Home Network – 2025 Edition

My home network was originally built to target speeds of up to 1G. When the house was constructed, cat 5e cable was the standard for residential use. And while I installed more network ports after the house was built, I stuck with cat 5e as it was much less expensive than the (faster, but much newer at the time) cat 6. However, when I last updated my personal computer and my gaming computer, they came with Ethernet connections that supported 2.5G. Also, at some point I plan to update two of the wireless access points in the house to models that support a 2.5G wired uplink. While my home servers only have 1G ports, they each have four of them that have been bonded in a way that presents them as a single 4G connection to the network. (This is “hardware” bonding, which is different from software solutions that only allow a single computer to communicate to the server at 1G speeds, but can have four computers talking to the server at one time without slowing each other down.)

To be honest, the 1G connections were and are still are sufficient for the things that I do around the house today, and while my cable Internet connection claims over 1G speeds, I have never seen it come anywhere close to that. Even so, I have always wanted to play around with faster network speeds and start putting equipment in place to support future plans. The problem is that the hardware required to allow for 2.5G switching has been prohibitively expensive especially without a real reason for having it other than the “wow” factor. That changed recently when Ubiquity released a 16 port PoE (power over Ethernet) switch where four of those ports supported 2.5G. It also came with two 10G ports, something my existing switch also had.

I use PoE to power the various cameras and wireless access points in the house so that I only have to run a single Ethernet cable to them and not have to also plug them into a wall outlet. For a long while I have used a 16 port PoE injector to supply power to things, which worked well. Unfortunately, at least one of the ports on it had died and it also was not rated to power the new wireless access points I planned to purchase in the future. And while unrelated to 2.5G upgrades, the patch panel used as a termination point for all the Ethernet ports around the house had a couple broken ports that I would want in the future. Finally, the cost of decent 10G network cards had become much more affordable.

Given all of these factors, I finally decided to make some changes to the network hardware in the house. These changes were totally unnecessary for my current usage, and even with things being more affordable, they were still expensive. But, this is a hobby and I had enough saved in my “hobby” budget to cover the cost of most of the upgrades. I did not update the main router for the house nor the device that stores all the video feeds from the cameras. If faster Internet speeds are ever available to me, or I ever install cameras that support 4k, then I will most likely replace those devices with ones that support faster speeds.

The first item that I replaced was the patch panel. Given that I had somehow damaged a couple ports on the previous one, probably while moving some wires around to make cable management cleaner, I decided to go with a “keystone” solution. This costs more as while the actual unit is basically an inexpensive frame with holes in it, you then have to buy the “jacks” that are put into those holes. In my case, I needed 11 Ethernet jacks that I could attach to all the various wires coming in from around the house. That left me with five empty holes for future expansion. On top of that I had some empty slots in an existing 16 keystone panel mostly used for things such as cable and phone jacks around the house along with the TV and FM antennas in the attic. Given that my current plans with the home network only require eight more ports, I should not need to add any additional keystone panels. (Famous last words, I know.) On top of that, if I damage a keystone jack in the future, I just need to replace that jack and not the entire panel.

Once everything was re-wired, labeled, and moved around so that wires from the keystone jacks were more directly above where they would be connected to the network switches, I added the 16 port PoE switch to the network rack and pulled out the PoE injector. A welcome side effect of this was the reduction of the number of wires needed to connect things by half. This was because the PoE injector needed one wire going to the network switch then a second wire to the patch panel (now keystone panel), while the new switch just needed a single wire to the keystone panel. I did need to run a wire from the new switch to the existing one as the new switch did not have enough ports to serve the entire network–it’s main purpose was just for PoE and some 2.5G ports. This was where the first 10G connection was made on the network as both switches had two 10G ports on them. While this does not totally eliminate any potential speed bottlenecks between devices plugged into one switch to the other, it does provide 10x more bandwidth between the switches. Given that all my existing and planned future cameras together should not consume more than a third of a single 1G connection, (I do not see a need for cameras with 4K resolution), that leaves plenty of room for the four 2.5G ports to run at basically full speed between the switches–not that they would need to as (almost) everything with connection speeds over 1G are all plugged into the new switch.

With the core networking updates in place, I added 10G network cards to the two servers in the basement (see Home Server – 2023 Edition). I plugged the primary server, (the other only powers on for a couple hours a day to take a backup of everything on the main server), into the second 10G port on the new switch. Unfortunately, while the secondary server was designed to be an almost exact replica for the primary one, it had some hardware issues with the 10G card that I have not yet resolved. But that is OK for now as it is only used as a backup in case there is a major failure of the main server. I will probably end up rebuilding the backup server with more modern hardware at some point that for sure supports the 10G card.

Since I had a little money left in my budget, I also swapped out the network cords connecting the switches and keystone jacks with much thinner ones. I also added dust covers to all the unused ports. These changes were for purely cosmetic reasons only, but were not too expensive and do, in my view, make things look much cleaner.

The final step was to test the network and see if all these changes made any appreciable improvement outside of just better cable management and arguably better visual appeal. Large file transfers between my personal computer and the primary server saw about a 2x speed increase. I expected a little more, but it is definitely noticeable. I may do some testing of the cables between the two and possibly replace some things there. Speeds between the gaming computer and the server are closer to what I expected, although the length of the cable between those points is about half as long as the one to my personal computer, and length can impact speeds. Was any of this necessary? Not by a long shot. Is it fun to know that I have 2.5G and 10G networking in the house? Absolutely. This is ultimately a hobby for me after all.