31/25

Title

Network hardware/configuration upgrades

Proposer

Issy Szemeti and Cristian Ladak

Date proposed

16/06/2025

Date for Decision

TBA

Cost

It Depends™️

What is being asked for

New network switches and wireless access points, as well as improved network configuration. I'll lay out the general idea below, but this is subject to change.

There are pretty frequent packet loss and network speed issues in the space over the wifi. Generally we haven't gone to masses of effort to test and diagnose these issues, but it's been mentioned enough times in enough places that we can confidently say it's not user error. Usually this manifests by way of photos/videos being slow to load, or taking a long time to upload/download files. Personally I've had wifi speeds being limited all the way down to 12mbps when I was the only person in the space, so there's definitely something odd going on.

Terms

While this document certainly won't be a beginner's guide to networking, we need to define some terms to avoid confusion and make sure we're discussing the right things.

Broadband - this is the connection from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) - in our case, we use Virgin Media. Our package is supposed to be something like 600mbps down and 600mbps up (I think?)

Network - how all the devices in the hackspace are connected to each other. A device on the network isn't necessarily connected to the internet.

Router - the main gateway between the local network and the internet. We don't use our router for WiFi, so let's not confuse the two.

WiFi - wireless networking between devices on the same network. Through the wifi we get to the router, which gets us to the internet.

Ethernet - wired networking between devices on the same network. Again, ethernet connects you to the router, and this allows you to do stuff on the internet.

When you do anything over the internet (or local network), the information you're sending/receiving has to go through lots of different places before it gets to where it's going. You can think of this like a series of pipes. If one of the pipes is very narrow you'll experience slow speeds - no matter how wide all the other pipes are.

We've recently upgraded our broadband package to be super duper fast, but almost none of the devices on the network can actually reach those advertised speeds. Let's dive a little deeper.

The 3D room

The PC in the 3D room is wired into a network switch. However, that network switch only provides 10/100mbps ports, with a gigabit uplink. This means that the PC, although it's wired into the network, can only reach speeds up to 100mbps. This would be easily remedied with a more up to date network switch (we could achieve this with any £10 network switch, but I'll later go into why we require something a little more powerful).

Both of the Bambu Lab 3D printers are connected to the wifi. They don't have ethernet ports, so this is the only option. Almost all of their communication between the Bambu software actually goes via Bambu's cloud service. This means that they actually don't need to be on the same network as the 3D PC, and I'll later go into why that might be useful information.

The laser room

All of the devices in this room are connected to the network via a small (5 port) gigabit network switch. We could do with some longer cables, but otherwise this is doing a fine enough job for the time being. It wouldn't hurt to have some spare ports, so maybe we could upgrade to an 8 port switch, just in case of any additional devices that get introduced in the future. Better to have them and not need them.

Who is supporting the project

Issy, KristiaN

Outcome

go to proposals