Home network - Recommendations - Advice Needed

[Ravenous26]

Recommendations on gear or flaws in my setup??

So long story short, with my job I had to move a lot and had small apartments. When I bought a house a few years ago and settled in, I went with ATT who gave me a very hard time about using my own gear. Well after nearly 3 years of issues after issues I am fed up and switching to a different ISP and as such doing a proper home network.

A little bit about the needs of the setup.
My needs - I am on call 24/7 and have to connect my work laptop through a VPN to access anything for work. Write and run a lot of AD HOC reporting which does not require a lot of bandwidth, however I also log into numerous IP CCTV units and stream/download video to validate the data from numerous different CCTV brands/types/compressions

I do not do a lot of online gaming but I hate waiting 5 hours for a 19 gig game to download haha. Every now and again the mood strikes and I do some flight sims, Arma3 and games like Gal Civ3... I do a lot of streaming - netflix, youtube, pandora, hbo go and the such.

Wife on the other hand went back to college, she does play an MMO and if often streaming audio/video in her office while she works.

Often have people over on the weekends for board gaming and a few times a year for a small lan party

Future Layout?
Modem?(more then likely having to go with Cox/Comcast DOCIS 3.0 capable of at least 150 down)
Router? (needs primary and guest networks - able to handle heavy streaming)
Main Switch(unmanaged is done) (16 Port) -
My Office - Personal PC (Wired), Work Docking Station (Wired), TV(will be wireless? might wire it), Printer(Wireless), NAS (Wired)
Wifes Office - Personal PC (Wired) , TV (will leave that wireless)
Man Cave - TV(Wireless), 6 ports for lan parties
Then One line ran to the living room into a 5 port switch located on TV stand - TV (wireless off, not wired), Xbox360 (Wireless - the nic died on it), BluRay (wired - main living room streaming device), Dish Box (Wired), Extra Line (for laptop for Steam sharing or if I choose to work in the living room on the weekend)

2 laptops in total wireless (wifes and my work)
2 cell phones on wireless
Again we often have friends over for an afternoon and others that come to visit.

So that is the needs of the network, I know what I need it to do but I am very behind on the times when it comes to current tech and what will meet my needs the best...

Thank you all for your time and advice, I look forward to seeing the feedback given.

TLDR - Need help picking gear for a home network- Modem/Router/Switch/Second switch in living room?

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Personally, I would recommend going with an EdgeRouter Lite for use as your router.

A 16-24 port unmanaged switch should work just fine. Usually I go with Netgear, depending on the sale.

Regarding a Wireless Access Point, it is hard to beat the Ubiquiti Unifi's. Even their older models provide fantastic coverage. Granted, you'd be limited to 100mbps per UniFi, but it looks like you'll be cabling everything that'll use real bandwidth.

One thing that you can do is install an 8-port gigabit switch in each of the locations where you need a number of ports (office, behind the TV, man cave) instead of running a ton of cables back to your core switch.

..... yes, I like Ubiquiti. a lot. >__>