A Home Network

I spent some time overhauling my home network. There was no way I was going to settle for the default WiFi access point you get from an internet service provider. (Verizon in my case) My house is big enough to need more than one access point anyway and I run some local servers so I needed a bit more flexibility. Additionally, I’ve started to deploy some IoT devices, mostly related to home automation, so I wanted some isolation from my user network should a device spiral out of control. (flooding the network / general security issues) All of these things and the fact that we moved to a new house acted as my excuse to entirely rethink my home network. This post covers where I am now and attempts to rationalize to myself the unnecessarily large mindshare I’ve devoted. Don’t blame me if I send you off on a similarly unreasonable direction!

The goal: reliable, flexible and (reasonably) cost effective Internet infrastructure. In my experience, however, “because I’m already working on it” ended up to be rationale enough to make it a bit more feature-full. You’ll see.

The Hardware

WiFi is the dead-center of everything in a network these days, be it home or enterprise. The choice here needs to be very solid and overbuilt enough to support future realities. I think you can take the number of expected WiFi clients and multiply it by 10, for example, because IoT is invading. Realizing that every light switch and even many power receptacles are becoming WiFi clients, you can see where 10x might be conservative. Therefore something more…