Today I'm gonna double the speed of my wired network, upgrading this 1 gigabit network
switch to a 2.5 gig version, and also install a new WiFi 6 access point connected at 2.5
gigabits using Power over Ethernet.
This switch is a 2.5 gig PoE+ switch from QNAP, and I splurged a bit so I could have
16 ports of 2.5 gig PoE+ power, in addition to 4 10 gig ports.
And two of those have the maximum PoE++ standard—up to 90 watts per port!
These kind of switches are great for small to medium businesses that wanna install the
latest fast WiFi 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 WiFi possible, which is WiFi 6 for now.
Since WiFi 6 can go beyond 1 gigabit, I need my wired network to also go beyond 1 gig.
For WiFi, I'm gonna install this Netgear AX3600 WiFi 6 access point, powered over 2.5 gig
Ethernet.
The main reason for the WiFi 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 install.
So let's start installing the access point first.
I made Red Shirt Jeff do it for me, since he's a bit more of a grizzled network installer.
So before Red Shirt Jeff starts drilling holes in my walls, I asked him to keep things
relatively clean.
So he's putting a little plastic 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 cleanup go a bit faster, since not as much dust will fall down to the carpet.
Red Shirt Jeff should also make sure the drill chuck is in drill mode, if he's drilling...
he's using a 2 1/4 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 falls to the second, then down to
the third.
But now it's time to go down to the existing wall plate below, and Red Shirt Jeff'll 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 the box opening to the new hole 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 tape the network cable to the string using some electrical
tape.
Fishing cables through walls is always a fun time!
Almost all the work that I've done in networking is old work—basically going to a place that's
already built and you gotta put in maybe 10 or 20 new cable drops.
It's always fun, especially when you're in a residential place where everything's finished
and clean.
That's sarcasm, if you didn't pick up on it.
Usually you don't have much access so you're gonna 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.
Luckily, since I had already run one network cable on this wall, I knew where to tell Red
Shirt Jeff to drill.
So now he's attaching the string down at the bottom then he'll pull up the string with
the 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 you wanna be doubly secure.
In this case a little tape will do to hold the string.
And down in the basement, if you look really closely where Red Shirt Jeff's finger's 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 wider than a Cat6A cable diameter, and the shaft is fairly 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 Red Shirt Jeff...
I tell him all the time, but he doesn't always follow my advice to wear eye protection...
But he's doing okay with his safety squints so far... eh, nevermind.
So this is the cable I'm using: Cat 6A.
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 Red Shirt Jeff seems to be doing okay with it, you just gotta plan your routes well
and muscle it a bit.
Now he's upstairs 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 Red Shirt Jeff has the cable ready for termination!
He's an old school network engineer, and he's still using the old RJ45 crimp tool 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 other fancy things, but you can still make do with any old crimper
and a flush cutter.
Red Shirt Jeff did tell me he wishes for the days of Cat 5 again, when you 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 ground wire, snip off the center divider, then untwist
thicker, more tightly-wound 23 AWG wires.
And I haven't even told him about Cat 8 cables yet.
One reason a lotta 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.
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 gonna pop the new AP back up on the wall.
But it's not connected to anything downstairs yet.
The first order of business is to tie it into the existing cable straps that that run down
to my network rack.
To keep it tidy with the other cables he's gonna estimate where it goes 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 TRENDnet, and I like this one since keystone jacks are
easy to work with, and since it's shielded.
It also has some tiedown 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 don't
pull out over time.
Now, to install the keystone connectors, it's a similar method to the RJ-45 we did upstairs,
but 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 it's 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 Red Shirt Jeff, old network installer
that he is, uses his tongue and groove pliers to pop the thing together.
Then he'll snip the excess wire with his flush cutters.
Funny story: one time I was terminating one of these keystones, and everything seemed
to test okay, but when I was on my computer, sometimes it'd connect at 10 gigs, but sometimes
I only got 100 megabits!
That was because one of the twisted pairs was shorting on the connector's metal body!
If you don't cut those ends really short, they can bend and bypass the tiny insulation
that's built into these metal connectors.
Anyways, 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 lotta time on installs, so it's
always a tradeoff between cost and time, with networking.
To finish off the patch install, Red Shirt 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 over-label everything than to
have to trace a bunch of cables 10 or 20 years from now.
After Red Shirt 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 run
a new drop over there, a full 10 gig line?
Now, I told him he couldn't abuse this privilege because we all know the shenanigans Red Shirt
Jeff gets into, so I don't want him blasting a DDoS cannon at all the servers in the house,
or testing out his white hat hacking tools internally.
I already have enough to deal with there; if you wanna see my adventures with a DDoS
attack check out my previous video on that, linked in the card above.
Anyways, it's the same process is we just went over but here's the full process sped
up a bit.
Just like the other port, Red Shirt Jeff labeled it to finish off the run.
At this point Red Shirt Jeff told me to go ahead and shut down all the equipment attached
to the old switch.
So I turned off the NASes and Raspberry Pis, and then gave him the go-ahead to decommission
the switch.
So he 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 in my 5-Pi 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 I could slide in the QNAP, I had to install the rack ears.
One thing I didn't really like about the way QNAP's rack ears work is they use a center
screw instead of having a top and bottom screw.
It just doesn't feel as secure if you're just using two screws if they're in the middle
instead of the bottom.
And also, the rack ears aren't a full 1U, so there's a little bit of a gap in there.
But those are minor grips.
Now it's time for the best part, which is the peel of course.
This one didn't actually start off that well.
The little peel tape just ripped right off.
But all's well that ends well.
Once power was connected, Red Shirt Jeff plugged everything back in.
I'll let you enjoy a few seconds of homelab ASMR.
This switch is gonna 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 twinax SFP+ cable and had Red Shirt
Jeff plug it from 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 Access Point port down to a 2.5 gig
PoE+ port.
In the end, it's not the best cable management you'll find on the homelab subreddit, but
it's good enough for Red Shirt Jeff.
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 Qfinder 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 it's MAC address
instead.
But once I logged in, QNAP's interface was pretty good.
I especially liked the live power consumption monitoring, since 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 ignored that and set it up locally.
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 `iperf3` 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 WiFi 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 speedup, and you're probably wondering why the numbers on the
screen there don't show the averages.
Those numbers are showing the bandwidth in one direction.
WiFi's... complicated.
And the average numbers I'm showing are Transmit and Receive, measured separately.
The performance you'll get depends a lot on radio quality and antennas on both the Access
Point and your device.
And measuring WiFi performance reliably is mostly voodoo magic, so I just took a bunch
of measurements both ways, and averaged them.
A business-oriented AP like the Netgear has more internal bandwidth and better radio and
antenna design than the ASUS downstairs, even though both use WiFi 6.
And we aren't even talking about things like MU-MIMO and beamforming!
But getting back to it, 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 the Netgear was only a few dB better than the ASUS in
the basement, but every bit counts when you want stable WiFi.
[hold: Intel AX210 WiFi 6E chip]
I'm hoping I can get past a gigabit with WiFi 6E, but it's too expensive right now.
I wanted to build a Raspberry Pi-based WiFi 6E AP, but cheaper hardware like this Intel
AX610 doesn't access point use.
Anyways, my network is faster, but it's still not fast enough for full time video editing
over WiFi.
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, they both get a thumbs up from me.
Links to everything I used are down in the description, and until next time, I'm Jeff
Geerling.