We're looking at buying a new house; the one we have in mind is a complete renovation project (right now it's just external walls, most of the floors and a few of the internal walls). What that does give me the chance to do is wire up the house with hidden CAT5 and install a selection of wireless points. However, as it's beyond a bog standard 4 port wireless router as one might normally use for domestic networking, I'm fairly clueless. Requirements for the setup will probably be for it to support 8-12 fixed Ethernet ports plus 3 wireless access points throughout the house. Can someone with more knowledge than me advise on suitable components for this. In particular, any scheme I've seen for multiple wireless access points from a domestic setup seems to bugger up security, and I'd like to keep the whole network on at least WPA2, with the option of MAC address filtering still.

As long as you get the wiring right, the rest can be tweaked later. I guess one cat5 in every room as a minimum, plus suitable locations for the access points. You'll also be putting in the electrics I guess?

Any thoughts on distributed HiFi and video? You can do a lot over IP, but dedicated wiring is usually simpler for live TV.

For the cat5, you can either terminate to a patch panel or a row of cat5 sockets. You can get quad sockets so you wouldn't need a ridiculous number of them. It's also possible to simply crimp connectors onto the cables, but that is cheap and nasty and very prone to problems.

The hardware side shouldn't be too complicated. A normal wireless 4 port router, the ADSL modem type unless you can get fibre there in which case go for it. An 8 port gigabit switch is pretty cheap now. For the access points, if you don't absolutely need seamless roaming then you can just use 2 or 3 normal domestic ones on different channels, but with the same name and password as the router. Connect them directly to the router to save wasting the gigabit. You may want to consider PoE to make the wiring easier and tidier. You can either use a PoE switch, or use injectors.

If you do want seamless roaming, then that's rather out of my depth. You'll need very much more expensive hardware though.

IMO, you'd be better with one socket in each room - you can always use hubs if you need to - if you use gigabit through the whole setup you'll have bandwidth to burn. Plus then if something does go wrong you don't have to pull a patch panel out of the wall and try and and troubleshoot it - just swap the hub over and you're probably back up and running.

Don't bother with full APs to extend your wifi, just get a few of these or similar and put them in the right places and you'll have decent wifi all over.

Basically, it's a house. There's no need to treat it like an office building, because it isn't. Hidden ethernet wiring to a discretely placed socket in each room with a power socket next to it, plug in an ethernet hub or repeater into each and then it's all pretty much plug & play and it's all easily replaceable. The more you build into the walls, the more replastering you're going to find yourself doing at some point...

POE? Patch panels? WIFI roaming? More expensive, far too much like hard work and (in my experience) not any more reliable or functional.

Jon

I'd have to disagree with that. A consumer level AP need be no more expensive, is far more likely to work effectively and will give better bandwidth.

Even if you don't end up using them, surely it makes sense to run the cables while the walls are down so there is always the choice? We're only talking a few meters of cable and some staples at this point. Fitting it later would be a lot more disruptive.

I'll probably run CAT5 for wireless APs at this stage because as JJ observes, it's a lot easier to do with bare walls than once everything is installed / plastered etc.

The issue I had last time trying to set up a wireless bridge was that I could not set it up with any form of security on it (this was using some of the better Netgear consumer level equipment), so what I want to make sure of is that I can run several wireless access points / repeaters (whatever required to give good coverage throughout the house) with a suitable security standard set.

Also, is running an 8 or 16 port switch off an ordinary router likely to create a bottleneck at all?

Not at all. Even the cheapest gigabit switch will handle far more data than any broadband connection can deliver. Just make sure all the "fast" stuff, ie computers, is plugged into the switch and not the router.

Of course. Herp Derp on my part there!