msabeln

It depends on the neighborhood. Where I live, all utilities are underground. At a former house, I had broadband coming from utility poles.

I’ve had fiber installed at two houses this year, and in both they worked with me to get the fiber, the ONT and the Ethernet exactly where I wanted them at no additional charge. At my old house, the fiber came in through the basement in the back, the fiber runs under the joists until it ends up under my office, and they ran Ethernet up to an outlet on the office wall. At the new house, it enters into my basement workshop, on the top shelf of a cabinet, where the ONT is and Ethernet goes to my router. There is plenty of extra fiber coiled above the drop ceiling for relocation.

At 2000 square feet one unit might work. If you have brick, stone, or concrete interior walls, then it probably won’t work well.

Usually I recommend one WiFi access point per thousand square feet per floor, especially with stick frame and plaster construction, although more area per AP is usable if the surrounding WiFi radio environment isn’t too crowded.

As they said.

But use Ethernet for new network cabling. Coax is good if it is already installed in the walls, but not so good for new work.

Change the shop WiFi device to Access Point mode if possible. Change its SSID (WiFi name), password, and security setting to exactly match your home setting. Then devices will roam seamlessly between home and shop.

Cascading switches is fine.

Doesn’t Spectrum provide a modem for no extra charge? But if you are having difficulties with yours, they’ll swap it out for you.

You might find bargains on newer gear with higher specs at resale shops.

Imagine you want a drink of water. What is best: going outside in the rain and opening your mouth up to catch drops, or turning on a water faucet? WiFi is like rain, Ethernet is like a faucet.

If your router doesn’t have enough LAN ports for your devices, you can get an inexpensive gigabit Ethernet switch to add more.

Maybe the router is the DNS server for the network, especially if it has content filtering.