Questions finally building a decent network

[NickF1227]

Okay-- so this is my first adventure into building a decent home network. For the past several years I've gone through 4 Linksys routers (WRT54GS, WRT54GL, E3000, and most recently the EA4200). All of which have run DD-WRT since almost day one, and I have fallen in love with the firmware. However, all but the WRT54GL have failed on me after a couple of years.
The EA4200 still works, but recently the 5GHz band has stopped working on me. It still transmits the signal, but it does not connect to the internet. I may have have misconfigured something, perhaps one of you can help me with this? However, I have also been having massive ping spikes while gaming on the 2.4GHz band, in the middle of the night when no one else is around to cause interference. So I'm giving up on it.

So--- background aside--- I just purchased a Netgear R7000 AC1900. I dont have any AC clients yet, but will throw an Intel AC 7260 in my laptop one of these days. Nothing wrong with a little bit of future proofing. I plan on using it only as an access point with DDWRT. Its probably crazy overkill for that, but I'm done with having issues and I want good quality signal.

I plan on using an old Del E510 I have laying around with a dual port Intel Pro 1000 NIC as a router, probably running pfSense, and then using the Netgear as an access point.

For reference: There are 5 of us in the house, 3 smart phones, 3 iPads, & 4 laptops. Also I have a few friends over with laptops gaming from time to time. We have a Comcast 30/5 (I think) internet connection. We have a decent sized yard and not a whole lot of signal interference from neighbors. My laptop is usually hard wired to the ethernet and hooked up to an external monitor, everything else is wireless. I am planning on building a FreeNAS box in the near future.

So SNB gurus, does this sound like a decent setup? Any suggestions for this noob?

 

[azazel1024]

Sure it sounds like a decent setup. Do you think it'll do what you want it to? If so then it is a decent setup.

My setup is as follows.

~2400sq-ft home, 1400sq-ft main level and 1000sq-ft basement, plus a 2 car garage and 1.01 acre property. I have a massive masonry chimney and fireplace offset in my house between my kids playroom/our TV room and the rest of the house.

To get good Wifi coverage over the house I have to use a router and an AP. The router (Netgear 3500L) is located in my basement office at one side of the house and the access point (also a Netgear 3500L) is located in the playroom on the TV cabinet just on the other side of the masonry fireplace.

Recently, to give better outdoor coverage, I added a TP-Link 849nd in my garage a few feet from the far corner of my house with 3' coax leads running through the garage wall outside with the 5dBi antennas hanging down from the eves of my garage. This gives backyard (and side/front yard) coverage.

Pretty much no where in my house does the signal drop below -60dB and it is generally in the -50dB or higher range. Outside, kind of the same, except the side yard opposite the garage/outdoor AP does get down in to the -70dB range as the house shields any wireless device from those antennas and the basement AP, though above ground level and up against the outside wall, is stuck behind cinderblock. Same with the front yard once you walk towards the the side diagonal to the garage AP, you start getting weak signal. You CAN connect from almost anywhere in the yard, but where I need it, in the backyard, it doesn't dip below -65dB anywhere and generally in the fifties.

For the hardwired end of things, the one Netgear 3500L takes care of routing and DHCP duties. My current core is a TP-Link SG2216 16-port managed switch which has run out of ports on it, so I have a used Trendnet TEG-160ws 16-port managed switch I just got real cheap coming to bolster things. I'll trunk a pair of ports on each switch as the uplink between them. The house is wired with Cat5e and a lone Cat6. All future wiring will be Cat6 and I am adding a few more LAN drops this spring while renovating the playroom (hence needing the extra switch capacity as I am using 15 of 16 ports and I need at least 2-3 more for that reno).

My server is the core services machine running iTunes server, hosting SMB shares, Calibre server and automated backups of several machines on the network. Its wired in with a pair of Intel Gigabit CT NICs as is my desktop with Windows 8 on the server and 8.1 on my desktop (SMB Multichannel goodness).

That pretty much covers my entire setup. It works well for me...but its a question of what works for you? It sounds like you've found what will work well for you.

The only thing I'd question is, would it make more sense to run a pair of wireless access point located at opposite ends of your house? Depending on house size that might give you much better coverage of the house and also give better outdoor coverage too. I have mine setup in 20/40/20MHz mode as mine are 2.4GHz only, so no channel overlap. Outdoor is Channel 11 20MHz, "centeral" AP is 40MHz on channel 2+6 (my tablet doesn't like 1+5 in 40MHz mode for some CRAZY reason) and the basement router is on Channel 11 20MHz.

It gives the best overall throughput without any bandwidth sharing at all. Now if the FCC would just free up a couple more 2.4GHz channels along with the 5GHz bandwidth they are looking at, that would make my life real nice. We only need 3 more channels to do a pair of non-overlapping 40MHz networks. Sigh.

 

[sfx2000]

to the OP - sounds fine...

Not sure how it would be much better - I'm not a huge fan of DD-WRT for various reasons, but other than that...