Help me make the complex simple! New wireless/wired home network

[flaca]

Hi all, first time poster here. This is a UK-specific question so feel free to tell me if I should post somewhere else.

It might be time to upgrade my home network. Everything works fine, but there are increasing dropouts and decreasing speeds. Not sure whether it's an ageing router, increased congestion or my imagination (and my wife's).

Situation
General
Fairly small house built 30 years ago, no thick stone walls or anything. Garage connected to house.

Living room
Billion BiPac 7800N router, positioned in bay window behind TV, hardwired to BT Openreach FTTC modem. FTTC socket is next to Bay window, hence the location of the current kit. Several devices hardwired into BiPac, including network music streamer, Apple TV and Sky+ box. BiPac provides wifi to whole house (no other wireless APs) but is hardwired to Solwise homeplug 500 to give wired connection to Home Office.

Home Office
Solwise homeplug 500 connected to TP-link el cheapo Gigabit switch with hardwired PC, NAS, laptop and 2 printers.

All around the house including in the Garage
Two phones, two ipads and at least one other laptop on the go quite a lot of the time. In the evening it's usually everything at once. Devices are mostly N but a couple of AC, and all future devices will be AC.

Usage and performance
Lots of streaming video and audio from/to wired and wireless devices. A few big files sent from time to time between a PC and one of the printers in the home office. One small impatient child and his even more impatient parents . Acceptable but patchy and often "slower than should be" connections, e.g. buffering video. Not convinced the homeplugs are doing a great job but I've nothing solid to base that on, just expectation! Printers are both network capable and hardwired to router so no need for a print-server in the router. No need for USB file transfer via the router either. No need for cellular backup and despite my pretensions, I don't really think there are any enterprise class features needed either.

Options as I see them - comments please
1. VDSL Wifi Router, ditch the BT Openreach FTTC modem, possibly struggle with router ports unless I ditch the homeplugs too, which I'd be fine with
2. Keep the BT Openreach model, hardwire to a Wifi Router somewhere else in the living room away from TV etc to hopefully get better wifi signal (10m Cat5 would do it - ideally flat), use another wifi AP in the home office to increase coverage, hardwire to existing or new/better Gigabit switch in the home office

I'm leaning towards option 2 - but only if it gets more speeeeeeeeeeeed.

Regarding router class, having read the reviews etc. I can't see it's worth getting more than an AC1750 at most as it seems that anything else is just exciting marketing stuff? I don't mind paying for faster processors, more memory etc, and more options are always nice, but I won't use USB ports or NAS things or print server functionality as I say.

So, advice please, which Option and which kit?

Cheers,
Scott

 

[System Error Message]

When i had VDSL internet it was before BT came out with it but the installation was done by BT openreach and they gave zyxel modem/router that was actually good at being both. It featured a more complicated MIPS than was commonly used but some on the city forum said a particular brand was better but i cant really remember which brand. They have been around for a while and sell load balancers, multi WAN firewalls with rj11 ports. If i remember correctly BT has specific speeds so unless you are not getting those speeds a better modem wont help if you are syncing at those speeds or better.

If you have the zyxel modem/router specifically the pnu....fx or f1 or f3 than theres no need to change the router/modem. for wifi consider an AC3200 (with wifi processors) or AC1750 or AC 1900 as they dont have bottlenecks for LAN which makes them good for streaming and file transfers however the more wifi traffic you expect you would need to use 5 Ghz and more APs instead of going for denser routers like the AC5300 or 4x4 based AC that are connected through the CPU as LAN ports on the router are only connected to the CPU by a 1Gb/s link shared among 4 ports.

I might be selling my asus ac68U so if you are in the UK and interested i can let you know later when i have time. wifi placement is important and if you can use less APs it would be better but it depends on how much wifi bandwidth and coverage you need.

 

[flaca]

Thanks SEM,

Regarding the modem, the question was more about whether to get an integrated modem/router, so a one-box VDSL capable modem/wifi router or keep the BT provided modem (Huawei HG612) and get a separate wifi router. Separate modem and router might make it a bit easier to position the wifi router somewhere more central as I could run a long (10m) Cat5 cable from the Huawei box to the router - maybe you can do this with the RJ11 cable into the FTTC modem but not sure how long you can run those.

Also, VDSL wifi modem routers seem harder to find than "standard" modem routers but maybe I just don't know how to look!

Actually, thinking about it, one of the main things I'm trying to do is have the wifi signal in the living room come from a different place than stuck in a bay window behind the telly. But that's where all the connected AV kit is, so I will need some kind of switch there, and I'll need a router to plug into the BT FTTC modem..., or have a VDSL router and a separate access point. You can see why I'm getting confused!

How about this config then?
Living room
BT Openreach modem --> router (or VDSL so no Openreach modem) --> wireless access point in more central location than rest of kit.

Home office
wireless access point --> Gigabit switch

Does that make sense?

Recommendations for specific kit welcome.

 

[System Error Message]

regarding your plan unless you really need it you can have the wifi and router be the same thing, otherwise you can attach both the living room and home office to the same switch if it is a managed switch and do vlans and segmentations so you can have the same wired network but with control. The reason not to have too many devices is that you save power but as far as power usage is concerned there are some MIPS based routers that uses less than 5W while providing more than enough throughput for UK's internet speeds. You can have the router and wifi seperate and configure multiple SSIDs with segmentation so it is not overkill. I have a CCR1036 which people would say is overkill for UK's internet and while it may be overkill since it only uses 1% CPU max for all the load i put on it but if you can go with overkill go ahead as long as it doesnt affect practicality.

As far as i would like to write an article here on using a router like ubiquiti or mikrotik at home with a good example config and what you can do with a raspberry pi as a mini server and home automation while being powered by the router i've been swamped by my studies. Ive collected a lot of information here about what is used at home and how to configure for such. For example my router is configured to only allow what is needed so if someone just randomly tried to hack or do a port scanned they get blacklisted. RMerlin's firmware adds iptables that lets you configure the firewall the same way.

With the modem you have i suggest seperate router/modem.

 

[flaca]

Thanks, very helpful. The CCR1036 looks great but def more than I need! I think unmanaged switches are fine for me, I don't need vlans or multiple SSIDs or anything. Everything can be on the same network, no problem. Reason for suggesting wireless AP separate from the router is just to get the wireless signal out from it's current constrained location.

Good stuff thanks.

If anyone else has any suggestions - feel free!

Cheers,
Scott

 

[System Error Message]

you can go about it this way since the UK only has 150Mb/s internet max (uploads for that is pretty much useless).
modem ----wifi router----switch---AP or router---switch===APs. You can get a consumer router and disable wifi. If you have the skill ubiquiti ER-X or mikrotik RB750gr2 as examples that are inexpensive that are wired only routers. many consumer routers work stably as APs, so if you just need wifi but without any advanced wifi features like multiple SSIDs, guest networks, etc than you can even get tp-link, ubiquiti wifi APs, etc. Just avoid dlink.

 

[flaca]

Extremely helpful, thanks SEM. I'll go that route I think. The routers look good, I'll probably go down that route. Hopefully not too complicated to get everything working. Anyway, I can tinker over Christmas...

 

[System Error Message]

i forgot to mention you want cat5e cables and not cat5. Cat5a can only do 100Mb/s and cat5e can do 1Gb/s.

 

[flaca]

Thanks, I have Cat5e cables - not sure if that was just luck that I bought the right ones

I think I'm going to buy a Draytek router rather than going ER-X or Mikrotik - I'm a bit time short to learn the ins and outs.