House Refurb: Wired Networking the place

[Marakith]

Hello

I'm about to have a load of work done on our house, including an extension, and significant remodelling on the ground floor, which is where our router is situated. Since we're also going to insulate the outside of the house I figured it'd be a good time to run CAT6 cables to all the rooms on the first floor. I saw a useful guide on here about wired networking but have a couple of questions (apologies if obvious - I don't want to screw it up):

1] Our router comes in on the ground floor where we'll be keeping the TV etc. Would the right thing be to just run all the cables from all the upstairs rooms down to the ground floor and connect them into the switch that way? I.e. terminating into labelled junction boxes on the ground floor and then connecting from those into a switch which is connected into a router?
2] It seems you can pay anything for a switch - are there any brands or standards to avoid? Any harm in going for a bigger one (like 16 ports) in case I need to expand?
3] Can you recommend any good hardware for managing internet access? As my kids start to go online independently, I'd like to be able to control internet access in terms of sites and making sure it's off at night. (ideally controlling the use of VPNs as well)
4] We do have a loft space - so potentially could move the switching gear upstairs to the loft, but I can't see a reason to (the guide suggested doing this though)
5] We also have a wireless mesh system in place - a linksys velop. So we'd run that in parallel with the wired network. Any issues with that?

Thanks so much in advance!

 

[Marakith]

As @SpellowHouse said I would do the same as well, when we re-wired back in 2021 we terminated all cables into keystones around the house that are sat flush in the wall with all the cables being run back to a singular patch panel in the center of the house where our networking gear lives.

In terms of where you would put the patch cable, I would be inclined to move the cabinet to somwhere that stays decent temperatures and is out of hearing reach just in case you get a PoE switch or something powered that has fans to avoid it disturbing you when you are watching TV. That being said you will need to be wary of where your BT/Virgin/Internet line is coming in as you want to be cable to get a connection from your modem/router to the switch.

For your other questions:

Switches - Entirely down to preference, I find that the HPE/Aruba, UniFi and TP-Link Omada series switches are decent with the HPEs having lifetime warranties but other brands like Zyxel and Mikrotik have good reputations. There's no harm in getting bigger switches but be wary that some may have fans and they can be loud so always check reviews, I would stick to 24 port or lower unless you have a need to go for any more ports as it can get very expensive.

Hardware - A decent router with content filtering should help sort that out, I believe UniFi's offering might do what you are looking for and it ties nicely into their switch and WiFi AP lines. Other stuff is available such as OPNSense which can work with pluggins if you are happy to "have a meddle"

Loft - Stay clear of putting stuff in the loft unless it is dust free and well ventilated, we boarded ours out and I had some cables run just in case I ever needed to put equipment up there but even then it gets very dusty and fluctuates wildly in temperature that I'm not comfortable putting anything up there other than a 4G backup router

Mesh - Personally, if you are re-wiring the entire house I would get some UniFi or TP-Link APs and pop them where you need them, you will have the cables for it so you may as well take advantage of them

Thanks - that's really helpful - especially the idea of replacing the mesh. I'm not rewiring the whole house so will look into whether I can use the APs as mesh points as well.