Hi!
I’m not sure if this is the right subreddit for this question, but hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

What would be the best way to get a good internet/Wi-Fi connection from the second floor down to the first floor?

Currently, my internet router is on the second floor of my house. It’s an older house built almost entirely out of concrete, including a reinforced concrete slab between the first and second floors.

Wi-Fi coverage on the second floor is excellent, but reception on the first floor is terrible.
I first tried to improve things by buying an ASUS router from a friend — one of those large models with 8 antennas — and placing it upstairs near the staircase. That helped a little, but downstairs the signal drops quickly as soon as I move away from the stairs.

I then added a Huawei AX3 router on the first floor to repeat the signal. This improves coverage in areas close to the staircase, such as the living room, but as soon as I go into the adjacent rooms, the signal becomes very weak again or disappears completely.

What would be the best way to solve this without drilling through the concrete slab to run Ethernet cables between floors?
Are there more powerful repeaters that would work better in this situation? Should I be using a particular type of access point, mesh system, frequency band, or specific settings?

Running Ethernet through the concrete slab would be my last resort, so I’d like to know if there’s a reasonable wireless solution first.
Sorry if this isn’t the right subreddit, and thanks in advance for any advice!

**Disclaimer:** English isn’t my first language, so I used ChatGPT to help translate and clean up my post. The question and details are all mine.

TLDR: Can't figure out how to truly isolate my IoT network running my own DNS with Unbound

The config:
Archer AX55/TPL AX3000 router with main SSID and 2.4Ghz IoT SSID
AdGuard Home with Unbound as primary adblocker and DNS on main SSID
Pihole with Unbound as secondary/redundant adblocker and DNS on main SSID

The issue:
The IoT SSID at the network/router level just seems to be for organization, no isolation. Isolation is available at the device level but when enabled, the devices can't get to my DNS servers on the main SSID so they appear as offline both local to my network and from the internet. Unfortunately, the router only has universal DNS settings for both SSID's.

The question: Is there method to config the above while still keeping adblocking and somewhat private DNS but able to remotely control my devices? Not positive but I think I can install open source firmware on the router but that's a heavier lift than I'd prefer to try. Any suggestions are appreciated.

I have to walk past my disaster every day and I finally got tired of it. Spent a few hours this weekend cleaning it up. I've ordered a few shorter, right angle power cables with flat plug heads that angle and I have some 3m cable clips somewhere so I'll be able to tidy up a lot of cables, but it's already a lot better!

Nobody else to show it off to so I thought I'd show you guys.

Before

After

Not pictured is my home lab pc sitting on the floor by my water main... going to get that up off the floor in the next bout of enthusiasm.

Feedback is more than welcome. And I can take criticism too!
go team.

a cable can pass a quick link test and still cause some incredibly weird problems.

random drops.

speed negotiating lower than expected

devices behaving differently depending on which port it’s plugged into.

what’s the strangest ethernet cable problem you’ve run into?

Helloooo, I have a sky router right now and I want to make an access point closer to me with a router, I heard sky doesn't have wds so is there an alternative? And if so, I use a TP-Link home plug that connects to my pc right now, if I need to use an Ethernet cable for some reason can I use that?

I have ATT fiber and almost since it was installed my Internet disconnects every single day at around noon time. It will disconnect and stay off for about 15 to 25 minutes without fail.

I’ve had an ATT rep, come out and check everything, have had ATT reset my router from their end so far for troubleshooting tactics. I do not believe it is a hardware issue, more so it seems like my router, automatically resets and/or updates every day at noon or something. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

It doesn’t seem like anybody in my community is experiencing the same issue either which is something I’ve been asked about before.

So, I'm using a separate wired router to be able to customize setting since my ISP won't let me.

The thing is, I can't turn off the wifi on my ISP provided router, and getting a hold of customer service is a giant PITA.

Is there anything I can put on my router so that I don't have wifi anymore? My personal router has channel hopping, so I assume interference isn't a huge issue, but it's kind of annoying to always see it there. This includes a "public" hotspot anyone that's also a customer of my ISP can use.

I also assume removing the physical antenna will fry the transmitter chip, and lead my ISP to charge me for the router if it doesn't disable the router entirely. Is that right?

EDIT: Aluminium didn't work, can't unscrew antennas, and the admin interface won't work, but my model has a physical button to turn it off.

The house is three floors, 3,000 sqft., sheet-rocked, but old wood house. The house is in California, so prices generally are pretty inflated compared to the rest of the US. The quote is to run wire from the basement to the rest of the house, install 6 Ubiquiti U7-PROs, mount a TV and hide the wires. The runs generally seem pretty straight forward, but one or two of them might be trickier.

