04 - Network Switches & Ethernet - Home Networking 101

Home Networking 101 is the ultimate beginner's guide to everything you need to know about home networking! In this video, we're coving network switches including where a network switch fits into your network, what to look for when buying a network switch, the different types of switches available, and finally some general switch recommendations for your home network.

Switch recommendations (affiliate):

5-port unmanaged switches

5-port managed switches

8-port managed switches

Timecodes

00:00 Intro
01:33 What is a network switch?
01:59 Switch infrastructure examples
03:55 Hardwire as much as possible!
05:35 What to look for when choosing a network switch
06:34 Port speeds
07:48 SFP ports
08:41 Managed vs. Unmanaged switches
10:02 Port mirroring
10:24 Link aggregation
10:40 Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 switches
12:16 VLANs
14:21 Power over Ethernet (PoE)
16:29 Ethernet cables
19:42 Network switch recommendations

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[esn]

Really wish this series wasn't cancelled. 108, 000 people probably got really sad seeing there was nowhere else to go after this video ended.

[heli]

Chris, I marvel at your ability to succinctly explain things and never miss a beat. Really useful content - thanks so much

[LeandroBurioni]

Thank you very very much for this video series! Sad you had to record twice the 3rd chapter, but thanks thanks thanks! It have been very useful and provided me clarity in some concepts I already known.

[michaelmartin]

So Far I have a R2D2 original Dream Machine. I have 2 flex minis coming tomorrow. I already used the tutorial on vlans to setup a iot and regular vlan. Eventually I want to upgrade to a Dream Machine SE and install a camera system. But its baby step right now. Have been completely redoing my network this week wall mounted my dream machine to get better WiFi coverage of my house and have been running new cables from the new router location to my rack which when don will house my complete network setup and a truenas server(parts inbound to finish this). I started in networking way back in the 90s with BNC networks and have been loving my unifi setup since discovering this channel and learning from it.

[KarimMGS]

As a beginner network hobbyist, I would have never known the disadvantages of daisy chaining switches, what the SFP is used for, the advantages of managed switches, layer 2 vs layer 3 switches, and how to protect my LAN by creating VLANs.

Keep up the good work and looking forward to more educational videos 👏

[marcusjankowski]

This video made home networking very easy and understandable. Thank you for being clear and making this easy for someone that didn’t know anything about this type of networking

[smilingcrocodile]

Awesome series, I learnt so much, thanks a lot ! Please continue it when you get the time to, I think it is a great way to hook people into your channel and have the discover the rest of your content!

[rtmsound]

At my last job we had business broadband but only had 90 Mbps at the front desk computer. Daisy chaining was the problem. Once I was allowed to look into it, I found the computer was connected to a gigabit switch though two 10/100 switches and a mile of cable all coiled up under the counter. After I cleaned things up we were getting almost 600 Mbps.

[ozzieo]

Thanks for this... perhaps next one you could go over fiber and all the different options.. different transceivers, cables, wavelengths, advantages/disadvantages, fiber nics, etc

[alexottersbach]

Really a shame there arent more. Genuinely most helpful videos ive watched

[lazzybug]

Thank you so much.. I just started a job in networking without prior experience..this helps a lot to understand the basic stuff 🙏

[xVertigo]

I love my Ubiquiti 16 port lite switch and 8 switches.
Heck, I even have multiple Flex poe switches and flex mini switches, and each one is used for certain types of devices.

Flex switches outside for cameras, 16 port switch outside under an eave with no risk of splash from the rain for more cameras as well a high power ptz cameras with poe injectors.

I absolutely love this stuff ^_^

Thanks for the video, I like following along to learn something new.

[James_Knott]

A couple of points, sometimes you have to consider physical size or weight when choosing between CAT 5 or 6. CAT 6 is physically larger and heavier than CAT5, making it slightly harder to work with. However, when running cables in a data centre you have to consider the weight of the cables in overhead cable racks. Also, I have found CAT6 patch cords do not fit is some models of conference phone, requiring the use of CAT5 only.

Also, RJ45 plugs should be used with stranded cable, not solid. This is because flexing of the cable can cause metal fatigue in solid wire. The structured cabling spec calls for solid wire cable to be terminated on a socket and stranded on plug. I always use a socket on solid wires and then a short patch cord to the device.

BTW, I have a 5 port managed switch configured as a "data tap" using port mirroring. I keep it in my computer bag, so it's always handy.

[colinsimmons]

Echoing everyone else here… this is a fantastic, super helpful series for a newbie like me. Very clear and concise. I would love to keep learning, if you’re up for getting back to it. Will subscribe on the hope that it comes!

I think home networking has a crazy gap of knowledge that is difficult to breach if you don’t know where to look. My ISP is useless and there are no technicians in my area. It’s really difficult to trust people over the internet, but this series has increased my confidence that rogue.support may be a good place for me to turn for help!

