My 10GbE Home Network Set-Up

Introduction

We recently moved into an apartment in a newly built complex in Zurich. High bandwidth fibre is very widely available in Switzerland, especially in its metro regions. Our ISP offered us 10Gbit for less than 40 CHF/month and through Init7 we would even have been able to get synchronous 25Gbit. But as we are still contractually bound to our previous carrier I will leave the 25Gbit upgrade for another day.1

Availability of ≥1Gbit/s in Switzerland. (link)

In this blog post I will go through all the components of my home network and how I selected them.

Requirements

Ethernet

Each room in our apartment has a double ethernet socket which is connected with a Cat6a cabel to our electrical cabinet. While none of the devices we currently own support 10Gbit and I prefer to set up any connection ≥1Gbit over fibre, as they are a lot more thermally efficient.

We also rent a large storage room in the basement, which will host our homelab and serve as a gym. The homelab shuold be able to make use of the full 10Gbit and as the distance to our apartment for a cable is about 150m, 10GbE fibre would be a requirement.

Wireless

We have about 20 wireless devices in our apartment online at a time. Most of the walls are thick concrete and therefore don’t let a lot of signal pass through. We also wanted wireless in our storage room.

Home Automation & CCTV

In our previous apartment we had all the physical light switches fitted with z-wave and zigbee switches. A raspberry pi running Home Bridge was connected to the switches and exposed them to HomeKit. We wanted to add a few IP cameras to survey our storage room and the entrance to our apartment as well as the nursery, as a more privacy focused babyphone variant.

Media

We consume most of our media in the living room through an AppleTV 4k. As part of the homelab I wanted to set up Plex on a NAS to host our media library for both local and remote access. For adequate bandwith we wanted the NAS to be connected to the network with 10GbE.

Hardware

Router

As part of our contract with our ISP we received a SaltBox fibre x6, which seems to be a rebranded SagemCom router with the following ports:

  • 10GbE SFP+ WAN (connected to ISP)
  • 10GbE Rj45
  • 4x 1GbE Rj45

While the performance seems fine it does lack a lot of functionality I would have liked to have. The user interface is very basic and unresponsive and the router does not even support custom DNS servers.

Rather than replacing it with another router or building one myself1 I decided to keep it and use it as a modem only. I disabled the DHCP server and connected the 10GbE Rj45 port to a 10GbE SFP+ Transceiver on the primary switch (more to that later).

DHCP & DNS server

To replace the DHCP server on the ISP Router I decided to use AdGuard Home running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It has a very user friendly web UI and combines DHCP and DNS in one. The custom DNS makes it super easy to block ads and trackers on across all devices in the network. It does not require a lot of resources, so the Raspberry Pi is more than enough.

Home Network Diagram

Footnotes

  1. Michael Stapelberg and Vladimir Smirnov have written about their 25Gbit adventures ↩ ↩2