What’s on the rack and on the desk.

My current daily-driver mesh. Wi-Fi 7, wired backhaul.

Three-pack covers a 2,400 sqft house with thick plaster walls. The 2.5 Gbps WAN port matters; the 6 GHz radio is the upgrade you actually feel.

Tiny 10G switch that runs cool, costs nothing.

Five SFP+ ports in a box the size of a sandwich. Fanless. I have one feeding the AP backhaul and another in the studio rack.

Yes it's overkill. Yes I bought it. Yes it's great.

This is what you reach for when a client says "Wi-Fi is slow" and you don't want to spend an hour guessing.

The cheap riser-rated spool I keep replacing.

1000-foot box. I've burned through three of these. Solid copper, holds termination cleanly, no surprises.

The mesh that made wired backhaul painless.

Wi-Fi 6 (AX5400), three-pack, hardware that finally treated Ethernet backhaul as a first-class feature. Replaced by the BE63 above; still recommend at a discount.

Stop putting access points on a bookshelf.

Cheap injection-molded mounts that get the radio off the floor and onto the wall where it belongs. Three to a pack, fit the X68 exactly.

The dumb 16-port that handles every wired run in the house.

Unmanaged, fanless, fits in a 1U rack space. Sits in the network closet feeding every Cat6 drop. Boring in the best way — installed it, never touched it again.

Same chip family, fewer ports, half the price.

Use this in the office or under the TV when you don't need 16 drops. Plug-and-play, unmanaged, runs cool.

The pre-made Cat 6 cables I keep in a drawer.

Mixed lengths, riser-rated jacket, snagless boots. For one-off runs where pulling fresh cable through walls would be overkill.

The cheap tester that has lived in my bag for years.

$15 LED-array continuity tester. Doesn't replace a Fluke, but you don't need a Fluke 90% of the time. Confirms a freshly terminated jack is wired correctly in three seconds.

Where the rack lives, on the wall.

Open-frame swing-out wall rack. Holds the switches, the patch panel, and a small UPS. The hinge means you can get behind it without crawling on the floor.

First line of defense between the wall and the rack.

Joule-rated whole-rack surge protector. Won't save you from a direct lightning strike, but stops the slow death from utility-side voltage spikes.

Plain power strip, not a smart plug — that's the point.

No app, no Wi-Fi, no remote toggling. Eight outlets, surge-protected, mounted under the rack shelf. Less to break.