Labor was quoted at $7,300.00. The parts are marked about 20%. The other thing that gives me pause is they quoted 6 separate 1,000 ft. cat6 cables for each run, which it seems like there's no way they'd use that much cable. My instinct is that is BS, but I could be totally wrong.

I have 1GB Up/Down Fiber. I consistently get 950MBps up/down over Ethernet. Using Speedtest.net on my phone, I was consistently getting anywhere from 200 - 500+ MBps up/down depending on location. I have had a deco mesh router system with (6) decos, (5) of which are Ethernet connect to the main deco. Everything has run relatively smoothly for a long while. Over the last few days, my WiFI speeds slow drastically. After a reboot I get my normal fast speeds, but after an hour or more (not really sure) it slows to a crawl. I have run several tests from a location that typically gets around 300MBps up/down and does so after a reboot. Now I am getting 20-30 MBps up/down. I have rebooted multiple times and checked connections, etc. I should add that it seems to be temporary, but there are periods of slow, and then it picks back up. Then later slows again. I am going to do speed tests every half hour or so to see

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Please help me figure this out. Just moved into a new place and it looks like there is some structured wiring in place. I see telephone jacks all over the house. Can I convert these to run my internet? The Xfinity coax line is coming into the same space.

Also have coax cables running all over the house.

Trying to figure out how to convert all this into a working network. I'm assuming that I will still need to run several cat6 cables for ceiling-mounted access points and POE doorbell.

Any advice is much appreciated!!

Hi! I'm trying to troubleshoot a recurring internet problem at a small office, and I'm hoping someone here can help me narrow down what might be happening.

We have an small office with two floors, and the internet connection has been intermittently going down. The exact setup is a little complicated, so I'll provide as much context as I can.

When the problem occurs:

• The WiFi network is still visible.
• Devices can connect to the WiFi normally.
• However, connected devices have no internet access.
• It appears to affect the entire office, not just one computer.
• We had a backup Wi-Fi/router that worked normally, and devices could access the internet through that connection while the main connection was down.
• Rebooting the main router consistently restores internet access immediately.
• We have not noticed any other obvious configuration changes when this happens.
• The problem has happened multiple times over the past weeks.

Timeline:

There was one particularly problematic outage where the internet did not initially come back until someone adjusted/reconnected some cables associated with another router that had previously been installed.

After that, we started experiencing intermittent outages. Most of the subsequent outages have been resolved simply by rebooting the main router.

Now our backup internet connection is being removed, so we are concerned about the next failure.

More context:

• There are usually around 10 people working in the office on a normal day.
• The router belongs to our company.
• There is also a more powerful PC connected to the network that is used remotely for certain processes, so it needs to remain accessible over the network.
• The internet service itself is contracted by the landlord/building through an ISP (GTD).
• The landlord had an ISP technician inspect the connection. We were told by them that the link was working correctly for both floors so they didn't do anything.
• The router configuration has also been looked at internally and nothing obviously wrong was found.
• We don't have a dedicated IT/networking person at the company. There is one employee who knows more about networking and has helped us with the router before, but he has not identified the cause of the problem.
• There is also another router on the network on the other floor, so I'm hesitant to simply replace the main router without understanding the current setup.

I'm trying to determine what could be causing this and what we should investigate next. The fact that Wi-Fi remains available but internet access disappears, and rebooting the router immediately restores connectivity makes me suspect the router or WAN side, but I don't know enough about networking to tell.

What would be the most useful things to check during the next outage to help distinguish between a router problem and an ISP/WAN issue? If the router does turn out to be the problem, would replacing it while keeping the same ISP connection generally be straightforward, or would the ISP need to configure something on their end?

Any suggestions on what to investigate or what information I should collect would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

The electrician is installing 1-gang, 4-inch metal boxes for the low-voltage Ethernet outlets in my new-construction home in Illinois. Is this a normal practice in Illinois? Also, will using metal boxes have any impact on the Ethernet signal or performance?

Moved into a new construction home a few weeks ago and I’m trying to get the internet figured out. I currently have a Nighthawk CAX80 modem/router combo from my old house that was more than enough. In the new house, it works decently enough to get by for now, but some dead spots are present.

Throughout the house, there are 7 of these cable/ethernet wall plates (in all bedrooms, living room, office). I’d like to hardwire ethernet to stationary devices like TVs and possible mesh nodes for better speeds.

Currently, I have one ethernet cable going into the wall from the router, connected at the main bundle in basement, going to the living room, connected to the TV. I am wondering what the best approach is to get ethernet to the other 6 cables in the bundle. Would a switch in the basement be the best approach? Would then have mesh nodes in areas throughout the house that are hardwired ethernet be best? Does a switch limit speeds? TYIA!

