What hardware do I need for my home network?

[ZeeWrath]

I've wired up my house in cat5e, they all terminate in my garage where I currently have:

14points to various places in the house
virgin superhub 3(router mode but wifi turned off)
2 poe ip cameras

at the moment the ones that are connected go into a 8port(4 are poe) switch

The virgin wifi was very slow so I'm using an old bt home hub as a wap+switch in the attic

Do I need a 24port switch with POE? Can I just add more (much cheaper) 8 port switches

Should the homehub/extra switches go into the virgin router or one of the switches?

Thanks

 

[bledd]

I would stick with the 8 port switch and add a 16 or 24 port non PoE switch.

A 24 port PoE switch will be needlesly expensive just for the sake of two ports, and most likely won't be fanless.

 

[WJA96]

As stated by Bledd, you can stack switches with the only proviso being that every time you stack a switch you limit all the traffic on that switch to chunks of the bandwidth available on the uplink port that connects the switches together. And if noise is an issue, then small fanless switches are good.

I initially tried to do something similar to what you are suggesting with lots of cheap switches but in the end I bought a 48 port 500W PoE switch because it was the optimal solution to the problem. Yes, you can buy something cheap, but if you end up buying the expensive thing 12 months later as well, then common sense says do it properly the first time you do it, even if it’s more expensive to do it that way in the beginning.

I was very surprised how little bandwidth cameras use (I have a lot of cameras) but if you end up adding an AC Access Point then an uplinked port switch could bottleneck your network if you are doing something like backing up an iPad Pro or something wireless that has a properly fast AC WiFi connection. And then you start thinking “Why didn’t I buy a managed switch with Link Aggregation” and eventually you will just buy that 24 port switch because it’s what you really needed to do the job in the first place.