GRcade

My wife's workplace is paying for us to have an Ethernet point installed in the home as she will be getting an internet connected permanent phone (Not a mobile). They said they'd pay for just what's needed (fair enough). I immediately thought wire the pc to the tv via steamlink and voila comfy sofa gaming

Anyway, our phone point and router (shitty sky one) Is downstairs, and the study is upstairs, so am I right in thinking a dual point in both rooms directly connected would work? Or do we need to get a dedicated router to manage it? It will be installed for us.

Thanks!

Probably best burning down the house and building a new one from scratch with ports in all rooms.

That was my first thought

I don't know what you mean by dual point in both rooms?

The basic answer is that most routers also act as ethernet switches, so t'internet goes into router, router goes into whatever you want it to go into. In your instance you could have a female socket downstairs next to the router that's wired up to a female socket in the upstairs room. Then just male to male from the router to the downstairs socket and male to male from the upstairs socket to your steam link.

Sandy's right, you only actually need one socket on both ends, unless you mean you want to plug 2x devices independently into the upstairs one? Then yes that would require 2 sockets. Unless you add another switch upstairs that is. I suppose you may as well get two sockets if it's the same price. It's the difference of a few quid when ethernet is bought on a spool. 2 sockets is not going to cost more than a few pennies over 1 either. You're paying for the labour.

Yes, two devices at once upstairs (so phone and pc) and the router thing is exactly what I was wondering. Thanks both of you

you want to buy a small network switch (4 port), but if anything just put 2 sockets in upstairs.

Am I right in thinking this network switch can be rolled in to a new router? So get a decent one to replace the sky one to also double as the switch?

Yes

Great, thanks everyone

As far as the wiring goes future proof as much as possible. Cat6 at LEAST

Ad7 wrote:Am I right in thinking this network switch can be rolled in to a new router? So get a decent one to replace the sky one to also double as the switch?

Yeah that will work but you will have to use the Sky hub as the modem because Sky do not allow you to configure your own modem if you are on fibre. They do that so they can snoop/monitor your traffic performance to adjust settings on the fly. So you have to use that as modem only to connect, plug that to new wall ethernet socket, then connect your new wifi/router to the socket upstairs if that's what you mean?

Need to set the sky hub to modem only mode or something or simply don't connect to its wifi. You can disable the WIFi on it by setting it's mode to "None" or something, I think. It's not very good anyway. Or... you could leave it on so that you have Wifi access points upstairs and downstairs, or put them on different Wifi channels so you have a broader spectrum of radio frequencies to connect to in case one is crappy in one place and not so bad on the other (it depends on how many other WIfi networks there are and where they are in relation to yours).

On Sky you can't replace the hub entirely because cuntishness. Sky won't reveal your connection details as they are hardcoded into the hub they send you (if you explore the backend for it there are no options anywhere for username and password, PPpoE/A settings etc., it's all programmed in when they send it out). So you can't totally get rid of it.

Then your new router/switch will by your new wifi access point / LAN.

Note: when you set up an Ethernet + Wifi set up, you are actually create two networks - the Ethernet one and the Wifi. It's the router (built into your typical home networking hub you get from internet provider or buy or whatever) that is allowing these to talk together. A switch is something else and is almost universally an Ethernet type device.

The sucky thing about this is the sky hub is not gigabit ethernet so you won't get the fastest speed between Internet and your network (which is usually much faster than the internet connection so it doesn't matter, but still).

If you don't want that complication just buy a 4-port gigabit switch by itself. All it's going to do is switch internet traffic around and connect devices requesting connections to specific IPs/devices for filesharing, media streaming etc. A network hub (moden/router/switch combined together) is actually a bit slower than this because it's having to do more work and share more bandwidth all the time.

You'll need to configure your network to use fixed IPs or weird stuff happens with DHCP (dynamic IP assignment giving two devices the same IP address and stuff). Once you've done that it should be fine. It sounds more complicated than it is by virtue of how unmanaged Ethernet switches work, they do most of the hard work for you and it may well "just work" when you plug it all together.

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/lan-switch.htm

I have a gigabit Netgear switch and would recommend one of those, a 4-port is not expensive and a 100mbit (Fast Ethernet) is even cheaper.

https://www.ebuyer.com/52760-netgear-pr ... IgQAvD_BwE

That's actually 5 port so one port free!!!

Connect your printer to it or whatever.

Green Gecko wrote:useful stuff

Blimey, thanks. I'll have a good read of that tomorrow and suss out what I've actually got and put this to use.

Just a thought, I'd guess you don't care about cost if you aren't paying for it. But unless you've got really shitty wiring, going to the trouble of running cable and putting in ports seems a little overkill.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TL-PA4020PKIT- ... 01M16AZTI/

In most circumstances the above would be fine for what you need, assuming you have the spare ports on your router already you wouldn't need anything else (if you don't have the spare ports a cheap 4 port switch would work).

Thanks HS28, and I'm currently looking at this

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TL-PA9020PKIT- ... 05-3643492

After we were quoted £500 to put Ethernet in

Stupid question time again, will wiring up in this fashion work? (Apropo achieving steam link on the tv Which has it built in):

Downstairs:
The router goes in to the powerline, my tv wires in to the router (or powerline if that would work)

Upstairs:
Wife's phone in powerline, pc in powerline.

Ad7 wrote:Thanks HS28, and I'm currently looking at this

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TL-PA9020PKIT- ... 05-3643492

After we were quoted £500 to put Ethernet in

Stupid question time again, will wiring up in this fashion work? (Apropo achieving steam link on the tv Which has it built in):

Downstairs:
The router goes in to the powerline, my tv wires in to the router (or powerline if that would work)

Upstairs:
Wife's phone in powerline, pc in powerline.

Nope, won't work...unless the upstairs and downstairs sockets are on the same ring main (i.e. fuse in the consumer unit). This won't normally be the case, as the upstairs and downstairs are usually separate to accommodate any overloading of the circuits.

You need one of these:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/Devolo-dLAN-50 ... 078&chn=ps

Plug one in near the router, and plug an Ethernet cable into it. Then the other one, plug it in near the PC and then run an Ethernet cable to it.

Apparently, these run off the house earthing system. Ingenious! (and it's patented to Devolo).

I'd advise anyone to get a pair of these as you will get super high speed connections.

I've used TP-link powerline adapters in 4 separate houses and have never had any problems going across different fuses.

I've just looked at the fuse box and there doesn't appear to be a clear bank of up and down fuses (at least they're not labelled as such). There's 2 next to each other marked sockets, so I guess I could plug a lamp in at the top and bottom stair sockets and flip the breakers to see if they are on different ones.

Again, maybe I've just been lucky or something but I've used them across fuses multiple times with zero issues.

Jenuall wrote:Again, maybe I've just been lucky or something but I've used them across fuses multiple times with zero issues.

That's strange. I struggled with a couple of TP models until the Maplin guys showed me the Devolo - which worked straight away. Maybe TP do them too now.