2.5 Gigabits ought to be enough for anybody

today i'm going to double the speed of my wired network upgrading this one gigabit network switch to a 2.5 gig version and also install a new wi-fi 6 access point connected at 2.5 gigabits using power over ethernet this switch is a 2.5 gig poe plus switch from qnap and i splurged a bit so i could have 16 ports of 2.5 gig poe plus power in addition to four 10 gig ports and two of those have the maximum poe plus plus standard up to 90 watts a port these kind of switches are great for small to medium businesses that want to install the latest fast wi-fi hotspots or other high-speed powered devices on their network i've been upgrading parts of my home network to 10 gigs but you know what 2.5 gigs is still more than twice as fast as gigabit but it's a lot cheaper than 10 gigs and the best part is i can keep using the cat5e cables i pulled when i moved into my house which i'd have to replace if i went all 10 gig but i do want the fastest wi-fi possible which is wi-fi 6 for now since wi-fi 6 can go beyond 1 gigabit i need my wire network to also go beyond 1 gig for wi-fi i'm going to install this netgear ax 3600 wi-fi 6 access point powered over 2.5 gig ethernet the main reason for the wi-fi upgrade is because right now my main access point is downstairs at my network rack i'd rather have a dedicated access point in the main living area upstairs and a separate router in my rack this access point has more capacity than a standard consumer router like the asus i was using downstairs not that it was bad i just wanted something upstairs and i didn't think my wife would take too fondly to this monstrosity hanging on a wall near the kitchen to be clear none of this video is sponsored i bought all this gear and i'll give my honest opinions at the end after the install so let's start installing the access point first i made redshirt jeff do it for me since he's a bit more of a grizzled network installer so before redshirt jeff starts drilling holes in my walls i asked him to keep things relatively clean so he's putting a little plastic barrier over my desk and he's putting a few pieces of tape on the wall in a v-shape underneath where he'll drill an access hole those pieces of tape should catch a lot of the drywall dust that comes out and that helps the cleanup go a bit faster since not as much dust will fall down to the carpet redshirt jeff should also make sure the drill chuck is in drill mode if he's drilling he's using a two and a quarter inch hole saw and it looks like most of the dust was caught by the top piece of tape and if you take it off carefully some more of it will fall to the second then when you take off the second to the third but now it's time to go to the existing wall plate below and register jeff will pop that off the wall and now there's a route we can use to fish a new network cable up through the wall from the basement then through that box opening to the new hole way at the top so the cable will end up going down from the new hole past the existing network jack and into the basement to fish the wire through the wall you can use this fish tape to fish some of this white string up the wall and then you tape the network cable to the string using some electrical tape and pull it up fishing cables through walls is always a fun time almost all the work i've done in networking is old work basically going to a place that's already built and you got to put in maybe 10 or 20 new cable drops it's always fun especially when you're in a residential place where everything's all finished and clean that's sarcasm if you didn't pick up on it usually you don't have much excess you're going to have to spend a lot of time measuring things drilling and re-drilling holes then fishing in the walls and hope you don't hit a live wire or pipe luckily since i had already run one network cable on this wall i knew where to tell redshirt jeff to drill so now he's attaching the string down at the bottom then he'll pull up the string with a fish tape the string is ready now to pull the new cable up to the top once it's pushed through the floor from the basement and anybody who fishes cables through walls knows the pain of the line falling back into the wall again so make sure you're doubly secure and down in the basement if you look really closely with redshirt jeff's fingers pointing right there that's where the existing cable goes up to my desk upstairs i have this super long drill bit i used to drill the original hole and this drill bit is just a little bit wider than a cat6a cable and the shaft is pretty flexible so it's great for my home where sometimes i have to drill from above sometimes below but it's always in a tight space and of course redshirt jeff i tell him this all the time but he doesn't always follow my advice to wear eye protection but it looks like he's doing okay with his safety squint so far never mind so this is the cable i'm using cat6a and if you never used it before it's a little annoying to pull because it has an internal divider between the twisted pairs but redshirt jeff seems to be doing okay with it you just gotta plan your routes well and muscle it a