As my homehub data rate has dropped to barely anything I’m prepped to install a wired network connection from the house to the router which is located in my office connected to the house.
Ideally I’d like to link three main areas in the house that need network connectivity by a single run of cat6 but would it be very bad to have the below scheme?

BB Router <—–> Switch (TV) <—–> Switch (AppleTV/Sky) <—–> Switch/WiFi

The distance involved would be about 50m around the outside of the house.

Nothing wrong with linking them up – it’s called an “uplink”

You’ll need 3 separate cables to hook the switches up, and 4 for the other kit (assuming WiFi is a WAP)

If your making use of old BB routers to act as switches make sure you turn DHCP off on all except the BB Router.

Yes the WiFi/WAP is actually an Apple Airport Extreme which will have have 2 macs connected to it by cat5 and will handle the wifi for the phones/tablets – this would be at the end of the run.
Cat6 would then connect it to an 8 port switch in the lounge to which would be connected the AppleTV, a Sky Box and the TV. Cat6 would then connect this switch to a little 4 port switch at the other end of the house where there’s a Raspberry Pi connected to the other TV. This little switch would then be connected to the big switch in my office and then out to the interweb.

If your making use of old BB routers to act as switches make sure you turn DHCP off on all except the BB Router.

No old routers involved. I did think about it but I’ve actually got enough Netgear switches hanging around to do the job.

Any reason you need Cat6?

As my homehub data rate has dropped to barely anything

By which I mean ‘powerline’ and not homehub.

In my experience the more switches you go through the slower the connection will be. Can’t you run three cables? One to each device?

I’m with xiphon, cat 6 cable really needed? I’ve run my own cat 5e cable through the house with basic connectors at each end and it handles gigabit connection speeds fine, the setup managed a real world sustained 70megabyte /second transfer rate between 2 pcs on the network when copying hard drive data from one to the other which is about as good as it gets.

The broadband gets no where near to saturating the network, so to me it wasn’t worth the extra expense of cat 6 at any point.

Rather than daisy chaining in a line, it might be better having single runs of cable from the BB router outwards to each of your switch setups ( office, lounge, PC’s ), that way each setup has a more direct access to the internet rather than fighting against other devices further up the daisy chain.

But that would also need compared against what other data traffic you may have … i.e. do your PC’s feed a lot of data to the TV (streaming films etc ? ) That would be a higher data amount than broadband, so it would be worth making that link direct.

ethernet over power

its the future

ethernet over power, its the future

Not here – I’ve been running it for about 4 years but recently the data rate has dropped to a trickle and I can’t figure out why. So running cable as it’s ‘better’.

Any reason you need Cat6?

Allegedly better weather resistance than Cat5 (different outer coating)

Can’t you run three cables?

I ‘could’ I suppose 🙁

I would run 3 separate cables. Cat6 cable costs very little more than Cat5e now, use it but follow these guidelines:

http://www.cat6.com/faqs/dosanddonts.aspx

My experience is you will see a huge loss of performance, and shitloads of spanning tree resets. As someone else said, if possible set it up as a star, and you should be fine.

However if you are using ethernet over power I wouldn’t worry about it as the performance of this is pretty dire anyway, as its a shared connection, its better than WiFi but much much worse than a switch.

Powerlines are great, but only if you hang a few things off it.