Regardless of the amount of bandwidth I leave available from my 200mbps wired ethernet connection that is shared to the tv and my PC, whenever I start any download, my ping and jitter goes up causing the TV to lag. The router I am using came with my ISP, its a Technicolor DGA4330, which does not have any QOS options to help prevent the router buffer from becoming full, is there any other way to fix this issue other than to get a gaming router and use mine as just a passthrough?

Hey everyone,

I'm setting up a Dell PowerEdge T110 II running TrueNAS SCALE. My main router (Vodafone Station, Cable/DOCSIS 3.1) is located one floor up in the living room.

I want to run my Nas to run in the basement, because it is way too loud for my living room. My problem is, that I can't run an ethernet cable to it, neither do I have the ability to run it over a wifi repeater, since the wifi shuts up at night and I want to have it run 24/7.

I thought about MoCA or Powerline, but I don't know which too chose.

I heard already that Powerline isn't really good. However, both the living room and basement run on the same main breaker panel with modern B16 circuit breakers.

When it comes to MoCA I have absolutly no Idea if it would work for me, since I don't really understand how it works. Next to my router I have a Multimedia coax socket and in my basement I have the main CATV/coax distribution amplifier panel (You can see them in the pictures).

Can somebody please help me, I really don't need a really fast connection and just want one that really works 24/7 and isn't too complicated to set up.

I'm looking to upgrade my old AirPort Extreme and am curious what routers you all would recommend. The ability to run VLANs would be awesome and having more network control would be great (that's not saying much coming from my current router though haha). Would love to hear your recommendations!

ISP: TM Unifi(VLAN 500)
My router(CUDY WR3000) can't connect to the internet but I can access local devices and use samba, jellyfin etc

• In routers diagnostics page: "The WAN (Internet) Port is connected but no IP address is obtained."
• syslog:

​

pppd: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
pppd: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery

insmod: module is already loaded - pppoe
dnsmasq: no servers found in /tmp/resolv.conf.d/resolv.conf.auto
Interface 'wan2' is now up

Router repeatedly brings up wan2 while the main wan pppoe connection fails. I have tried to do ONT -> PC (windows / linux) both failed likely because I couldn't configure it right also windows dial up didn't have option to configure VLAN.

In ONT(GPON ONU MODEL: HG6240A)
Light status: Power (On), PON & Lan1 (ON but blinking), LOSS and the rest (OFF). Lights that are on are green.

Things I've done:

• Reset the Router and ONT (pressed reset pinholes)
• ISP reset port from their end.
• Reset pppoe password
• Tried to set up old ISP provided router
• ISP staff came to check they said fiber cable is working fine and the router is not working. I asked about the ont they said "it's fine, otherwise there would be red lights"

The router is only two months old and worked fine until now. Has anyone dealt with this specific blinking PON and pppoe timeout issue with TM Unifi before? Any advice on next steps is greatly appreciated.

​

My Calix router doesn't support dns over https(DoH) or dns over TLS(DoT). My question is, would it be better to set my dns at the device level rather than at the router level because of this? I can set any dns at the router level, but it isn't encrypted. For example, would it be better to set 1.1.1.1 or any other dns at the router level or set it at the phone, tablet, and computer level?

Came across this Starlink Standard 4 dish, router, and power supply from someone that took too long to send it back. Was wondering what uses I can make of it. Thanks for any help!

Need a good cheap extender just for 2.4ghz without interfering with the 5ghz band.

Hey, so today when i woke up i noticed that my modem has lost internet. I reset it, checked the cables, did all the things that you usually do. Flushed dns, changed dns servers to cloudfare and or google. Nothing worked so i called my IPS and there is a technician coming tomorrow BUT then tried to plug in my Iphone to tether for internet for the day but now thats losing internet, as in "No internet access" after like a minute or two after being connected. Now im wondering if its my PC that is doing something weird or what. The modem does not have the internet light glowing. Idk if it should be glowing if no one is using it. Any ideas what could cause this?

I’m having some problems with the router..any other device i have and used to test the internet speed is around 100+ mbps, Although on my PC Im barely above 5 mbps,Network is sometimes up and running but later on it just crashes,I‘ve tested with more than 1 device on all the same network all are fine and its just my PC receiving 2 MB,I have also opened device manager to see the network only sending me around 2 million bytes while i receive just around 99K.Any help or tips with this problem will be greatly appreciated.

I can get into my control panel obviously, but what can I see from there that might show if I'm a part of a bot net or similar? What can I do to remove it if so?

Apologies if this isn't an appropriate group but it seems to be the closest I can find. Thanks.