$2 a foot? You're hired! I'll even fly you in at that price.

This is charity level pricing.

Travel routers are built for this. One of the leading companies in travel routers is GL.iNet, go look at their product line.

Be happy for those pink cables.

Right now, you got your modem/router in the Family Room, and it's doing well covering the first floor. You also have a CAT5e Family Room pink cables there too. Logically it should be right next to your router.

All you need to do is plug one of your 4 LAN ports on your router into the Family Room CAT5e. This connection then leads back into your wiring cabinet (the picture you provided).

Second, buy a small switch, and install it into that cabinet. A 5 port or 8 port switch will do, as you only have a few pink cables. Then plug in the CAT5e from the Family Room, Room Room, and Master Bedroom into that switch. You can leave the Demarc cable unplugged, because that cable probably goes outside.

Having gotten this far, your Room Room and Master Bedroom Ethernet ports (RJ45) are now active and are a part of your network and have Internet flowing in their veins.

So you can now attach other switches to these active Ethernet ports and connect wired devices to them. You can also connect an Access Point (or two!) to these connections to give you a new source for WiFi coverage. If you give this Access Point the same WiFi SSID and password as your current Netgear, then devices can potentially "roam" between them when moving from one floor to another.

Hopefully the Master Bedroom or Room Room is upstairs, and can thus cover the second floor.

Instead of buying a separate switch and Access Point for your new connection, sometimes it's simpler to just buy another router and set it into "Access Point Mode", which is like a switch and WiFi Access Point combined into one. Any router can do this. This sub favors buying a separate switch and dedicated Access Point, but for a simple setup, I don't mind just getting a second router and using that instead.

So you need some Ethernet cables, at least one switch for the cabinet, maybe one or two switches for the other rooms, maybe one or two dedicated Access Points for new WiFi, OR maybe one or two additional routers set to "Access Point Mode" to act as both a switch and an Access Point.

With your setup, if two devices want to communicate, and their ports and the ports on the switches they connect to all supports 10G, then they'll communicate at 10G.

If any of the ports is 1G, even if every other port is 10G, it'll drop down to 1G for that particular communication pathway. That drop down does not "spread" to other pathways.

Having a 1G device plugged into a 10G switch does NOT affect anything else on that switch. Each connection has the "right" to connect at 10G as long as everything along the communication pathway supports it, and is not affected by other concurrent connections that are happening alongside it. Switches can compartmentalize each connection as its own.

Get a Protectli box with a very good CPU, 4 Ethernet ports, install OPNSense, and have at it.

I'm surprised the UDM Pro cannot route 2x 1 Gbps on two WANs. I thought it was rated higher than that.

Your test might be running into the 1 Gbps limit backplane problem on the built in switch for UDM Pros.

Maybe he's just testing something temporarily. Like something he bought is having trouble connecting, probably because he's using the same SSID for 2.4 and 5 GHz, but the shitty IoT device can't handle that. So he's messing around, trying to get it to connect.

Unless he's a good friend, I'd just ignore it. You make a comment to the typical person about his WiFi, and he'll become super paranoid about why you even noticed.

Then we'll get a post on this sub from him on how his "creepy neighbor" is hacking his hidden SSID and 60 key password. And now his IoT lightbulbs are now dimming on their own.

And so goes the flow of this sub.

The bitrate of 4K from streaming services like Disney and Netflix is much, much lower than your UHD Blu-ray rips. They recommend having a 16-25 Mbps connection to stream 4K, but the average bitrate is even lower. It's closer to 6-8 Mbits. They just recommend a higher Internet connection because of how streaming works (small bursts of higher rates with a lot of idle time in between).

You can calculate it accurately by just downloading the movie (if the streamer lets you, like premium subscriptions do) to see the file size, and then dividing that size by the length of the movie in seconds. That will give you the average bits per second by definition. You'll be surprised how low it is, because streamers use compression, while "pure" UHD Blu-ray avoids compression to satisfy purists.

As to how much data a streamer uses, it's immense. It's a huge chunk of the data on the Internet at any given time, with estimates in 40-60% range for all the streamers in aggregate. Look into "Content Delivery Networks" (CDNs) to see how it's delivered on a global scale. It's actually very impressive.

There is no set answer, because everyone's environment is different. You'll just need to test it for yourself and see.

