Enhancing home wired network

Wail

I would appreciate your thoughts on how to expand my home network. 

My home network is currently ~15m of cables run round the living room and up the stairs to a small bedroom acting as an office. My partners role has changed, which will involve more home working. We are thinking of using the attic room as a second office. 

Our roles are/will include using Microsoft Teams for substantial volumes of correspondence. 

Should I run two wires from our hub even though the first 7-8 metres will see them running parallel along the skirting board before they split to reach their intended destinations or should I put a switch in in the small bedroom and run a cable into the attic from the small bedroom. 

Thank you

flashg67

Are you looking to stay with wired? I WFH with a vpn and inevitably have a lot of Teams meetings. I have no problem using wifi, although I'm near the router.  Parts of the house where the router wont reach use a simple powerline/homeplug network which has both wired and wireless access. Otherwise, yes, you could run the new cable, or add a network switch to the end of the current cable then cables from there to each room

tacpot12

You will be fine running two wires in parallel because the wires inside the cable are twisted together and this essentially stops the  wires being able to interfer with each other. 7-8m is quite a small run for adjacent cables.

CoastingHatbox

Don't add extra switches unless you need to. I have, for the time being, got 3 5-port switches daisy chained into my network and they sometimes get into a state where they stop passing packets and have to be reset. They will be disappearing soon when I finish getting structured network cable into the house.

Powerline adapters are evil for several reasons. The main two being:

1. They are never as fast as advertised
2. They cause horrendous radio frequency inteference (RFI)
3. They don't always work

WiFi is only as good as the environment it is in. If you can avoid the WiFi arms race between neighbours, best to do so. Our WiFi here is terrible because there is so much congestion and people near-by running multi-channel mesh networks.

jamesd

Two cables will give each room its own port from the router limited by the port capability or the internet connection speed. One cable and switch is easier and will get the job done if you dislike the cosmetics but means they will share the original port capacity. Router port is probably either 100 megabit or gigabit, the latter will be fine, the former will be fine unless you have higher speed broadband. Flat cable can be used for this task and might look better. One cable and switch would have less latency and higher transmission speed than wifi if it's using gigabit ports and suitable cable.

I suggest not trying to save a few Pounds with a 10/100 megabit new switch when gigabit unmanaged ones are so cheap and suitable. Well known names include TP-Link TL-SG1005D, 5 Port Gigabit for £10 and Netgear 5 Port Gigabit GS205 for £11.48 and you can probably find cheaper options, particularly if you drop to 10/100.

On the cable side, either of these cat7 types would do the job - a or b - and assorted colours are available. Cat7 is more than you need but it has extra interference resistance. Cheaper would be cat6a or cat6 and either would be fine for gigabit ethernet. There are also external grade cables like this 50m one that may work better for some situations.