Welcome to Home Networking 101, the ultimate guide for beginners looking to unlock the full potential of their home networks. In this video, we're gonna discuss everything that you need to know about network switches and ethernet. We'll cover where to use network switches in your network, how to choose the best network switch for your network, and we'll also discuss the different types of ethernet cables that tie everything together. After this video, you should be able to determine where you may need a network switch in your home network, as well as the best type of switch for any given situation. So hang on to your ethernet cables as we dive into the fourth episode of Home Networking 101. Do you need help with your home networking? Then look no further than Rogue Support. In this tutorial series, we aim to make understanding networking concepts as simple as possible. However, if you find yourself stuck trying to figure out why your WiFi isn't working, or if you're trying to understand if you need to use a VLAN in your network, Rogue Support is here to help. Rogue Support offers expert, independent computer networking assistance, regardless of your mix of equipment. Our team of experts is ready to assist you with your networking issues, from initial setup and configuration, to optimizing your network performance and troubleshooting. So say goodbye to the frustration of trying to navigate network issues alone. Visit us on the web at rogue.support, or click the link in the description below to connect with one of our friendly Rogues. With Rogue Support, you're just a few clicks away from conquering your networking challenges and enjoying a secure and reliable home network. At its most basic, a network switch is a device that allows you to connect more wired devices into your network. And when you start getting into home networking, you're gonna wanna start hard-wiring everything. It's pretty common advice to add in more switching capacity than you think you're gonna need. That little eight-port switch fills up pretty quick, so why not start with 16 ports, right? Okay, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Here are some examples of where you may use switches in your network. In this first example, we're using a combo router, which probably has four or five switch ports on the back. I've added in a 16-port switch to expand the network's port capacity. Eight of those ports are just standard gigabit ports, and the other eight are gigabit ports with PoE, or power over ethernet. This is a way to power devices through ethernet without the need for an additional power cable. More on that later. Wireless access points, voice over IP, telephones, and surveillance cameras are all examples of devices that can utilize PoE for power. In this example, I'm also powering a small switch that then provides an additional four ports of connectivity to some entertainment devices. Here's another similar example with a standalone router where we're using our 16-port PoE switch to power up a couple of different wireless access points. For example, if you wanted one access point on each side of your house. In both of these cases, the 16-port switch is at the core of the network, tying together your wired devices as well as your PoE-powered devices. Finally, let's take a look at a small business network example. Here we have some larger rack-mounted 24-port switches, two of them for redundancy, connected with a 10-gigabit fiber backbone. We'll talk more about fiber a little bit later in this video. One thing to keep in mind when designing your network for switches is that you should try to bring all of your switch connections back to the main or core switches, if possible, and avoid daisy-chaining multiple switches together. It can still work if you do that, but with each additional daisy-chain switch, you're adding more points of failure between your devices and the router, and you're also possibly creating bottlenecks in the network if, for example, too many switches and devices are terminating all the way back to a single gigabit ethernet port. Another general rule of thumb in networking is that it's always better to hardwire a device if you can. Take a smart TV, for example. That's a device that could possibly be streaming 4K video from a streaming service such as Netflix, and possibly 8K video in the future. Most smart TVs have the option to connect to your network wirelessly, but they usually also have an ethernet port for wired connectivity. The wired connection is always going to be more robust than Wi-Fi because it's not subject to wireless interference or other issues related to your wireless access points. If you've ever experienced slow-loading videos, lags, or buffering when watching your favorite movie, it's very possible that those issues are due to wireless connectivity, and by hardwiring your devices into a switch, you take Wi-Fi out of the equation completely. Plus, the more devices that you hardwire, the fewer devices you'll have competing for wireless airtime. I personally try to hardwire as many devices as possible in my own home network. And when I say you should hardwire a device, that just means plug it into a network switch, right? Any network device with an ethernet port can be plugged into a network switch with an ethernet cable. The ends of the cable are what's known as RJ45 connectors, and those are standard across all networking devices. To plug into a device, simply use an ethernet cable to connect the ethernet