First, do speed tests with and without the secondary mesh node. Run a dozen in each configuration to get a usable sample size. Use different speed test sites too.

Then do a continuous ping test to your Default Gateway (your router's LAN address, for example 192.168.1.1 is common, but just check) with and without the secondary mesh node. Run that test for an hour each or more during busy network times, like in the evenings. Compare the results.

Then see which you prefer.

The placement of your mesh nodes, test computer, how busy your WiFi is in general, and layout of your home will determine test results. So there is no set answer.

I will say that, with wireless backhaul, you should just use the least number of nodes you need for full coverage. Four seems excessive. Most homes need only two mesh units to cover everything, three for bigger or unusually shaped houses.

Fooling someone into installing malware is far, far more effective than someone trying to penetrate your firewall with a frontal attack, or brute forcing passwords, or faking certificates, man in the middle, or anything "hacking".

Ransomware, one of the proven successful cyber attacks, is pretty much just trying to get a secretary to click on an email attachment that is malevolent. Or faking an ID badge or uniform and just walking into a company and installing ransomware off of a USB drive. Or promising you a new iPhone if you just install this little file to verify you've won. Or pretending to be the IT department and asking someone for their passwords.

Social Engineering has always been magnitudes easier to do than any kind of "using computers to break into other computers" that we normally think of when "hacking" is mentioned.

Installing pirated games is a known and common tactic for getting malware behind your firewall, no direct hacking needed. Just set the bait, and the fish hook themselves.

Just having a basic firewall, which all routers provide, has proven to be enough for home users. Whether it's because no one cares to even hack a home user unless the door is wide open (because he's worthless), or a basic firewall has proven very difficult to bypass through "frontal attack" means, regardless of the reason, home users just aren't being hacked to any significant, measurable degree. If they were, it'd be the central focus of every government and law enforcement agency because of all the money, and political motivation of the outraged people, to make it stop.

Instead, we have almost literally everyone on the planet using the Internet to move / trade large amounts of money every second of every day. There isn't even rumors about anyone we know getting hacked and robbed that way, because Social Media would explode with those kinds of legitimate stories. Unless you are a big or key technology corporation or a government, you simply aren't worth any real skilled hackers time at all, and that's the truth of it.

If you're getting a fiber plan, you don't need a cable modem at all. Save that money. You just need a router of some sort.

1500 sq ft can usually be covered with just one router usually, depending on the layout of your home. If your townhouse is tall and thin, then where your ISP connection is located will determine if you can just use one router, or if you need more coverage.

Before committing to any system, I'd look at what kind of wiring is already included in the house. Often, coaxial cable (using MoCA Adapters) or old telephone wiring can be converted to Ethernet. If this is possible, it not only reduces the need for WiFi (perhaps you can cover everything with one router and 2.4GHz WiFi in the extreme corners because everything important and demanding is now wired in, so that's good enough), but also opens your choices up tremendously on what system to buy into not just Orbi.

If you or your partner already have a router from your past home, consider using it for the first month until you evaluate your wiring situation correctly, and then make a hardware choice.

You should look at the postings on this sub. Many (especially ones with pictures) are all about converting coaxial cable into Ethernet, or rewiring old phone lines into Ethernet. Read some of those and you'll start to see a lot of possibilities for your home network.

Ethernet cables do not "sort out" and treat data communications differently by any kind of categorization. They will transmit any kind of valid data, without discrimination of the source. Internet traffic is not special and does not need to be treated any differently. It just happens to come from farther away.

So you can use your one cable to have the observatory communicate to any amount of devices, from your home or from the Internet, as long as your network topology and settings are configured to do so. Most likely, yours already is. You can test this by "pinging" your observatory equipment's IP Address from the PC controller inside your home.

Are your WiFi devices actually dropping every 5 seconds, or are you just worried about WiFiman readings?

If it's just WiFiman, you seem to be extremely close to the router at -30 dBm, like touching it. Try backing off a little.

If devices are dropping, try plugging the ASUS into a different power outlet, or better yet, a UPS outlet if you have one. Try not using a power strip if you are plugging into one.

If somehow available, try a different power cord for the ASUS.

As a longer-shot, reflash the latest firmware again, or try Merlin Firmware if your ASUS model supports it.