High-Performance Home Networking

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In this video we will walk you through the key parts of your home network and cover the main things you should think about when investing in your network. Let’s start with what the Internet Service Providers like Spectrum, Comcast, AT&T and others provide. Most of these Internet providers rent you a very entry level all-in-one device which serves 4 roles simultaneously: the modem, the router, the switch and wireless access point. As you might expect, by combining all of these functions into one inexpensive box, the service providers make it simple and easy for them to connect your house to the Internet. For most of these devices, the valuable piece of the box is the modem which transmits the ones and zeros from your house to the rest of the world. However, to keep the costs down and make it all work in one box, the rest of the pieces including the router, the switch and the wireless access point are all relatively cheap. This is why when your Internet is installed, the technician can plug directly into the all in one box and show you blazingly fast speeds - but then the next day your children get lower resolution Netflix and your Zoom call just does not seem to be as clear. The modem is doing its job super well, but as soon as numerous streams are hitting the wireless chipset from different distances, the system seems subpar.

This is also true of the wireless communication in the all-in-one box. A single wireless access point in general talks to only one device at a time. Even though there might be four of you all in your house working on the Internet at the same time, a normal wireless access point literally has to communicate to and from each of your devices in order. Further, the farther away you get from the device the slower and worse the connection gets. So the end result is that all-in-one boxes do a reasonable job in a small home or apartment but are generally terrible in large homes. So what are the solutions for large homes? There are basically two major options. The best by far and the one most installed in larger homes by Audio Advice and professionals like us is identical to an enterprise grade network. What we do is to turn off the router and the wireless access point in your all-in-one box and then connect a very fast and highly secure router that is then connected to a super fast enterprise grade switch and then we wire multiple access points throughout your home to the switch. A few things are going on here. First, we are stepping up the quality level of every single piece in the system as the network is only as good as the weakest link. The second thing that is going on is that we directly wire the access points back to the switch and router. This means that all of the different wireless devices you have in your home--and you have way more devices connecting all day long that you may think, now are spread over multiple access points which dramatically improves performance.

The last point I want to cover is about network health and monitoring. Really good systems like the ones that Audio Advice installs will constantly evaluate the health of your network. If our system sees that you’ve lost Internet connectivity or a key piece may have not come back correctly from a loss of power to your home, it will automatically reboot itself and it will reboot the pieces needed in the correct order. So no more calling your Internet provider while they tell you to pull power to each device and wait 5 minutes, etc. The system does this for you. Further, we provide a customer phone app where you can reboot your system remotely if you are out of town. Or you can simply call our 24/7 on call number and our team will gladly check your system for you--we can even see if homes around your house have lost Internet and let you know if there is an Internet outage in your area. If not, we can remotely troubleshoot for you. But frankly these enterprise grade systems are so good that we hardly ever get calls.