port on your device to an open port in your network switch. Similarly, you can connect two network switches together with an ethernet cable as well, and we're gonna dig more into the different types of ethernet cables later in this video. So then what should you look for when choosing a switch for your own network? The first decision is how many ports do you need, right? Switches come in all flavors of port capacity, from little four and five port switches at the low end all the way up to like 48 port rack-mounted switches at the high end. It's rare that home users would ever need a 48 port switch though, so later in this video, I'm gonna give you some general switch recommendations for your home network. Most commonly in home networks, you're gonna see 16 or 24 port switches at the core or closest to the router, and then you may find some smaller switches closer to the wired devices. For example, this $29 five port flex mini switch from Ubiquiti is perfect for behind your entertainment center. You can feed one port in from another switch, and then you've got four ports for expanding wired access to your television, your Roku, your PlayStation, your Nintendo Switch, whatever other devices you happen to have. Another thing to consider is the speed of the ports in your switch. For smaller switches like this flex mini, one gigabit connectivity is very standard since most of the devices that you're gonna plug in here can't go or don't need to go faster than that. Switches with a one gigabit port speed are pretty standard these days, though the older standard was 10, 100, meaning 10 or 100 megabit or 1 10th the speed of today's standard gigabit switches. This will apply to most home users, but if you're designing a network with many switches, you don't wanna bottleneck those switches by adding in, for example, a 24 port switch that uses gigabit ethernet out to another 24 port switch, and then another 16 port switch further down the line. This is the daisy chaining of switches that I mentioned earlier. And this is why many models of larger switches and routers have uplink ports that provide 2.5 or 10 gigabit connectivity. These are typically meant to connect switches together so that if multiple devices are maxing out their one gigabit switch ports, you're not then trying to cram all of that throughput into a single gigabit port all the way back to your router. When you're dealing with higher end switches, those uplink ports are often provided in the form of SFP cages. SFP stands for small form factor pluggable, which is a swappable transceiver that plugs into an available SFP port. Notice here on this switch, we have two SFP ports. Into these ports, you can add a fiber transceiver for plugging in a fiber cable. You can use an ethernet transceiver for plugging in an ethernet cable, or you can use what's called DAC, or direct attach copper, which plugs directly into each SFP port without an additional transceiver module. I used a DAC cable recently in my Frankenstein's Dream Machine video. Most home users won't have a need for SFP ports or fiber connectivity at all, but it is good to understand that these options exist. Another concept to understand with network switches is managed versus unmanaged switches. An unmanaged switch is also known as a dumb switch, right? Since there's no graphical user interface that you can log into to make configuration changes within the switch itself. It basically just takes whatever you plug into it and then it expands the ports that are available. It's super simple to set up since there's literally no configuration necessary at all. You just plug it in. A managed switch, on the other hand, will still function like an unmanaged switch in that you can simply plug in an uplink to your router or another switch, and it's gonna replicate that connection out to the other ports. But with a managed switch, you can configure the settings of the switch and the individual ports within the switch. Usually this is done with a graphical user interface or through a managed network ecosystem such as Ubiquiti's UniFi or TP-Link Omada. So then why would you need to manage a switch? Well, there are many reasons. Managed switches allow you to turn some features on and off for a particular port. For example, power over ethernet. Maybe you want power, maybe you don't want power. You can enable or disable it. You can also manually set the link speed of an interface in case you have a device that won't auto-negotiate to one gigabit or 100 megabit. Managed switches also unlock some more advanced functionality such as port mirroring, which allows you to take all of the network traffic that's flowing through one port and then mirror it over to a second port. This is helpful for applications that monitor your network so that they have a view of all of your network traffic without affecting the traffic itself. Another more advanced feature is called aggregation. This is where you combine multiple ports of a switch to function as a single port. So for example, if you have four separate gigabit ports aggregated together, you essentially now have a four gigabit port. And since we're talking about more advanced features, you may also come across switches that say they're either layer two or layer three switches. Now this is getting a little advanced for a beginner tutorial, so I'm gonna keep it really simple here. Layer two versus layer three is referring to what's known as the OSI network model. This is a seven layer conceptual model representing all of the various elements of networking from the physical cable all the way up to the application that's displayed on your computer monitor that you as a human interact with. Layer two of the OSI model refers to the data link layer, which includes ethernet as well as switching at the hardware level. Layer three on the other hand refers to the network layer, which includes routing and IP addressing. So with a layer three switch, this basically means that that particular model of switch goes beyond simple ethernet port connectivity and also includes features related to actually routing traffic. Layer three switches are typically seen in very large networks where there's so many data packets flying around the network it just makes sense to reduce network traffic by doing some of the routing at the switch level rather than having all of those packets go all the way back to the router to get from point A to point B. In general, home users will never need to use layer three switching in their networks, but it is good to understand that the concept of using a switch as a router exists just in case you see that terminology pop up when you're designing your network. Since we're talking about more advanced switching concepts, we do have to mention VLANs or virtual local area networks. VLANs are a way of dividing up a physical network such as the LAN, the local area network that we've been talking about this whole series so far into multiple separated networks. Now you can think of VLANs like creating separate rooms in a house, right? The house itself is your physical network. And if it's just a big empty space inside that house with no rooms or walls, you'd be able to walk around and go wherever you want, right? But when you start adding walls and rooms are VLANs, right? You're creating separate spaces and you can control access to those spaces with doors and locks. VLANs allow you to create separate areas of your network that you can grant or deny access to using firewall rules or what's known as access control lists. Now to be clear, most simple home networks don't need to use VLANs. So then what are the advantages to using VLANs? Well, there are a few. First is gonna be network performance. If you create separate VLANs, network traffic can be told to stay within its own VLAN, right? If we think about our house analogy, let's say my home office here is a separate VLAN. I can lock the door in order to prevent my kids from running in and out of here all day causing distractions, right? That reduces unnecessary traffic here in my office. VLANs are also good for security purposes. These days, we all have a ton of miscellaneous IoT devices such as our Roku's and smart vacuums and smart light bulbs and whatnot. These devices often maintain connections out to the proverbial cloud, right? And those cloud service can possibly get compromised by hackers. If we separate out our IoT devices into their own secure VLAN so that we can get to the IoT devices from our mainland and the IoT devices have internet access, but they don't have access back into that mainland, right? We're adding an extra layer of protection in our network. One final feature of switches that we need to discuss is power over ethernet or PoE for short. PoE is a technology that allows network cables to carry electrical power. Normally, your higher powered devices such as your television or your computer need both an ethernet cable for connecting to the network and separately, a power cable to supply power. But some lower powered devices such as wireless access points, video surveillance cameras and voice over IP telephones can receive both power and network connectivity through a single ethernet cable. There are a few different types of PoE and they all have to do with how much power that network port is capable of delivering out to your end devices. When buying a switch, you may see ports designated as PoE, PoE plus or PoE plus plus. This is just a way for you to know how much power a switch port can provide with PoE being the lowest and PoE plus plus being the highest. Most network switches with PoE these days provide PoE plus, a technology that is also known as 802.3AT which is the IEEE designation for that specific type of power over ethernet. I should also mention that some specialized devices such as point to point access points may use the less common passive PoE such as 24 volt passive or 48 volt passive. The difference between standard PoE and passive PoE is that switches with standard PoE can automatically sense whether or not a device that's plugged into an ethernet port needs power or not versus passive PoE that is always sending power down that line regardless of what's plugged in. It's more rare that you'll see network switches especially those that are marketed towards home users with passive PoE and often that's a feature that you would have to specifically enable on a per port basis because you can absolutely fry a device if you plug it into a passive PoE port and it can't handle the power that's coming from that switch. Okay, so now we've talked a lot about some of the more advanced features of network switches as well as what to keep an eye out for if you're planning on purchasing one. But any network switch is pretty useless without an ethernet cable to plug into it, right? So now let's explore the different types of ethernet cables. Ethernet cables come in different categories. The category of a network cable is always printed on the side of the cable itself. You'll see something like Cat5e or Cat6 or Cat7. The most common types of network cables in use today are Cat5e which is capable of speeds up to one gigabit and Cat6 which are capable of 10 gigabits though that's over a shorter distance than Cat5e. The differences between these types of cables physically usually has to do with the reduction of crosstalk. Within an ethernet cable, there are eight smaller copper wires that are split into four twisted pairs. Crosstalk is what happens when signals from one cable interfere with the other cables when it can just cause all kinds of weird network problems. Fun fact, my company name Crosstalk Solutions comes from this term because I just thought it sounded cool. When an ethernet cable is designated as Cat5e or Cat6 or Cat7, the difference is that the higher categories of cables do more to prevent crosstalk which makes them rated for higher speeds. Now this is done in a number of ways but primarily it has to do with shielding the wires inside the ethernet cable from the other wires with plastic separators or other types of shielding. With higher categories of cables, you get more speed and distance than the lower categories but they're also more expensive. Now at this point, however, Cat5e cables and Cat6 cables are almost identical in price. So if you're purchasing ethernet cables, I would recommend getting Cat6 as those cables are going to be perfect for around the home use and they should be relatively future-proof for years to come. As for where to buy cables, Amazon is great or Monoprice.com. They both have Cat6 cables in almost any length or color that you want and you don't really need to buy super expensive ones. The cheaper cables are typically perfectly fine and definitely stay away from the hardware stores or big box stores for ethernet cables. You will almost certainly pay way too much for cables at those locations. If you wanna take it a step further, you can also make your own cables by buying Cat6 cable in bulk and then terminating RJ45 ethernet ends onto the cables. Now I usually only do this myself if I have like a really long cable run that's going from one part of my house to another or if I'm running cables outdoors because they make specific outdoor rated cable. Now I've done a video on how to make ethernet cables in the past and I will link that video down below. If you do end up making your own ethernet cables, you'll also wanna pick up a cable tester so that you know if you terminated everything properly. Ethernet testers can be purchased for as low as 10 bucks or so or you can get a fancier one like this Klein tools tester for around 50 bucks and I wouldn't recommend spending more than that on a cable tester unless you're actually trying to pursue a career in low voltage electrical. All right, so now onto some network switch recommendations and again, this is gonna be very dependent on your networking needs and most specifically, how many ports you need and whether or not you need power over ethernet. If you're just looking to add a few ethernet ports to your network perhaps behind your television, well, both Netgear and TP-Link make some super cheap unmanaged five port gigabit switches for less than 20 bucks. I always keep a spare one of these in my network bag just in case I ever need it or if you're into the Ubiquiti UniFi ecosystem, you can pick up the Flex mini switch for about 29 bucks. This is a bit of a step up from the unmanaged switches and it can be controlled by the UniFi network central software controller. Stepping up into the eight and 16 port model switches, I personally like the Ubiquiti UniFi switches, especially these like light models that provide gigabit connectivity for every port and also have some ports that can do power over ethernet. For standalone switches, I like both TP-Link and Netgear for home use. Both of these companies offer eight and 16 port gigabit switches in managed flavors, unmanaged flavors with or without PoE. For a managed eight port switch with PoE capability, you're usually looking at between 60 to 120 bucks. This Netgear eight port switch with PoE plus for instance, is just about 60 bucks. Beyond the eight and 16 port switches, there are basically tons of options for both 24 and 48 port switches, but it's still the same concept when you're making your purchasing decision, right? How many ports do you need? Do you need power over ethernet? And you have a need for higher speed ports that are gonna connect switches together. Also keep in mind that typically with 24 port switches and higher, the form factor is usually rack mount, right? Which means they're the size of equipment that fits into a 19 inch network rack. So there may be some additional costs if you also wanna buy a rack to house the equipment. All right, so that was a ton of information that I just threw at you in regards to network switches, but hopefully you learned enough to make an informed decision. Remember that if you get stuck trying to figure out what equipment you need or how to design your network, Rogue Support is available to help you out. We've had a number of people open up tickets just to have us design out a network based on their needs, and we are more than happy to do so. If you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand selected a couple of videos on the right here for you to watch next. The top video is my full home networking 101 playlist, and the bottom video is my guide to making your own ethernet cables.
