Network Infrastructure in My Home - After 10 Years

I wrote an article about 10 years ago (on September 13, 2002) named:

Network Infrastructure in my Home in Shanghai

Time flies. So many things changed since I wrote that blog ten years ago.

• I was at age of 25 at that time, and now I am 35

• At that time, I was an engineer at Microsoft who likes and good at writing technical articles like Knowledge Base Articles. Now, I am an entrepreneur who only cares about the network to be working than anything else.

• At that time, Dial-up was still an option (Just dial 8163 for Internet?) and now it is not.

• At that time, The Great Wall Broad Network was still an option, and now it consolidates to just China Telecom, and few similar.

• At that time, broadband just started. The first paragraph of my old article reads: “For friends in Shanghai, they are curious about the broadband, which is new to the city.”

• At that time, I only have one client device - a desktop PC - connecting to the Internet. Now, I have a dozen. (While, that PC is famous because it is in my reading room, and accessible from the Internet via http://home.wangjianshuo.com, the domain I later migrated to hosting companies).

So, let me take time to examine the current network infrastructure of my current home - Wendy complained for Internet access many times, and I finally get it to a level that is stable enough to Wendy’s satisfaction.

Broadband Provider － Fiber To The Home (FTTH)

In the recent upgrade, the China Telecom Shanghai changed ADSL in my home to the current FTTB. There is a optical fiber cable at the door of my home, connected with a fiber modem. I pay 150 RMB per month for the 10M speed.

Here is the IP information from APNIC

% APNIC found the following authoritative answer from: whois.apnic.net

% [whois.apnic.net node-5]

% Whois data copyright terms http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum: 101.224.0.0 - 101.231.255.255

netname: CHINANET-SH

descr: CHINANET SHANGHAI PROVINCE NETWORK

descr: China Telecom

descr: No.31,jingrong street

descr: Beijing 100032

country: CN

admin-c: WWQ4-AP

tech-c: WWQ4-AP

status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE

notify: ip-admin@mail.online.sh.cn

remarks: service provider

mnt-by: APNIC-HM

mnt-lower: MAINT-CHINANET-SH

mnt-routes: MAINT-CHINANET-SH

mnt-irt: IRT-CHINANET-CN

changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20110103

source: APNIC

It seems the IP address is a stable number since it is always connected there. (I started to miss the time when we were using 202.120.xxx.xxx IP address in universities.)

The Shanghai Bell equipment of RG201O-CA is a very simple modem plus a gateway to the outside world of my entire home.

Three Routers

To cover the entire home, I needed three routers. Due to being stupid and too optimistic about the performance of WIFI, I only have limited ethernet cable on the two floors of the home. So I setup it this way:

Router 1: 192.168.2.1 TP-Link WR320R to provides wireless to the first floor.

Router 2: 192.168.1.103 Apple Time Capsule 2T to provide wireless for the reading room

Router 3: 192.168.1.253 TP-Link WR700R to act as a repeater to extend the wireless network of Apple Time Capsule to provide additional coverage for other areas of the house.

WIFI/Ethernet Clients

Obviously, we have much more clients than before to connects to all these wireless and wired networks. Here is an incomplete list:

• iPhone of Wendy(0C-74-C2-A5-C0-A5)

• iPhone (18-E7-F4-F6-4A-45)

• iPad 2 (40-30-04-9A-C3-80)

• iPad 1 (D8-A2-5E-3D-96-29)

• iMac (e4-ce-8f-5f-6d-89)

• MacBook Air (04-0C-CE-D4-0F-52)

• Sonos Hi-Fi System (00-0E-58-72-39-AE)

• TCL TV

• …

Obviously, there are much more clients than before, and the count is going up every month.

It is a much more fancy network than many years ago with NAS (Network Area Storage) and other equipments connected to it.