I’ve been using networking gear for decades, but in recent years, I’ve gravitated towards a more simplistic, “If it works, I’m not messing with it” attitude. Gone are the days of making crossover cables for multiplayer Diablo 2 sessions in the university common roomsand other odd but workable LAN party setups with Ethernet strung everywhere. I just needed stable Internet and good Wi-Fi coverage, and that’s about it.
Except, while I thought I was prioritizing convenience over other considerations, I was actually doing myself and my home network a disservice. There are tons of network features I missed out on in the interim, and I should have looked into some of them much sooner. I’m often the first person to upgrade to the latest tech, but when it came to networking, I was happy with the modded firmware on my router for longer than I perhaps should have been. Here are some of the things I should have been exploring earlier, but am very intrigued by now.
7
Network segmentation
VLANs are my friend, and they should be yours, too
I’ve sorely ignored the possibilities and security that virtual local area networks (VLANs) offer. Even when I first got a router that allowed the setup of a guest network, I didn’t think about what it could be used for. Anyone who came over was a trusted friend or family member, so what was the point of a guest network?
Except it’s more than just having one Wi-Fi password for your devices and a guest password you can change easily. Things like my printers and network-attached storage don’t necessarily need to be able to talk to each other. My growing assortment of IoT devices in my smart home definitely shouldn’t be allowed to touch my file storage, and they shouldn’t be able to open up ports to the internet either, unless I want them to. Being able to group devices into their own virtual subnets is fantastic for security, and it makes the connections to my phones and computers faster as they’re not crowding those networks with traffic.
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6
Separate network appliances
All-in-one devices are jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none
The router your ISP supplies is often terrible, not just because the ISP can control it remotely for firmware updates, but also because it’s a combo device with a modem (if you have DSL or cable), router, and wireless AP all in one box. Once I knew enough to put those into bridge mode so that I could run my own router for my internal network, I still used a Wi-Fi router that had routing and wireless together.
Granted, that was a while ago now, and I’m now running a hardware firewall with routing capabilities and wired APs, which are far more capable. At the time, running separate network appliances was fairly rare outside of enterprise settings, but the networking landscape has changed, and I was slow to change with it. Some of that was also a very real worry about setup complexity, but modern networking gear is far more user-friendly and often walks you through the setup steps, or does many of them for you.
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5
10 GbE wired speeds
I didn’t realize how much I was limiting my Wi-Fi and NAS
For the longest time, I didn’t really believe in needing 10 GbE at home. Most of my computing was done with wireless devices, and having capable Wi-Fi was all I needed—or at least I thought I needed. Then I started using my NAS more, got faster Wi-Fi APs, and upgraded my computer’s motherboard, and realized that things weren’t as fast as they should have been because of the slower Ethernet links between them.
I still have mostly 2.5 GbE links between devices that can’t support any faster, but the NAS has a 10 GbE link to the router, and the links to the wireless APs are either 2.5 GbE for the Wi-Fi 6E ones or 10 GbE for the Wi-Fi 7 ones. That’s made my whole network faster as a result, and what I thought was my NAS being slow was actually the network connection linking it to the rest of the network. I’m not about to start chasing the current enterprise speeds, which are several times as fast, but for now, I’m slowly building out 10 GbE links as I upgrade.
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4
Hardware firewalls
Control, monitor, and limit traffic and access to your home network
Like many, I was happy relying on the basic firewall built into the router and the software firewalls built into the operating systems of my computers. But that’s not really enough for today’s cyber threat landscape, and it does nothing to protect devices that aren’t powerful enough to have their own firewalls, like IoT devices or everything else where security is an afterthought.
Having a hardware firewall isn’t just about static security, as you can add modules for antivirus, intrusion prevention, custom DNS, and a ton of logging and monitoring tools to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on in your network. Like the misbehaving smart TV I had, which was constantly flooding the network with broadcast requests and external server connections until I stuck it onto its own little blackholed VLAN so it could talk to literally nothing. I couldn’t have done that on my old networking gear, and I couldn’t figure out what the slowdown was because I just assumed it was from streaming 4K video.
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3
Mesh Wi-Fi
Almost as good as multiple APs with no wires to run
Whether I was in a larger house or a one-bedroom apartment, I was just like the majority in using the single router the ISP supplied, or one single router I owned, plugged into the incoming Ethernet from the fiber ONT. Granted, much of this time was before mesh networking was accessible to the home user, but I still took years before I tried it out.
I even owned one of the first Asus routers to get AiMesh, their version of mesh networking, flashed onto the router with Asuswrt-Merlin so that I got it ahead of consumer devices. I never did get a second one to try using it, though, and my first taste of mesh was with an Amplifi kit that was more router plus two repeaters than true mesh, which I’d use years later with an Eero kit. Mesh Wi-Fi makes getting consistent wireless coverage throughout my home much easier, with one AP on each floor, and I don’t really know why it took me so long to embrace it.
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2
Wi-Fi 6E or 7
Faster connectivity standards benefit all your devices, even the ones stuck on 2.4GHz
When routers and Wi-Fi adapters started using the 5GHz band to supplement the 2.4GHz band they’ve had since Wi-Fi began, I was a very early adopter. Swayed by the marketing about faster connections and lower pings, I bought in, and I got burned. See, the marketing gurus didn’t tell you that it wasn’t going to make your internet faster because you were still using DSL, or even when I had 10Mbps cable, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to speeds. Wireless-N didn’t make much of a difference to daily tasks, and neither did Wireless-AC when it arrived, so I kind of ignored Wi-Fi 6E for some time.
What I didn’t realize was how much being able to shift things to the 6GHz band would make on overall network performance. Not just because of the faster speeds that could take advantage of the gigabit fiber connection I now had but because of how much more responsive the other bands would be now that fewer devices were on them. Moving my high-use devices like computers and phones to the 6GHz band also meant less interference from the neighbors, who all seem to have dual-band routers still. I have a couple of Wi-Fi 7 APs now, not really because they’re necessary but because I don’t want to neglect newer standards as they come in.
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1
Integrated smart home hubs
Having Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter or Thread built-in to existing network devices is amazing
When I first started adding smart devices to my home, it was a few Wi-Fi-based things like a Nest Learning Thermostat, ostensibly to be lazier than I already was and have it learn my routine, so I never had to walk over to the thermostat again. Then I got the smart home bug, and started piling in smart locks, smart lights, anything I could find with “smart” in the description, really. And that was dumb because I ended up with multiple smart home hubs for competing ecosystems that all needed to be plugged into the few Ethernet ports I had on my router.
Nowadays, I’ve got Home Assistant running on my NAS to manage the disparate smart home ecosystems in one place, but it wasn’t until I got an Eero router kit that I could ditch the dongles. These mesh nodes have Zigbee hubs built in, plus HomeKit and now Matter, so most of my smart home devices can connect directly to the hub inside the router, and I don’t need the octopus of Ethernet hubs anymore. The only thing that’s missing is Z-Wave, but I don’t have any devices that use that standard, and if I get some in the future, I can get a USB dongle to plug into my NAS instead.
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I slept on these awesome network features, but you shouldn’t suffer the same fate
Modern networking hardware is a far cry from the manual, complicated devices of a decade ago. These are some of the major features I’ve not been using because I didn’t upgrade sooner. I also missed out on app-controlled routers for the longest time and the simplicity of network administration that they bring. The current state of my home network is a joy to use, and to administer, and I don’t want anyone else to not experience that.
#network #features #regret #sooner
source: https://www.xda-developers.com/network-features-i-regret-not-using-sooner/
