Recently wrapped a nightmare of a home installation. It was a historic ranch house in Texas’ Hill Country that was originally built in the mid-1800s, with many, many stages of renovations and additions over the years. Estimating, using the ruler on Google Earth, and multiplying for the portions that are two story, I got 8,936 square feet in total. Most of the exterior (and some of the interior) walls were 24" thick stone, and some were 36". They needed a complete technological overhaul of literally everything.
The previous ISP told them that they needed three separate DSL drops for the different sections of the house because it was so big.
They had also been using DirecTV for entertainment but hit the maximum number of receivers (5), so for the other side of the house, they signed up for a promotional deal with Dish Network for three more TVs. Of course, many years went by, and that promotion had expired, and they were paying several hundred dollars a month for satellite TV that was typically only on in one or two rooms at a time.
So, walking into the project, they had:
- Three separate DSL accounts
- Five different phone lines (they were bundled with the DSL)
- Three DSL routers and two WiFi range extenders in service (WiFi was terrible because of all the interference, but also… DSL)
- Two satellite TV dishes in use, and two others retired in place, along with all of their associated tv set top boxes and repeaters
- Coax and Cat5 (mostly indoor) stapled, screwed, and/or glued all over the house exterior in groups of up to six at a time for all the phone extensions - This was an absolute eyesore considering the historic nature of the house.
At completion, I had sold, installed, and setup:
- Starlink
- Firewalla Purple
- (2x) S8-POE (one each in office and upstairs suite closet)
- (4x) AP6-PRO (office, suite closet, game room, living room)
- Cat6a outdoor, shielded wire connecting the different parts of the house, and everywhere possible
- Two 1500VA UPSs for the two main network closets
- Grandstream WiFi VoIP Handset
- Grandstream ATA for the fax machine
- Zoom Phone service for both, including two new numbers
- (8x) Roku streaming devices for all the TVs
- Helped client create and set up subscriptions with Gmail, Roku, DirecTV Stream, Hulu, and verified proper operation at each device.
- and removed all unnecessary equipment and wiring from the house
The fact that I was able to cover nearly NINE THOUSAND SQUARE FEET in a multiple-story historic stone house with ONLY FOUR ACCESS POINTS is amazing. We were able to stream 4k content on two TVs while sending a fax to Faxtoy.com - ALL THROUGH STARLINK.
I need to go back and get a few more photos, but here are a few:
Compact and neat placement of most equipment on a shelf under the printer:
Nice and clean exterior now (there are four different additions visible in this one photo. The straight line of dark stone at the right edge is the original back of the house, they went out, then up, then out again, and what looks like another building in the distance is actually connected by another two wings):
Here’s some of the original ISP and satellite TV wiring that I pulled out:
