An Example Home Network
Last update: 2021-04-02
Working at home can be simple or complex.
Here’s an example of one person’s home setup.
Internet:
Past: cable, bonded DSL, Wimax (the former Clearwire and Clear)
Present: 1-gigabit synchronous fiber; LTE (cellular); cable via Wifi bridge from neighbor (as wireless ISP, or WiFi as WAN).
The 1-gigabit synchronous connection handles five static WAN IPs.
The 1-gigabit synchronous connection provides service to 40-60 devices, depending on what is going on. These devices include:
— main work station (see image below) comprising: Dell XPS tower with six monitors; Beelink i5 small-form factor computer connected to 40″ 4k Roku TV that also servers as monitor; Mini-box computer acting as audio streaming server and web server
— three other multi-computer, multi-monitor work stations
— several video streaming devices, such as six Rokus, Chromecast, Amazon Firestick
— several Internet radios
— eight Amazon Echo devices in one multi-room music group; two Amazon Echo devices in one-multiroom music group
— streaming audio server for listening to various international news services via Internet outside the house
— dedicated VPN servers and routers
— two NAS (network attached storage) devices, each with RAID mirroring
— Raspberry PI with voice codec decoder server for amateur radio
— four networked printers (one using wifi into the network)
— professional Tricaster webcasting equipment
— surveillance cameras
— streaming audio server connected to low-power FM transmitter to create in-house Old Time Radio station
— tablets
— smart phones
— various laptops
— routers dedicated to VPN (virtual private network) connections (so, among other things, I can have wifi in the house with foreign IP#; handy to get around IP-geo-blocking)
— I’ve probably forgotten something
— cloud-controlled enterprise access point as main access point for house
All these devices are connected through one of the following:
— several switches, including several 16- and 24-port switches
— 1200 feet of ethernet cable
— outdoor 2.4Ghz access point
— Asus dual-band, concurrent router used for WiFi as WAN feed
— Asus router used for fiber Internet feed
— Open-Mesh A60 (dual-band, concurrent) cloud-controlled PoE Access point as main WiFi access point for the fiber Internet
— several Meraki (indoor and outdoor) cloud-controlled access points used as system-down alarms and other fill-in needs
— access points from the VPN routers
