Home networking

[Naveen]

So Comcast came out to my house to connect the cable and internet. I wanted the internet to be upstairs. When the tech came out, he said the line was dead upstairs and he could only hook things up on the first floor.

The house is older but there was a rehab done a few years ago, and every bedroom upstairs is wired with cable, phone, and ethernet

Does anyone have a recommendation for someone who does home networking who could give the place a look to see what's connected, what's not, etc. The Comcast guy seemed to want to do the bare minimum and get the hell out, so I don't really trust what he said.

Thanks.

[Marc]

No recs for who can do this, but a possible solution...

Consider getting a wireless router. Assuming your PC or laptop has a wireless antenna (and if it doesn't you can buy one for it). The wireless router connects to your cable modem and can broadcast a wireless signal throughout your space.

[raider.adam]

So Comcast came out to my house to connect the cable and internet. I wanted the internet to be upstairs. When the tech came out, he said the line was dead upstairs and he could only hook things up on the first floor.

The house is older but there was a rehab done a few years ago, and every bedroom upstairs is wired with cable, phone, and ethernet

Does anyone have a recommendation for someone who does home networking who could give the place a look to see what's connected, what's not, etc. The Comcast guy seemed to want to do the bare minimum and get the hell out, so I don't really trust what he said.

Thanks.

Any professional electrician should be able to look into it.

[Garret]

Are you renting or do you own the house? You could always ask the landlord or previous owner about it. We replaced some walls in our house and I put cable and network wiring in. We always used wifi for networking and rabbit ears for TV so the other ends of those lines are just coiled up, sitting on top of the basement ceiling tiles, ready to be hooked up once someone has a router or cable-splitter that needs them.

If you can't get hold of the previous owner, you could just take a walk down to the basement and eyeball the ceiling for any network or coax cables.

[JasonMcElroy]

My first thought was that you should call up and complain. Especially if you paid for installation.

Jason

[Sailaway]

If each room has ethernet, just go down to the basement and look for the ends of the cables or a "patch panel." Many home will just have the cables grouped together. They look like they have phone plugs (male connectors) on the end, but a bit wider with 6 pins instead of the 2 or 4 that phones have. These you will simply be able to plug into the LAN ports of the router. A patch panel has the female jacks instead; you plug an ethernet cable between each operating jack in the patch panel and the router.

Wireless has a lot of disadvantages versus wired, but could be used as a last resort. I don't know what equipment Comcrap provides but if they cheaped-out on you, you can get a 150N router for about $30. I recommend Dlink if you go this route, and whatever you do, stay away from Netgear products.

[Naveen]

Consider getting a wireless router. Assuming your PC or laptop has a wireless antenna (and if it doesn't you can buy one for it). The wireless router connects to your cable modem and can broadcast a wireless signal throughout your space.

I actually do have a wireless router. I upgraded to a dual-band N when I moved, and it's been great so far. The problem is my desktop workstation doesn't have a wireless. I've been debating whether or not to get a card for it (or a USB receiver). I'd really prefer to have it hard-wired. I have to upload large files for work, plus if all the ports were wired, it'd give me the option of better streaming to a TV upstairs.

Of course, maybe I'm just being a luddite. The wireless, especially over the 5 Ghz, really is pretty fast.

But, I'd definitely like the cable to be working upstairs.

Are you renting or do you own the house? You could always ask the landlord or previous owner about it.

If each room has ethernet, just go down to the basement and look for the ends of the cables or a "patch panel." Many home will just have the cables grouped together.

I tried to eyeball the wiring downstairs but it seems there was at least one if not two attempts at previous networking, maybe using DSL. I own, so I think I'll ask the previous owners. I've been in touch with them pretty regularly since their mail keeps coming here!

My first thought was that you should call up and complain. Especially if you paid for installation.

The less I have to deal with Comcast the better, even to complain. Luckily, I didn't pay for the install.

[daguerre]

A picture of the basement wiring would be useful.
As Sailaway said, look for ethernet cable ends in the basement (they have 8 pins, not 6). Your wireless router (provided by Comcast?) may have some wired switchports in it. Use the router to test electrical connections out to the network ports in the house: plug the router in in the basement and connect one of the house network cables. Go upstairs to the bedrooms and connect some kind of other device to the network port there (a laptop, desktop, other switch or router, anything with a network port that is powered on). Look at that network port on your laptop or whatever. If there's any kind of light right on the port, then you have "link" and that cable from basement to bedroom is electrically live. Test all the ports. If there's more than one network cable end in the basement, plug each one in to the router and go back upstairs doing an exhaustive check of what basement ends are connected to what upstairs rooms. Label with tape for future reference. If the Comcast guy did not do end-to-end tests of your Ethernet runs, he didn't really know if anything was "dead".
All this talk so far has only involved 8-pin Ethernet cabling. Comcast doesn't like to use that stuff even if it already exists in the house, because Comcast uses cable-tv coaxial cable, the round black cables with a screw-on pin at the end. The existence of Ethernet cabling is an invitation to use a competitor like Verizon. They'll have run co-ax into their cable modem, which probably ALSO has a few ethernet ports you can use with the existing Ethernet cabling.

[Naveen]

So the cable is wired in at least two of the three bedrooms. I need to check out the third - that's the one the Comcast guy actually claimed did not work. In any case, I have hard-wired internet upstairs now. There's a splitter in the basement with four outs, one for each bedroom and one for the TV room on the first floor.

The phone jacks are all working, but since I have no landline not really useful for me.

As to the Ethernet? Not sure. Really, they wouldn't be any use unless I was able to get the internet from the cable to whatever the Ethernet source was. Will dig deeper...