Recall from my previous blog post regarding my experience history with technology? Let’s tie that together with the internet – specifically, home internet!
The internet of things (IoT) category has brought and connected a lot of these devices that were once thought of as their own isolated device space altogether (Think calculator or microwave – they are independent devices that do not need to connect to the internet, but now they can). We have smart speakers, smart lights, smart thermostats, and smart whatever today – wow, it is like marketers just put the word smart in front of any device that leverages the power of the internet.
Well, I became a consumer of this category of devices with the smart speaker by Google – the Google Home! Well, my knowledge of getting hands on with the internet began in my middle school years at the start of owning a WIFI all in one router. Particularly, for my Nintendo DS and the games associated – more on that flash back on the previous blog post.
The internet infrastructure can be confusing, and the popularity of the internet made a lot of people, myself included, to be their own mini–Information Technology experts where basic concepts connecting devices together and the like became the core concept involving the inter-connectedness of the modern era. Okay, enough about that, let’s talk about my home network and fast forward this to the 2010s.
Upgrading my home internet
Router bridge mode and Wireless Access Points are unusual for someone who was not particular involved in technology to know (Recall, my previous degree was not related to Engineering or Software at all per my last blog post). And yet, I know of these concepts – but why?
If you know about the old routers, they were not particular the best and have since evolved to Wireless 802.11a, g, ax – whatever standards and 2.4GHz or 5GHz connection speeds. So, why does this matter?
I grew to include an additional router. At the time in high school, I did not know much about inter networking, but I knew that my home needed a new router because the old Linksys router was regarded “slower” based on all those new letters and numbers added to those newer routers.
As you can probably guess, the old Linksys router was but in a hidden drawer somewhere else after it was replaced with the new one as the new router. But this did not solve an issue as my house was particularly “large” and more and more family members are starting to use the internet at all over the place around and outside the house (Outside when the smart phone was introduced to minimize the cost of cellular bandwidth usage).
Range was the issue – there was a lot of interference because of the walls and the house story levels (Basement, Topfloor, etc.) so connecting wirelessly was a pain. So, what did I do? My young adult brain during college at the time made me do some research – Access Point and Bridge mode. Apparently, you could connect multiple Access points together and they will serve to connect the devices in the same network (Again, at the time, I did not study engineering or computer science). All I had to do was to reconfigure a device to act as an Access Point (AP) and connect it with a long ethernet cable – And that is what I did during the winter break from college – the old Linksys router became an access point downstairs on the far side of the living room connected with a long 50ft ethernet cable bought from Amazon.
And do you know what? It worked! Two WIFI points at my house!
Network Upgrade – After DSL to Cable Internet (Refer to timeline from the previous blog post)
But this was certainly not enough – fast forward to around 2018, I began to have issues with my home internet. Why? These consumer all in one routers are not particularly reliable because they take some time to come back online after they are down due to the gateway modem disconnecting. Or, much worst, they had wireless stability connection issues after each update or if restarted.
Because of the growing number of internet of things (IoT) devices growing around my house, this is becoming unacceptable.
So, I have replaced these old routers with this new set up:
- A dedicated non-wireless router
- Two dedicated power over ethernet Access Points (To replace the previous ones)
- 4 dedicated ethernet switches
- modem -> router -> switch 1 from basement -> switch 2 to upstairs connecting two additional switches: bedrooms (with AP) and living room (with AP).
- A network attached storage
- A dedicated firewall
- A dedicated Raspberry Pi that acts as a VPN and miscellaneous services center (Ad block, etc)
- Power over Ethernet Security cameras and center recording server
- And so on and so forth personal devices that either need WIFI or ethernet like the PCs.
- Each ethernet switch is plugged into their own dedicated uninterrupted power supply so power outages are not going to bring down my home network immediately.
Quite the upgrade to be frank – all came out of my own pocket and before starting this CS degree here at OSU. Note that after taking CS 372, I feel very appreciative of both learning this stuff on my own and understanding additional fundamentals like how the protocols work.
Note that these are only a few select images.
Learning on Command – The Reflection
I just want to say that doing this home network upgrade was cool. The cause for this upgrade to my home internet network was caused by the growing demand of IoT devices and the stability demanded for the home network to, well, just work!
