Building a smart home network

one of the most foundational parts of any smart home is probably its internet access and Wi-Fi connection the computer network in other words this network lets us access the internet and stay connected to the outside world it's how we watch TV or listen to music and that's how many of our smart devices talk to each other the Wi-Fi router that your ISP gives you is probably not up to handling the demands of a modern smart home especially in a house like mine with dozens of devices that are spread across more than one floor with insulation through all the walls I can barely even get any mobile reception in my house so it's really important to me that I'm able to get a strong solid network connection in every room of my house the first thing I did when I moved into my new house was plan and install a bulletproof home network let's take a look at what I did foreign [Music] I started with the internet connection and before I selected an ISP I put together a list of my requirements firstly I wanted an internet connection that had a static IP address that means that the IP address of your internet connection never changes that's really useful if you want to remotely access your home network when you're out and about an IP address is sort of like a phone number for your internet connection and if it changes all the time and people or Services won't know how to reach you sure there are Services out there like Dynamic DNS which you can use to get around this but a static IP address also helps prevent another problem too many isps here in the UK use something called cgnat to provision IP addresses for their customers I won't go into all of the details but if your ISP uses cgnat then your internet connection won't have a fully routable IP address and you'll not be able to set up any port forwarding on your router or access any Services remotely a lot of isps give you the option of paying five bucks a month or so to give you a static IP address which stays the same all of the time and avoids this nap problem you don't need to order this from day one but it's worth making sure that your ISP supports this if you want to go down this path in the future it's especially important for things like VPN access next up I obviously wanted my internet connection to be blisteringly fast we watch a lot of streaming video in 4k we work from home on video calls all day and we didn't want to see any buffering or have any dropouts don't forget to make sure that the upload speed is also fast as that's important for doing video calls or when you want to access your CCTV footage from outside of your home I'd also look for isps that don't have any download or upload limits because with fast internet speeds like this it's pretty easy to hit your limits quickly and you want to make sure that you get all of the speed that you're paying for here in London I went with a company called G network because they offered Fiber Optic internet directly into my house at 900 megabits download and upload speed for a reasonable monthly fee they also happen to be one of the only companies that had fiber optic cables in my street which was a major factor in the decision I'm not endorsing G network by the way I've not really had time to fully test them out but so far they've delivered what they promised solid internet connection is no good if the wireless network inside your home is crap no matter who your ISP is I suggest that you put the wi-fi router that came with your internet connection into a cupboard and invest in some better quality Equipment don't throw the Wi-Fi router out though most isps will ask you to send it back to them when you eventually leave them as a customer I once again went back to the planning phase and wrote down all of the requirements for my home network it's important that you hardwire as many devices as you possibly can into your router using cap 5e or Cat6 cabling my house luckily had network cables already installed to a lot of the rooms which I was able to reuse this let me wire in my desktop computer our work laptops my home server and anything else that doesn't move around and needs a solid network connection but there wasn't cabling to everywhere I wanted it to be available so I hired an electrician to come and run a few more cables for my wireless access points and my CCTV cameras they also wired up my smart light switches but that's the topic for another video so make sure you subscribe so you're notified when I release it I asked the electricians to get Category 6 network cable installed which is the most common type of cabling available these days and it supports up to 10 gigabits per second of network throughput over a 50 meter run which is plenty of Headroom and growth for anything happening in the next few years category 5e network cabling was the previous standard and it's perfectly fine to use if you already have it installed in your home just be aware that it only has a maximum throughput of one gigabit per second which is perfectly fine for most people if you're building your own house from scratch then I'd suggest running Cat6 cabling throughout your home in advance before the plasterboard goes onto the walls try and imagine where you'll place any equipment that might need to be cabled and then putting out Network outlets near there I'd suggest putting at least two or more outlets in each room maybe on either side of it and not too far away from some power outlets it's likely that you'll move things around over the next few years and whatever you plug into the network will probably also need to be plugged into a power outlet it doesn't cost much more want to run two cables instead of one especially if the walls aren't up yet I didn't have the luxury of putting the cabling in before the walls went on so the electricians had to get creative about how they ran them through the existing walls my partner wasn't too happy about it everything that's not hardwired and needs network access will get connected via Wi-Fi and if you have a large house you'll probably need more than one access point I've chosen to use ceiling mounted access points because they extend the coverage excellently across a wide area I did a lot of reading and research to figure out the best places to mount these access points in my house but the basic gist of it is to put the access points directly above where you're likely to have the most people using Wi-Fi for me that will be above my kitchen and dining area and above the living room sofas as well as in the hallway equally spaced between the bedrooms these access points are hardwired into my network so they each have a really powerful Upstream connection to the network my security cameras are also going to be hardwired into my network using Cat6 cabling and these will power the cameras using something called Poe which stands for power over ethernet hardwired Poe security cameras are