhere inside and around the house outside has WIFI. [~$250 ]
4) A battery backed up UPS powering the modem, network box, the big switch and a couple of the Ubiquiti access point POE power supplies. [~$50]
When an local office supply store went out of business I purchased the 24 port Gbit Switch, and put it to use in the new network. What do I have need of a 24 port switch you ask?
I purchased a 1000 ft of CAT6 Ethernet cable and some modular RJ45 plugs and outlets and proceeded to run cable to every room in the house. Well, at least all the big rooms. The office and the three bedrooms upstairs were easier than the downstairs family room. For upstairs I cut a hole for the outlet plate, ran a very long drill bit up inside the wall, drilled a hole in the top plates of the walls into the attic. I would find the drill bit in the attic and pull a string back down the hold to the wall plate. To reach the down stairs I had to find a pathway from the attic upstairs to the downstairs. It just so happens that the both AC units are in the attic above the second floor and all of the ducting for the return air and supply ducts were passed through hidden spaces in the floor plan. I fished three CAT6 cables downstairs through one of these spaces and into a closet in the downstairs bedroom.
We just had a lighting strike nearby and the power went off for about 5 seconds. We did not loose network connection. And since my computers are all laptops they all stays up through the black out. Now if the power outage had lasted more than the an hour then my battery back up system would have given up the ghost and I would have been without high speed internet. Then it would be a good time to read or take a nap I think.
I will post later about my forays into home automation, more wood working ideas (my making sawdust) and other home projects.
A bit of history about me and computers.
I started working with computers back in the late 70's, before the internet, before the personal computer (PC), before the Apple Macintosh. At UT I worked on the big mainframe in Taylor Hall. I worked for a professor, A.J. Welch in the Bio-Med department and would help him out by taking his program runs down and submit them for compilation and execution. It would not be immediate turn around but eventually the print out would be tossed in the outfeed window and I would grab it and the box of punch cards and hike back up to the professors office. The project his was working on was pretty cool. He was trying to create a model of the back of the eye. The Retinas response to different wavelengths of light. The light sources were all lasers. We had an Argon Laser, a neodymium yag laser, a ruby laser, and a couple of others I can't recall. The model was the first effort to understand how to treat detached retina and other eye issues.
In school I learned to design with a microprocessor. I put the skills I learned to use at the work-study job. I helped out in the Bio-med lab trying to automate the timing of experiments and the data collection from temperature sensors. I used the Motorola 68000 with a parallel I/O chip, a multichannel Burr-brown analog to digital converter module and a serial interface chip to control the shutter timing of an Argon laser, index the stepper motors controlling the x-y-z coordinates of a platform, take temperature measurements and then storing the data on a digital formatted cassette tape. The data was used to perfect the eye model.
My first computer was a generic dual 5 1/4" floppy disk Intel 8086. I quickly outgrew this and upgraded to a Intel 286 with a 10 Mbyte hard disk and a 3 1/2 inch 700 Kbyte floppy disk. I used this machine a lot, used the programming skills learned in college to write some Basic Account Software for use to use for home accounting. It would take in all our income and expenses, categorize it and be able to create reports for doing taxes. I had a modem I could use to dial into an email provider and exchange email with whoever had it, I think I had a Yahoo mail account.
For the longest time I had DSL through AT&T then switched to Time Warner Road Runner internet service. My work, Motorola and later Freescale would even pay for it so I could work from home as needed, That lasted for about 10 years. I initially had 10 Mbit service, then 70 Mbit, then 300 Mbit service.