Thank you 🙏

[c]

Should mention using solid copper vs. copper clad aluminum ethernet cables for POE. POE is DC and more prone to voltage drop with distance. Solid copper is better than aluminum in the POE use case.

[wwljnmv]

I love these videos, I'm trying to plan my home network out and they are really helpful. My question is: Do you prefer Unify Networks or Omada? Is one or the other more secure? Easier to set up? More cost efficient? There are so many options out there!

[charlesbuzz]

question/reflexion I have is when using Vlan for LOT devices, you often lost access for those devices from sotware agragator like Google home or Appel homekit, you have to start doing some traffic management and sometimes knowing which port an LOT device is using is a bit of a struggle

[ptjenl]

Nice video. I just have one comment. I would never put an RJ connector on a long cable directly. Definitely not when it has a solid copper core. The pins in the connector can't connect to it properly and they usually cause issues after some time. Better to connect these cables to a patchbox or a wall mount using LSA! Then use prefab patchcables.

[ChrisGSimmons]

This was an excellent primer course. Thank you!!

[looseycanon]

A few things Chris didn't mention.

The reason, why there are outdoors and indoors cables, lies in insulation. Outdoors cable has extra shielding and one additional wire for grounding purposes. This wire is attached to a special Ethernet connector, which has metallic outer shell and connects to a metallic chassis of the rack or special F-F Ethernet plug, that has grounding wire as an extra attachment. These are typically used, when connecting say a WISP antenna, that's placed somewhere high on a building, like on a chimney.

As to what switches are good for you, price differences between unmanaged switches and managed switches is miniscule for small eight and five port switches these days. TP-Link has very bad reputation, especially for their higher tier managed switches. They can advertise link aggregation, but only support one standard, that is not supported by other devices, so I'd steer clear off them, unless you need fairly vanilla switching, at most to terminate a VLAN on something larger. Their unamanaged five and eight port switches are probably unbeatable in cost to performance category. As for small managed switches, I like to use Zyxel GS1200 series switches. They are dirt cheap and very intuitive to set up, particularly, when you need devices on multiple VLANs. Comparable UniFi switches (the flex line) are more expensive and you need the controller, which should be on separate device (a cloud key G2+ ideally, or you can use UDM series router, which also runs the controller), but the more complex and more advanced needs you have, the more compelling they become, mostly, because you are likely to enter world of UniFi WiFi equipment, which needs that same controller. Particularly interesting switch in UniFi line up is UniFi switch 8 150w. This switch supports both 24v passive PoE, as well as .3af and .3at standards and has two SFP ports, making it ideal core switch for a newtork, that needs to utilize 24v passive PoE on lan side (for instance, sending Internet over WiFi to a workship or separatly built garage).

Finally, what Chris said about designing a network, it is not gospel. There are situations, where a small switch would sit between larger switches, or you can end up daisychaining connection across five hops, because the house being wired was not designed with computer network in mind, or ISP terminated their connection at inopportune place. a few examples
- Daisychaining: House built narrowly along a hallway (fairly common in Europe). In this case, daisychaining from switch to switch makes sense, because eventually you'd be running great many wires to where the ISP terminated their run, if you strictly minimized number of hops. The thing is, even today and even going into the future with symultaneous streaming of video, your bottleneck will not be gigabit ethernet in your switches, but the speed you're buying from your ISP. As long as you will not have a NAS on your own network to store your videoteke, you will not push the network to it's limit.
- Daisychaining: Multigenerational housing. It makes sense to build networks of each family living in the building into their own networks with shared router. If one of the families uses a NAS as videoteke very rarely, purchasing a core switch could be unnecessary expense. The NAS would then be connected to the branch of network, that uses it more often. From the perspective of the other family, they are crossing multiple pieces of networking equipment to access that NAS, whenever they want to watch something from it. The idea behind this setup stems from the fact, that most traffic of the two families is independent of each other and ends in the Internet anyway, hence unnecessity of a unifying switch. This situation can occour also due to working from home. Most routers have five ethernet ports. In failover setup, where one connection serves as backup, two ports are WAN ports, two ports are uplink ports, one for each family, and one port remains for other uses. If this port is used for any purpose other than connecting that NAS, then one of the families is daisychaining into it accross switches and router.
- Daisychaining/small switch between big ones: relay. Very rare occasion in home envioronment. Per standards, limitation for 1 gigabit over Cat5e or Cat6 is 100 meters or 300 feet. A run longer than this can be done, but can either lack speed or stability. Putting a small switch between large ones makes sense, because in this case it serves the function of a signal repeater. Such situation can ocuour, when wiring enclosed courtyard, when the longest run is too long, in which case, adding a switch as a repeater or daisychaining final part of this network is the only way to go.
- Small switch between big ones: A camera hub. it would be wasteful to put a 24 port PoE switch in a place, that only needs to connect three to four cameras. Taking an inexpensive eight port PoE switch and inserting it here will not harm throghput, because cameras don't need that much bandwidth and switch would have been placed here anyway. Their added bandwidth is so small, it will be barely noticable.