House refurbishment - Cat 6 routing and termination

[viennese]

That's awesome! Networking a home is not a scary as it seems but I appreciate that it's easier when there is no furniture in the way and the flooring can come up!

It's interesting that BT did not remove your master socket. Is that still being used? I'm tempted to rip out my existing socket in my room just so the engineer will install everything new when he comes.

 

[JohnStewart]

If you are an existing BT customer, then you can retain your copper line for the telephone. If you are a new customer, then you have to take their digital voice package and use new VOIP phones via the BT Smart Hub, but I believe you do get the option of one advanced phone or two basic phones.

 

[viennese]

Thanks for confirming. I'm an existing customer but as everything in the house has been stripped down, the old BT socket has also made it to the skip.

So as an update summary, the Cat 6 cables will be installed on Monday. The patch panel and basic switch will reside in the loft and cables run down to all the rooms (2 per room). I will use the supplied BT Smart Hub 2 for now. ONT will also be in the office.

After reading back on this thread, I will use UniFi AP (with the UniFi Cloud Key Controller) mounted on the landing ceiling. Now speaking to several people they say go with a couple of the UAP-AC-LITE, one on each floor (I live in a standard 2 storey house with a rear extended kitchen).

Do I need one for the hall ceiling too? I don't know whether something like one UAP-AC-LR or PRO will suffice in the landing but I'm told that the more expensive APs cater for more connections to the AP rather than strength.

I'm more inclined to just add one to the hall anyway as once the carpets are down in the landing, I don't want to lift them up again to feed an ethernet cable! Am I going overkill here? Shame I can't test the strength of one AP just in the landing!

 

[bremen1874]

I'm more inclined to just add one to the hall anyway as once the carpets are down in the landing, I don't want to lift them up again to feed an ethernet cable! Am I going overkill here? Shame I can't test the strength of one AP just in the landing

Feed the cable but leave in it in the ceiling void. If you later find that it's required it wouldn't be much work to put it into service.

Now speaking to several people they say go with a couple of the UAP-AC-LITE, one on each floor

Sounds like good advice. I have one LITE on the living room ceiling. The signal upstairs 'behind it' has proved to be good enough. I was planning on installing another on the landing ceiling but never needed to.

 

[viennese]

That's a good idea to prepare the cable in the hall and pull it through if I need it

I just hope that I get a good BT engineer on installation day and that he is willing to pull the fibre through the conduit that I have prepared from the loft to the first floor bedroom. AFAIK they're not allowed to enter loft spaces.

 

[viennese]

You don’t necessary need to have the controller up and running all the time unless you want real-time monitoring. You also don’t need to use Ubiquiti hardware to run the controller, I run mine off a NAS and others run theirs on a Pi. I’ve not actually looked at it since I set it up though. You can just set up the APs using the phone app and call it done.

This is what confused me watching all the YT videos saying that if you want it on 24/7 you'll need the Cloud Key Controller or Pi or similar. Initially I thought that the controller had to be on for the AP to operate! I didn't quite understand what the controller did back then.

If you don't have the controller running, will all the monitoring be stored anywhere or will it just stop monitoring altogether and the next time it is turned on, all stats will be reset?

 

[b0rn2sk8]

You just don’t get network stats, logging, monitoring, it’s that simple really. Unless your into that or your having issues then the value it adds is pretty limited. Like I said I haven’t looked at it since I set it all up.