The original post: /r/homenetworking by /u/WeiseGamer on 2025-03-29 01:25:08.

Hey all,

Buying a new construction home and close in a couple weeks! There’s a 30" panel in the laundry room that has a line coming from outside the house for my ISP to use, and then some coax lines to each bedroom and the living room as well as a bonus room (loft) over the garage). The house is all 1 story outside of that bonus room and on a crawl space that has pretty good head room (I can crouch/sit upright comfortably).

My plan right now is to have the ISP (Spectrum) put the modem in the box (hoping it fits), then trying to also fit my Orbi mesh router in there, and put two access points through the house to complete the mesh network.

Then, I planned to plug the modem into my router, router into an unmanaged 2.5G switch, and then from the switch run CAT6 (CMR) down into the crawl space and follow the existing coax runs (which are either in conduit or stapled to the beams), replacing the wall plate and terminating where the coax plate is now. For the loft/bonus room, there’s a coax run that goes up (I think/hope some conduit) to a coax jack as well.

The plan was to then take the 1 jack on the wall and plug those into another unmanaged 2.5G switch for each “end point” (sorry I don’t know the proper term here). So for example, in my living room I’ll take the wall jack, plug it into the 2.5G switch, and then use that switch to distribute to my Roku, Xbox, etc. In my office the switch will distribute to a network printer, NAS, and a couple gaming PCs.

I’m thinking all of this is fine, but wanted a sanity check as it’s my first time. Any dos/don’ts, tips, etc? I’m especially unsure about having the extra switch AFTER I terminate, as it would mean that bandwidth is split between all devices on the switch, right? Should I instead terminate enough lines to cover all the devices and just have one big switch in the 30" wall panel?

Thanks for your help and inspiration with your posts on this sub too!