When I lived in a small apartment, a few CAT6 cables and a mesh router kit was all I needed for a stable home network. But I always dreamed of building an overkill network setup, and ever since we moved to this house, I've been testing various configurations, from prosumer setups to more consumer-friendly appliances and custom routers based on OPNsense.

For the most part, they all perform fairly similarly for my needs, but I have noticed a few things along the way that I wish I'd known earlier. Some systems were easier to set up and administer, while others took more research and reading to figure out. While some issues were system-specific, many were more general and could apply to anyone's home network. Here's what countless hours of upgrading my home network have taught me.

5 A single bad cable can break things

Have spares on hand of every length you might need

One of the most important lessons I've learned over the years is never to trust that your physical connectors are good. The chances are, at least one of your cables, ports, or plugs will be faulty, and you might not notice for some time. This is even more important if you want to use PoE to power distant devices because the integrity of your copper cables is now crucial.

The number of times I've spent hours troubleshooting intermittent transmission faults or odd speed drops on some links, only for it to be the cable at fault, is far more hours than I want to count. Copper cables don't always bend that well, or they might have manufacturing defects that only show up when bent in one particular place. You might snag the sheath on something inside your walls or the little nails that hold your carpet in place.

I always have extra CAT cabling, whether it's short lengths for rack use or long pieces for longer runs. These days, I'll pull two cables through, so I have a spare in case the first cable goes. Pulling cable is annoying, and the price of even shielded CAT6 is cheap compared to the effort involved. I haven't pulled any fiber through the conduits in my walls (yet), but I'll be pulling several runs through in the same manner, for the same reasons.

4 Faster Wi-Fi needs faster wired connections

The move from an all-in-one router to network appliances didn't go smoothly

I was an early adopter of Gigabit fiber, jumping on the chance as soon as it was available in my area. This was years ago, and if I remember correctly, none of my Wi-Fi devices could sustain over 300 Mbps or so, due to them only having 2x2 antenna arrangements, but that didn't matter to me at the time. Important devices like my NAS and PC were hardwired and could use the full Gigabit speed.

Now, Multi-Gig is all the rage, and ISP plans can be higher than Gigabit (although not where I live yet). Home networking equipment comes with ports that often support 2.5GbE or higher, and Wi-Fi 7 is more common. When I moved to using separate Access Points (APs) instead of a Wi-Fi router, I didn't consider the wired network speeds I would need to fully support that AP.

In real-world testing, Wi-Fi 6 or 6E can do more than Gigabit, so you'd need 2.5GBase-T between your router, switches, and AP to take advantage of it. Wi-Fi 7 increases that substantially (especially with 4x4 antenna support), and can easily saturate a 5GBase-T connection, which is why most Wi-Fi 7 APs have a 10GbE port for connectivity. If you're only using Wi-Fi 5 devices currently, Gigabit wired connections are probably fine for your needs, but newer devices will come with faster Wi-Fi versions and eventually you might want to consider upgrading.

3 Some devices deserve even faster connections

For me, that's my NAS and main PCs, but it could be different for your network

Not all devices are equal, and not all connections between them should be either. You don't have to upgrade every device to faster Wi-Fi or wired connections, but some do benefit from the increased bandwidth, and those should be a priority. Which devices to upgrade will depend on your particular network configuration, but I can tell you what makes sense in my home.

Currently, the connection between my benchmarking PC and router is handled by a 10GbE active optical cable, partly because it's always downloading different games or software to test, but also to test the networking connection itself. My main PC is connected via 2.5GBase-T because that's the fastest onboard connection, and I'm not sure if I should get a PCIe card to increase that further, as I plan to move my main PC into a Small Form Factor case soon, and won't be able to use another card. My NAS uses 10GBase-T on my router, so it has plenty of bandwidth to deal with streaming files to devices while also handling my backups.

2 Network security is now your responsibility

No more pretending your ISP router magically keeps you safe

Network security should be a key component of any planned network upgrade, but it's often overlooked. I didn't have a dedicated firewall appliance for years, and didn't think I needed one. Similarly, I relied on Google Chrome to manage my passwords when I should have moved to a password manager much sooner.

Suppose you don't think you need a better security solution than the basic firewall in your router. In that case, my colleague Adam's dive into the depths of an SSH honeypot might give you some reasons to rethink your position. The Internet has always been a scary place, but the tools that hackers use now are increasingly sophisticated and automated, so every little bit of security you can set up will help. It's a myth that you're too small to target; even taking over one or two IoT devices to join in a massive botnet is enough of a target, so secure your home network.

1 Your Internet wiring (rarely) comes in where you want it

Expect to open walls or work around the annoyance

Depending on your builder, your contractor, the person who lived in your home before you, or how the stars aligned on that day, the place your Internet hookup comes into your home could be set up nicely, or it could be the backwards mess that is on my house, and every other house on my development. What's more, the CAT and coax cables running to various rooms hang outside in a big coil behind my electricity meter.

This is not an uncommon sight, even when this wall is my garage, and they could have terminated everything inside. It would have taken no extra effort, and probably less because they had to cut a hole in the stone fascia to pull the cable clutter through. The ISP then decided it was easier to drill another hole and push the CAT cable back inside to connect to the fiber ONT hookup, making things harder to remedy.

Once it's not boiling hot outside, I'm going to cut a hole in the drywall inside the garage, pull all the cables back in, and terminate them in a shielded patch panel so I can easily use the internal wiring to put APs upstairs or for other uses. If I'd realized it earlier, I would have gotten the builder to fix this mess, pull the cables back inside, and patch the holes. As it is, it's a weekend job for me soon. Don't wait like I did, check where your Internet hookup comes in, and make sure it's at least terminated inside.

Oh, the other thing? Your network upgrades never really end

I've still got a long list of things to fix, tweak, or upgrade on my home network, from moving the network appliances into a small rack for tidiness to deciding if there are any other network drops I want to make around the house so I can cable every device that has an Ethernet jack. Plus, I want to set up a fast backbone between the basement and the top floor to put a managed switch up there for future upgrades and capacity, and hardwire an AP on every floor for better Wi-Fi coverage. After that, I've got a home server to situate and run cables to, and I've built a custom NAS with TrueNAS to replace the Synology unit that gets more annoying to use over time.