bit now he's upstairs again attaching it to the string in the wall then he'll pull the wire up from the top and as before it's always a good idea to secure it temporarily so it doesn't just fall right back down through the wall and you have to fish it out again at the top the hole itself is still pretty messy so i bought this snap-in grommet that can hold the wire contain the drywall dust and look pretty nice doing it so redshirt jeff has the cable ready for termination he's an old-school network engineer and he's still using the old rj45 crimp tool that he told me he got in high school there are some fancy crimp tools that do things like crimp and trim push through connectors or brush your teeth or do other fancy things but you can still make do with any old crimper and a flush cutter richard jeff did tell me he wishes for the tase of cat5 again when he just stripped the cable untwisted the pairs trimmed it and crimped it cat6a terminations are a bit more involved since you have to rip off the outer shield an inner plastic wrapper pull back the groundware snip off the center divider then untwist thicker more tightly wound 23 awg wires and i haven't even told them about cat 8 cables yet one reason a lot of people end up switching to fiber at higher speeds is because the wire and shielding requirements starts making copper cabling really annoying to work with but unless you're building a data center in your home fiber runs through your house probably isn't happening anytime soon anyways he got the cable ready and he's going to pop the new ap back up on the wall but it's not connected to anything downstairs yet the first order of business down there is to tie it into the existing cable straps that run down to my network rack to keep it tidy with the other cables he's going to estimate where it ends up by pulling off the patch panel and running the cable straight to the back where it'll end up the ideal is to have a little slack but not too much the patch panel i'm using is from trend net and i like this one since keystone jacks are easy to work with and since it's shielded it also has some tie-down points on the back which are nice because in a setup like mine i'll be pulling this patch panel out a lot being able to have that extra bit of strain relief helps make sure the connections won't pull out over time now to install the keystone connectors it's a similar method to the rj45 we did upstairs but actually a little easier all you have to do is pull the cable through this little plastic insert with the shield wire hanging out the back then push each of the wires into its color-coded guide i use the b wiring standard but both are color coded right on the connector once that's in you push the connector into the metallic shielded jack and once you do that it crimps the connections onto the right pins i know trendnet makes a special crimp tool but redshirt jeff old network installed that his uses his tongue and groove pliers to pop the thing together then he'll snip the excess wire with his flush cutters to finish it off jeff popped the connector together using his tongue and groove pliers then the keystone connector just pops into the patch panel these connectors are a bit pricey but they also save a lot of time on installs so it's always a trade-off between cost and time with your networking projects to finish off the patch install redshirt jeff zip tied the cable to keep it nice and orderly then he wrote a label towards the end of the cable i know i'll rewire this place someday so it's nicer to overlabel everything than they have to trace a bunch of cables 10 or 20 years from now after redshirt jeff mounts up the panel again he's going to make sure he also labels the port on the patch panel itself there's not much room for labeling but a little p-touch label fits nicely i told him to call it living room ap some people just use a number scheme for their ports but i like to use the actual names because it's my home and it just feels nicer to name these things while he had out all the gear i also asked him you know what i have this cable hanging out to the workshop and you never had a permanent network jack over there so why don't we just run a new drop over there too a full 10 gig line now i told him he can't abuse this privilege because we all know the shenanigans redshirt chefs gets into so i don't want him blasting a ddos cannon at all the servers in the house or testing his white hat hacking tools internally i already have enough to deal with there if you want to see my adventures with a ddos attack check out my previous video on that linked up in the card above anyways it's the same process we just went over but here's the full process just sped up a bit just like the other port redshirt jeff finished it off with a nice little label at this point redshirt jeff told me to go ahead and shut down all the equipment attached to the old switch so i turned off the nasa's and the raspberry pi's and then gave him the go-ahead to decommission the switch so we unplugged all the devices and pulled the switch it was a little stuck on the screws below so it looks like he had to stick his hand in through the empty slot