Techies,

I'm not great with infrastructure so hopefully someone can help. I have a two story house and I just set up my bonus room upstairs.

Downstairs I have an Apple wireless router from which I feed a smart TV and smart DVD player (both wired) and various laptops, phones etc. wirelessly.

I'm putting a smart TV and my playstation upstairs along with a desktop. I would like to hard wire both the TV and playstation. Can I get Cox to just install another cable jack and plug a second modem in? Or do I have to pay for a second internet connection? Or would it be better to get a third party super wireless router for the entire house?

And my internet often won't assign more than 5 IP addresses. Is that normal or is there something wrong?

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Posted by drizztiger

Deal With it!

Member since Mar 2007

37069 posts

Posted on 6/15/14 at 2:16 pm to Antonio Moss

quote:
Can I get Cox to just install another cable jack and plug a second modem in? Or do I have to pay for a second internet connection?

I don't work for Cox, but I'm fairly certain this would be another internet connection.

quote:
And my internet often won't assign more than 5 IP addresses. Is that normal or is there something wrong?

Something is wrong. Your router should be acting as a DHCP server (hands out IP addresses). It should be set with a pool of addresses to hand out. An off the shelf router is probably set to a /24 network mask (allowing for 254 IP addresses to be handed out). I'd google your router model and see if others have this issue.

To your original Q:
1) Run cat5/6 ethernet from your downstairs to your bonus room. Would satisfy your hardwired preference.
2) Use a wireless router to connect the new devices.
3) You can try an Ethernet over Power adapter.

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Posted by Layabout

Baton Rouge

Member since Jul 2011

11082 posts

Posted on 6/15/14 at 4:08 pm to drizztiger

quote:
1) Run cat5/6 ethernet from your downstairs to your bonus room. Would satisfy your hardwired preference.

To this I would add that if the three devices can all be fed from the same point, i.e., they're all along the same wall, just install a single ethernet jack and buy a small 5-port desktop switch for about $25 to distribute to all the devices.

Even if your router is only 10/100 ethernet it would be smart to only buy 10/100/1000 (gigabit) ethernet devices going forward. If you plug your router into a gigabit switch it will continue to operate at 10/100 but the other devices can take advantage of gigabit speeds when communicating with each other for file transfers. The difference is very noticeable.

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Posted by Pear