I have a new job that was just "flipped" by a contractor. They didn't wire it for SH*T!
They told the owner it had Cat6.......We found one cat 6 from the demarc to the closest "phone" jack. It was even added via the crawl space, after the house was done. My guess, they totally forgot to run the feeders!!
For the Coax, they ran one coax (RG6, not QS) from the protector to above the fireplace. This is where the new owner remembers seeing the router, hanging during the open house. My guess, so they could show the Ring unit actually working and calling it a "smart" house. After some digging around we found another coax in behind the other coax. It was too short to even put a connector on it. So, with my Milwaukee camera I could see the fireplace was added after the house was drywalled and painted. My guess, the realtor told the "flipper" it needed a fireplace. So they popped one in and stretched the coax, or tried!! Bottom line, no coax feed to the "structured" panel. Totally CRAP work!!
The "structured" panel had a cover from another brand. The screws didn't even line up.....
AND THIS PLACE SOLD FOR $2.9 Million !!! But it has a really nice fridge and oven though, crazy money for houses in the westside of Los Angeles!!!
So, back to my question. I will most likely need to use a mesh network. What brands have you used. What are the pros and cons, etc. Will most likely be using some type of WiFi cameras (need recommendations), so reliability is a must. We've been using the Ubiquiti Unifi line for the last year, if that matters.....

Eero for mesh.  Will also give you ports to connect anything needing a hardline or for connecting a switch.

Since you're used to Unifi, I would recommend that. I have a customer with 6 AP-AC-M's creating a mesh network that works really well. About a 6k square foot plaster wifi black hole that is impossible to retro to most of the locations in the house. This option gives you ports to connect hardwired devices as well.

Eero is not a bad solution as well though.

Eero all the way

Interesting.  Good info.  I have a 7500 sq ft stone and hard plaster/metal lathe house with 7 Eero's covering.

With these mesh networks. I know they talk to each other using a frequency that isn’t typically used for computers, phones and such. This is so to keep the speed rate up.

My question is, can these mesh devices be hard wired to each other as well?

KOT

No, they DO use the same WiFi frequencies. This is why it is important to look for a mesh system with a dedicated back haul channel to get full speed.

The cheaper systems only have 2 radios (2.4GHz & 5GHz) and use one of the radios to 'repeat' the traffic. Slowing the 'potential' speed, just like any WiFi repeater. If you are only getting 10Mbps up to 25Mbps from the ISP, then this is fine as you will never get that much slow down on the repeating. But if your ISP is giving you 200Mbps or more, depending on the quality of the mesh links, you could experience slowdown.

The more expensive systems (like Eero) have 3 radios. One of those radios is dedicated to the back haul, so no 'repeating' on the same channel. And you can get the full speed of the WiFi link. But it does give you another channel you have to be aware of, to make sure you are not getting interfered with. In a crowded RF environment, this could be a problem. But most likely such an install would also cause problems with the cheaper dual radio setup as well.

Yeah, just another option that works well. That house I was talking about is also plaster/metal lathe. Eero is a good product as well, I just happen to really like the Unifi ecosystem, and feedback/logging it gives us. Makes troubleshooting network issues a lot easier some times. Also, only having one interface to learn/teach the less network savvy guys is very helpful.



The Unifi mesh pieces can be hardwired as well. With any mesh system, the less hops the better, so if it is possible to hardwire a few of them then great.


Regular Unifi AP's also have the ability to do wireless uplinking to another AP, they recommend no more than 1 hop with them though (they have fairly recently added the ability to do more hops if needed with them, but don't recommend it).

The one place where we've had to try Eero, it worked great.

As for flips, THE MOMENT YOU FIND OUT IT IS A FLIP, TELL THE OWNER YOU NEED TO HAVE A HEART TO HEART. Hell, print out this thread for them.

I did a flip in Sherman Oaks. There were plenty of phone wires. Problems were twofold: they were CAT3 and they went about eight feet into the walls.

Thank GOD there was RG6 (not QS) throughout the house. I learned about DECA real quickly! We were able to give them wired internet in seven places as well as two DVRs and some four other receivers (some were wireless clients).

On other subjects:
The Belden guy who literally wrote a book on low voltage installation agreed with me in a conversation that Quad Shield is only really necessary in ridiculously strong signal areas.

Various other things are wrong with the house.

One of my sons bought a flip. We found that the kitchen sink drained into the space under the house. There had been cameras in the house and we found all the wires chopped about five feet from the previous DVR location. A year in, the drain out of the house to the street had to be replaced.

Flips are total crap, in my experience.

I haven't pulled a quad shielded coax cable in over 18 years.  Lots of folks still do, but don't really know why  / can't tell you why they're doing it.

MoCA saved me on an install yesterday.  Electrician daisy chained all the coax and Cat 5 in the house.  Nightmare!

I can tell you why, as I've said 100x over the years on the forum. It has NOTHING to do with the shielding. It has to do with the much lower resistance the quad shield gives for the coax. That much higher combined awg of the 4 layers helps with attenuation and even DC power drop over distance.
Same reason I use solid copper center for my coax cables.

I will always choose to use a quad shield, solid copper center, swept test coax cable for my choice of permanently installed cabling.
And I will explain in detail to the customer why. And answer as best I can when they ask why the other installer didn't use it, when I'm fixing their signal issue running 200' out to their pool house. :)

But keep using that cheap CCS, dual shield crap from the supply house. I love taking business when I run into a situation that it exceeded its limit and should never have been installed for the use it was being put into.

So just because I don't use quad shield coax means I don't use a quality cable?  Not sure how you can infer that.

I use broadcast quality, serial digital, 4.5 GHz, BCC with 95% braid shield usually Belden, but sometimes CommScope.

I own several thousand dollars worth of RF testing equipment and always engineer my RF systems.  I also do my own DirecTV distribution and have many installs with 20+ receivers around the property.

200' to the pool house?  That's cute.  I wish I had it that easy.  A good chunk of my projects are on estates with multiple buildings and houses.  15 to 20 acres is routine.  Have one that is almost 250 acres with multiple houses.  Lots of RG-11, drop cable, or even fiber links to outbuildings.

Wow.  I guess we steered this thread way off the rails.

OK, you can't ding good quad shield and then substitute digital serial cable in the mix. That's even more expensive than most quad shield.
Yes I have some of that as well. But mostly in mini (23awg) and RG59 (20awg). As I usually only use it for short run of special purpose.

Have some RG-11 also for those really long runs. But I need to order some more ends. It is rare I need to make runs over 200'.

And yes I too have thousands of $ in RF meters, sat meters, etc. Although my old Sencore digital RF meter is about shot (imagine that), and I'm not springing for a new JDSU.

When has a thread ever stayed on topic around here. :)

Your reasoning is right, but...

Hundreds of times? There are 9 posts in your name at remotecentral with the word "resistance" in them (actually, one has "resister") and only three of those, all from this year, are about cable shielding.

There's one more "reason" to use quad shielded wire. It's so the next installer can't show the thicker quad shielded wire to the customer and say "look, the last guy didn't even use the better wire," equating thick with better in the client's mind.

Ernie,
Did your mom ever say "I told you a million times" before she spanked you, when you were little?
Did she really tell you a million times?