Home Networking
I’m due to post a progress report on the new home. In three weeks we move in, so I’m in the middle of the planning for the electronic components of the house. I decided early on that I was going to wire the house up as if it was an office. That meant I wanted to use hard wire for networking rather than wifi with bridges. Because the home didn’t have cat-5, and I’m not in the mood to pay thousands for putting it in, I decided to use MOCA (Multimedia over Coax) to do the whole house network. However I am getting an estimate on cat-6 runs, so these MOCA routers might be on E-Bay soon! UPDATE: $100 a drop I’m quoted, so yes, will be on e-bay soon.
To do so, I purchased five MI424WR Rev F routers from Actiontec, the same devices used by Verizon for FIOS. I bought them on eBay. Each of them will be at a cable terminus with wifi and coax enabled as bridges, so we’ll have maximum wifi saturation as well as 200mbps wired networking in each room.
Each device has a gigabit switch on it, so in certain rooms DirectTV boxes will be connected, in others, computers. The DirectTV coax will run outside of the house and punch in through the walls where the receivers are, while the main in-wall coax will serve the MOCA.
The first 30 IP’s on my network are mapped to VPN to the office, so I’ll be maintaining the class c in a split configuration to ensure things that shouldn’t route through VPN don’t. ie, the surveillance cameras won’t be directly accessible except through a web interface.
I’m debating doing two different VLAN’s on the Netscreen, to segregate things like the camera traffic from the main house traffic, and AV traffic, but not sure if that’s necessary.
I’ve been ordering equipment in advance of the install from MacHomeStore.com, Amazon.com and Smarthome.com.
Anyhow, here is the networking diagram.