less prone to dropouts and don't need separate cabling for the power and they're generally a higher air quality than Wi-Fi cameras but I'll be covering my security camera setup in way more detail in a future video showing you what cameras I've chosen and why so once again make sure you subscribed so you don't miss out anyway all of my network cabling runs into a single location in my laundry this is where the original cabling that came with my house already went to and the electrician's wired theirs up to the same place there was just enough room next to my washing machine and dryer to fit a server rack which is not an ideal place for networking equipment but what are you going to do eh I measured up the space and ordered a server rack that would fit nicely it came flat packed so I spent a good long afternoon putting it together like a big piece of Ikea furniture and eventually wielded into place those of you that know me know that I'm more of a measure once cut twice sort of person so it was a genuine surprise when it fit perfectly as I had imagined it The Next Step was to connect all of these network cables into a patch panel which needs a special tool called a punch down tool and then I mounted everything into the rack itself you can see that with all of these network cables I needed to buy a router and a network switch that had enough space to connect everything and had all of the features that I wanted for my home network in a past life I was a systems engineer and it was my job to install networks like this into smaller medium businesses I've used a huge range of different networking equipment and I knew what I wanted for my own home I ended up choosing unify networking equipment because they have a lot of functionality considering their price point they're quite expensive for home use but they have a lot of functionality I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with unify when everything is working properly they are fantastic but every now and then they release a software update to break something major then you have to go in and log a support ticket upload a bunch of log files and they inevitably come back telling me to install some beta software update which they've just written and allegedly contains a fix for the problem that they introduced I sometimes can't help feeling that I'm paying to be a QA tester with some of this equipment but anyway that doesn't happen that often and I ended up getting a unified dream machine pro which acts as my router firewall Network video recorder Wi-Fi controller and the general brains of my home network I then extended my network with an additional 24 Port Poe switch and connected them together with a 10 gigabit SFP plus connection all of my wireless access points video cameras and hardwired computers plug into these switches from the patch panel now you may think that hard wiring an entire house into a server cabinet with a big rack mounted Network switches and servers is a bit Overkill and you'd be completely 100 correct it is overkill but I'm a massive nerd who's always wanted to have his own server Rack in his house I also managed to get a sweet hookup on the unify equipment so I didn't have to pay for Price which helped a lot even if you're not a massive nerd with their own dreams of owning a server rack I still suggest that you hardwire as many devices as you can and if you're building a new house I will always suggest that you run Cat6 cabling before the walls are put on no matter how good Wi-Fi gets it will probably always be less reliable than hardwired connections also more hardwired devices mean less of them are using Wi-Fi and that frees up bandwidth for the rest of your devices and just because you're wiring up a brand new house with dozens of network Outlets all over the place doesn't mean you need to have them all plugged in on day one you can definitely get away with buying a small eight Port switch and only connecting the ports that are actually in use at the time you can always buy another one or a bigger one later on when you outgrow what you have if you can't use hardwired devices because your house has no cabling or you're renting and aren't allowed to put massive holes into the walls then don't sweat it for my whole life I've been living in rental properties and occasionally I've been able to run some network cabling underneath some carpets to hard wire some things in but for the most part I've just relied on Wi-Fi there are some really great Wi-Fi mesh Network Solutions out there that will give your entire home solid coverage I've heard good things about tp-link Netgear Linksys and d-links Wi-Fi mesh systems a lot of people are using them very successfully in their Smart Homes and it will probably work perfectly fine for you there are a lot of other YouTube channels out there that have done some tests and comparisons of many different mesh Wi-Fi setups so go check those out if you want to go down this path yourself I would definitely avoid the Google or Nest Wi-Fi mesh systems however the controls are very dumbed down so it's very difficult to do anything fancy with them and my parents had them for a while and they were really really flaky and just like in my last place I'm going to once again be running two distinct networks inside my house one for us humans to use without work computers our laptops our mobile phones in a completely separate Network for my iot equipment that's banned from talking to the internet I'm quite a paranoid person and I don't like the idea that all of my random iot equipment might be spying on me and sending data back to some company servers in the clouds if you haven't already seen them I suggest you take a look at a couple of previous videos are released that explain in a bit more detail how and why I secure my home networks they're Linked In the description below and if you want to see how I set this up in my unify Network equipment then drop me a comment below and I'll take a look at it our internet connection and home network are now installed and they've been working perfectly for the past couple of weeks since we moved in but as fundamental as Network reliability is it don't make a house a smart home for that we need some home automation equipment like sensors smart switches light bulbs and thermostats all of those devices need to be able to talk to each other in some sort of way and they need a hub or system to control them and to form automations I'll be covering all these things as I work through my journey of turning the house that I just bought into a world-class smart home if you want to come along for the ride and maybe learn a thing or two then make sure you're subscribed to the channel so that together we can make your home smarter

Channel: Home Automation Guy

Views: 94,426

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Id: x4hUt45ChAI

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023