Home Networking

cheesepants

Hi!
I've installed Cat5e cable throughout my house and could do with a bit of advice on the next steps please?

I've future-proofed it for when the kids are older and put plenty of wires in, and terminated them with wall plates in the rooms. The other ends of the cables all run into a large cupboard in the attic, where my router is.

I've done a bit of research and it looks like I now need to buy a 24 port Switch, a 24 port Patch Panel, and a data cabinet - but I've no idea which ones I should be looking for? Please could someone advised upon some models?

Do I want managed or un-managed? I don't want to spend a fortune ideally.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - cheers!

esuhl

Wouldn't a simple unmanaged switch be enough?

Do you really need a patch panel and data cabinet?

cheesepants

Hi, yes I’ve decided I need a patch panel and a cabinet to keep it all tidy - do you have any advice on which ones I should get?

I don’t know the difference between managed and in-managed - I just want something plug-and-play that’s easy to set up and reliable, that I can forget about once installed.

Inner_Zone

Puzzled why you think you need a patch panel, a 24 port switch will have 24 ports. Do why add another 23 / 24 cables to duplicate it? And without the extra cables a cabinet is probably also superfluous.

Unmanaged will be fine, I use a TP-Link TL-SG1024D which is fanless therefore quite.

Lorian

No way you need a rack and patch panel for that small amount of cabling - just put your own plugs on the cabling - if you don't have the crimp tool they are not expensive, and easy when you've practiced a little.

Hopefully you've used proper solid copper cabling, rather than cheap CCA.

As it's in the attic you may want to think about heat, condensation, fire prevention etc etc.

Debbie_Savard

A residential patch panel should be OK with an unmanaged Gigabit switch, a 16 port switch may be enough with the patch panel to provision just the wall sockets you need.

Of course if you are using IP cameras than a switch with PoE would be ideal.

Midland45

Totally agree with everyone on here, that I can’t see why you would want to over complicate your set up with a rack mounted switch/patch cables/cabinet etc. I’ve simply used a Netgear 16 port gigabit unmanaged switch which I mounted it and carefully and neatly added my cat5E cables as my system grew. Never had an issue in 5 years of running. I can stream HD 1080 videos all over the house without issue.

GadgetGuru

OK, so without resulting in an over-complicated setup, a basic 24 port patch panel is fine - no need to overspend here as they all do the same thing.

As for a switch - a Gigabit switch will be more then adequate for your needs. The below would be fine - affordable as well as a good all round performer. Ive installed a few of these on client sites and they last forever! This looks a pretty good price too!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/273001865712

You may wish to consider a small UPS to power the switch during any power failure etc? Thats dependant upon how reliable your power source is though.

System

Unless you're planning on reconfiguring the networking then I'd not bother with a patch panel. A patch panel is only really needed in business installs where there is a possibility of having multiple physical networks, subnets and/or servers and using a patch panel to be able to easily switch a fixed socket from one to another makes sense.

If you're just going to be linking them all into a 24 port switch then there's no point in a patch panel and you're just introducing three additional points of failure per socket into the network.

kwikbreaks

IftiBashir wrote: »

You may wish to consider a small UPS to power the switch during any power failure etc? Thats dependant upon how reliable your power source is though.

For it to be any use you'd need to have anything you need on UPS as well. Not much point having a powered up switch with a dead router, NAS, PCs, TVs etc. If you really must have internet during power outages a good compromise would be a UPS on a wireless router and use a tablet. A tablet or phone with 4G wouldn't even need that.

AndyPix

Iv got some Dell powerconnect 24 or 48 port switches that are going in the skip soon.
You can have one if you pay the postage