on my five pie rack for leverage there it goes the new switch is actually a little bit larger than the old one and the main reason for that is it doesn't have a separate power supply the qnap plugs straight into wall power which is nice because the hp i was using had a giant power supply like half the size of the switch but before sliding in the qnap redshirt jeff had to install the rack ears one thing i didn't really like after seeing this was how qnap's rackers have just a center screw instead of having a top and bottom screw it it just doesn't feel as secure if you're just using the two screws if they're in the middle instead of on the bottom and also the rack ears aren't even a full 1u so there's a little bit of a gap in there but those are minor gripes now it's time for the best part which is of course the peel this one didn't actually start off that well it looks like the little peel tape just ripped right off but all's well that ends well [Applause] after he plugged it in redshirt jeff plugged everything back in and i'll just let you enjoy a few seconds of homelab asmr this switch is going to power six poe devices currently but i mainly wanted the flexibility of having a full 16 ports of 2.5 gig ethernet plus the ability to run poe to more devices in my house to connect the new switch to my 10 gig network i bought a twin x sfp plus cable and had regis jeff plug it for my 10 gig switch to one of the unpowered 10 gig ports on the qnap the last connection was a new patch cable from the new access point down to a 2.5 gig pue plus port in the end it's not the best cable management you'll find on the homelab subreddit but it's good enough for redshirt jeff so it's good enough for me after a few minutes the netgear ap upstairs turned on and after a minute or so the green light came on and it was ready to rock to configure the qnap switch i installed q finder pro but i was put off by their license agreement luckily you don't have to use that app you can discover the switch using its mac address instead but once i logged in qnap's interface was pretty good i especially liked the live power consumption monitoring because i was used to that feature on my old hp switch for the netgear access point they really want to lock you into their cloud insight management service but i just ignored that and set it up locally and setup was easy for now i just split the 5 and 2.4 gigahertz networks to make sure i had a solid baseline i ran iperf 3 over wired connections and got 9.4 gigabits over my 10 gigabit network and 2.35 gigabits through the qnap but the real test would be to see how fast wi-fi was upstairs to see if i could edit video wirelessly at my desk i averaged 385 megabits per second on the downstairs router but with the new one just a few feet away i get 753 that's a pretty significant speed up and you're probably wondering why the numbers on the screen here don't show the averages those numbers are showing the bandwidth in one direction only wi-fi is complicated and the average numbers i'm showing are transmit and receive measured separately the real-world performance you'll get depends a lot on radio quality and antennas on both the access point and your device and measuring wi-fi performance reliably is mostly voodoo magic so i just took a bunch of measurements both ways and averaged them together a business oriented ap like the netgear has more internal bandwidth and a better radio and antenna design than the asus downstairs even though both of them use wi-fi six and we aren't even talking yet about things like moomimo and beamforming but getting back to the testing at the furthest point inside my house i got 167 megabits on the old router and 426 on the netgear the average signal strength i got on that gear was only a few db better than the asus in the basement but every bit counts when you want stable wi-fi i'm hoping i can get past a gigabit someday with wi-fi 6e or wi-fi 7 but right now it's just too expensive i actually want to build a raspberry pi based wi-fi 6e ap but cheaper hardware like this intel ax210 doesn't actually allow you to use it as an access point anyways my network is faster but it's still not fast enough for full-time video editing over wi-fi but i can do light editing work from the laptop at least the qnap switch and netgear ap have been working great for a couple weeks now so except for the annoying setup process on each one they both get a thumbs up for me links to everything i used are down in the description and until next time i'm jeff gearling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 224,939

Keywords: netgear, qnap, switch, network, networking, networks, 2.5, gigabit, gbps, gigs, 10, poe, poe+, poe++, power over ethernet, powered, devices, cat6, cat6a, cat5e, cat5, rj45, copper, fiber, cabling, fishing, fish, tape, wall, drywall, gypsum, install, electrical, old work, technician, ccna, network+, certification, patch, trendnet, panel, rack, hub, managed, layer, l1, l2, insight, cloud, speed, iperf, benchmark, linux, wifi, wireless, wifi 6, wifi 7, wifi 6e, intel, ax210, ax200, raspberry pi

Id: LDflrf85h9Y

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022