Beginner Basics • Network Infrastructure for Home

Hi everyone,

we will be moving in to our new house in a few months, and I am planing a completely new infrastructure for the whole house.
The connection from my ISP will be an ethernet connection RJ-45. That is my WAN entry point, from which I would like to create the infrastructure for the whole house. Alltogether I have:

1x HomeLab Server / NAS with 3 Connections: 10G Ethernet (RJ-45), x2 Gigabit Ethernet (RJ -45)
22x wall sockets (Cat 6a RJ-45) Edit: Not all wall sockets need to be connected all the time. Alltogether 24 ports for the whole house should be enough.
3x interior AP (POE)
1x exterior AP (POE)
4x security camera (POE with recording to HDD over SMB)
1x workstation (2.5G Ethernet RJ-45)
and of course other PCs, TVs, gaming console, media players, receivers, printers, IOT devices, ...

The entire networking infrastructure in the house - all cables in the walls are Cat7.
My question is, what kind of devices would you recommend for this type of network. I need to connect 4 cameras and 4 access points over PoE, 1 server over 10G Ethernet, and a workstation with also at least 2.5G ethernet.

I originaly wanted one of the following:

• RB5009UPr+S+IN with the CSS326-24G-2S+RM - with these 2 devices beeing connected over SFP+ ports, and the 2nd SFP+ port of the switch beeing used with the S+RJ10 module to connect to the 10G Ethernet on the homeLab server. But that this will not be enough, since I would not have a free port for the WAN connection going to the router, and I would need to dedicate 1 port on the switch for the WAN connection, which does not seem to be the right aproach.

• CRS328-24P-4S+RM - but I am not sure if the device itself is good enough to be used as a router and switch

Regarding the APs, I wanted to buy the APs from TP-Link, or Zyxel, since my experience with the cAP ac was terrible in our current home. (I replaced it with a zyxel AP and got 10-12x better speeds). Or has the situation changed and are the new cAP ax better?

Here is a schematic of the situation:


Any help or advice is very much appreciated.

Statistics: Posted by zubo100 — Tue May 21, 2024 5:52 pm

---