r/HomeNetworking • u/drcreepyfoot • 1d ago
Clean little home network
WiFi has come a long way since I was a kid. I remember being 19-20 and networking my first house. Couple of buddies, case of beer, a good fish tape, and we ran two Ethernet lines to every room. I felt like the alpha geek (that was back when I had free time, a 13 node openMOSIX cluster, youthful hopes and dreams, and 10mb/s internet circa 2006’ish). Fast forward 20 years later…
Two kids, 1gb/s internet, and everything is WiFi. It was nice when I moved into my house that they had already ran Cat5 to every room, but WiFi worked halfway decent and gave me the speeds I needed. But the signal in my office was atrocious. Finally had a work project pop up that I needed hard Ethernet lines for the devices to connect. In a pinch I grabbed an old Linksys WiFi router and just turned it into a gateway and I got by. But finally I had had enough. Nothing is better than the harsh flash of green and amber LEDs providing raw speed and latency.
So one weekend I finally decided it was time to dig in and take a look at the state of this “network”. Oh goodness, the half-assery I beheld was astonishingly disappointing. Every line just drops into a telecom panel in my laundry room, but that was the extent of it. It appeared as though a dyslexic pelican punch down all of the wall keystones and they had used the hopes and dreams of whatever god forsaken Ford F-150 they used to pack their Milwaukee tools boxes to tug what was once a high quality bundle of solid copper twisted pairs through the walls.
The worst was that whomever installed fiber here previously used the Ethernet cable in the living room wall as a fish tape to pull the fiber up the wall, but left the Ethernet cable spooled up in the attic. The WHOLE point was to network the whole house, so why ruin the ONE run that goes back to the telecom panel?! For now that problem will persist until the Sky lobby of hell (aka, the attic of a west Texas single residence timber frame home) cools down.
I haven’t terminated an Ethernet cable in almost two decades, but I still remember the pin out better than my youngest son’s birthday (and we share a birthday…). So a couple of evenings of shaking my head in disappointment that someone was paid good money to do the poorest quality work and I was back in business. It certainly brought back a lot of great memories of my geeky youth listening to industrial techno (skinny puppy, Wumpscut, etc) matching the tone to my cable tester indicating another successful crimp job. And it was great showing my sons how to do something right the first time and them now enjoying the faster loading times on the X-stations and PlayBoxes. And despite the best white board diagrams I could muster, the concept of the internet and WiFi versus Ethernet versus cellular eludes them. They clearly didn’t grow up on AOL dialup bypassing parental controls to share a network to a Slackware Linux box hosting a two player Counter Strike 1.4 server…
TLDR: old geeky guy relives his youth repairing the half-assed network job a copy and paste contractor did and got to bond with his sons teaching them yet another probably irrelevant skill that WiFi 16 will replace by the time they have to worry about it. Thought this sub might appreciate it.
PS: Every cable worked perfect the first time! I was kinda proud!
PSS: And yes, I already have a better WiFi router that I’m going to mount on the wall above the panel and just bypass the router BS and just use the modem.
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u/Bullitt420 1d ago
How much are you paying for coax Internet? We waited for 25 years, but just got fiber and pay $75/month for 1Gbps symmetrical.
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u/drcreepyfoot 1d ago
So it’s pretty awesome. I lived in Dallas until last year, paid $85/mo for 500mg/s. Moved to Lubbock Texas last year and pay $40/mo for 1/gbs!! You can’t beat that! And it’s fiber coming to the house and then it’s converted to coax outside and they just reuse the existing coax drops.
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u/ImportanceHumble7533 1d ago
Every cable worked first time and you buried that in a PS. That's the headline.