Setup a home network with media/phone support

[lan_baba]

Hi there,
I'm moving into a new place would like to set up a fast, stable and easy to maintanence home network.
The house is prewired with cat-6 cable and each room has one cat-6 jack. all the cat-6 cable meets at the media box in the garage, where I will have verizon FIOS modem/router placed. There is cable tv jack in each room and there is no phone jack inside the house. And I'm using OOMA as my VOIP provider. And besides the FIOS modem, I have one netgear WDNR3700, one WNR3500, one 5 port gigabit switch and several NAS. There are more than 4 cat-6 jacks in the house, so it is over the limit of the FIOS router( and the router is 100M speed).

What I want to have is the phone and the computer network shares the same cable if possible and without any performance lost (the network should be running with gigabit speed). I think it can be done by using the vlan, but does that means I need buy expensive equipment? And I will have several device in the study room, and would like to have the flexibility to put several device in one room if needed (using a switch connected to the single cat-6 jack?).
I know I get most of these done by wifi, but the singal inside is not really good due the the construction meterial of the house. So, a physical lan will be my first choice.

Please, suggestions. Thanks in advance.

 

[yinan]

What you want cannot be done with consumer grade equipment.
VLANs wont matter because if OOMA is like most other VOIP providers it has a device that all of your phones plug into. What you should look into is cordless phones that can share a common base station.

The best set up however, would have been to have 2 cat5+ connections in each room.

 

[Binky]

Put a switch in the media box with enough ports to connect everything. Router is also in the media box and it links to the switch there. Ignore all other ports on the router - you just need one to feed into the large switch to feed the house.

Each room might need a small switch if there is more than one device in the room. You can grab cheap 5 ports for $15-$30 if you watch for deals.

Put the OOMA anywherre in the house that you want, as long as it can plug into one of the cat6 ports or one of the small switches that you might have in different rooms to feed multiple devices. You won't know if the OOMA has any issues with that particular router until you try it.

Screw Wifi. I'd much rather deal with multiple devices feeding off a single gigabit switch link than deal with the best wifi signal possible. I cant stand wireless!