Once I started I couldn’t stop—rebuilt everything + New Routers

I couldn’t help myself. After doing a nuke and pave on my MBP and reinstalling the OS and all apps, I decided to do the same thing with the iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. I went a step further and added new routers, a new TV receiving box and reinstalled three eeros routers. I now have two wifi networks at home—one for TVs and the other for tech devices.

What a pain. It took nearly two days to reinstall and sync everything but I’m off work this week and the wife is out of town so this was the perfect time for this project.

Everything is snappy, downloads are faster, and everything “just works.” All data is synced and I’ve been judicious with installing apps. I’ve been as minimalistic as possible while ensuring I have the tools I need. An app has to earn its place back on a device.

While this was not fun, I’m glad I did it.

So now I’ve earned myself some Monday night American football. :slight_smile: :football:

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I’ve been really tempted to do this as well. I like the idea of creating two networks. Did you have to use two routers for this?

Why have two networks this way?

Wating for my new M1 MBP to arrive and I’ll set everything up from scratch. Reset router, reconfigure NAS, rewire switch, iPad and iPhone, home automation…

Things you do in a lockdown…

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For one network I use the AT&T router. For the other I used my eeros routers - three of them.

Because I am assuming, and I am no expert, that there will be fewer bottlenecks with heavy data loads - for example, when video is streaming and we have multiple devices hitting the network simultaneously. Two fire hoses better than one? :grinning: Thus far, it seems to work well.

PS: don’t tell ATT but I’m paying for 40 MB download speeds but I’m actually getting 60 to 62 MB through my Wi-Fi network at this point. Not too shabby. :slight_smile:

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I suppose this is one of the few silver linings.

That’s why in my home network I have a proper switch (with broad backplane) handling the heavy loads.

  • NAS goes into it with two trunked GbE cables
  • TV is attached by cable
  • MacMini (server, documents, scanning, Hazel,…) is attached by cable

Even if the TV is streaming from the NAS, I still get full speeds in any direction and even huge file transfers don’t impair the speeds. I tested it transferring a file from the MBP to the Mini, at the same time streaming, at the same time moving a file from the NAS to another laptop. Full Gb. The router only handles WiFi, DNS, Port Forwarding, limited Firewall and goes into the switch.

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Your on-net speed is not necessarily the same as the speed your router is getting at the internet interface.

The bottleneck is that internet point. The contention between streaming and other uses occurs there – that’s the narrow end of your pipe that everything has to pass through. Most modern WiFi networks can handle a lot more load than you need, but if they are attached to a tiny pipe not much can be done but buy a bigger pipe.

40 Mbps is on the lower end of average broadband. Netflix needs about 10-20% of that depending on how many simultaneous users. If you boost your pipe to 100-200 Mbps you would probably avoid any contention.

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How do you have the two routers connected (treating the eero’s as one router)?

I freely admit that that is way above my pay grade technically but at my amateur level, my system seems to be working well. :slight_smile:

Yes, that I realize. I have two hoses attached to the same hydrant.

But, all I can say is that throughout the house I have faster speeds and better coverage than before. I have no idea if this is technically accurate but it seems to this layman that having discreet points of contact via two wifi “channels” seems to have improved my speed coming from the same hydrant (prior to the changes I made I had the same speed coming into the house (40mb) but was achieving only ~35mb on my devices. Since the change, I’m seeing higher speeds than I’m paying for even though support confirmed the 40mb coming into the house. I’m now getting a consistent 55-63mb downloads on my devices. I have no idea why and, I’m not sure I care. :slight_smile: Right now, I’m a happy camper.

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I freely admit that I did it…because I can. :smiley: If I had everything running through the router and it’s included switch) I wouldn’t notice most of the time.

Great stuff …why do we guys always wait until our wives travel before doing upgrades? “She’s leaving …what projects can I get done?” lol

I’m tempted to replace my Velops with 3 Eero Wifi-6 and then eventually move to WAP connected POE.

Separating your network is a smart thing that’s essentially creating a VLAN so that some network traffic is invisible to other devices.

LOVE doing clean installs. I wish there was a ways of archiving every preference setting on a Mac so that you could just import the preferences once the clean install is done.

Clean installs make you love your Mac again and allow weeding apps that just aren’t making the cut anymore.

Thinking about ripping my Cat 5e out and replacing with Cat 6x. I’ve only go 6 drops and the builders kind of lazily routed the cables through the attic and that bothers me because if we want to finish the attic I’d have to deal with the cables then anyways. May as was well upgrade the cable and improve the cable routing.

Next year going to build a TruNas system on 10g Ethernet to store all my text files …jk. I’ll uses for Roon, Plex and Firecore. Might run Docker…we’ll see.

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@hmurchison So this may strike you as funny but since humility is a virtue I’m about to demonstrate some. :slight_smile:

1.you described what I did with my network better than I could have.

2.most of what you describe is way above my technical paygrade but if I ever need help I may call on you to come visit. :slight_smile:

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