During my day job, I am a Dir of IT for a private school located here in sunny FL. I have a Jr tech that works for me but I handle the heavy stuff mostly. In the evening I freelance as a video editor for my old company located in Seattle doing editing and rendering for them while also attending to other household duties. I also game as well
Now, onto the situation: I purchased my first house (2br/2bath) late in 2019. The house had all the major work done and need cosmetic updating. We've redone the bathrooms, repolished the terrazzo flooring, opened up the entire kitchen and living room by having a professional put in a load bearing wall which also allowed me to rewire the entire house with Cat6a and new Coax with two punchdowns in each room. We left the kitchen the same for now as we don't want to go over budget. Also did a lot of manual labor landscaping during the covid stuff. In July of 2020, my mother called and told me she wanted to semi-retire. She has been in the medical field for the last 40 years and divorced the last 20 and is a workaholic still at 68 and pinches pennies. Her hospital chain offered her a position here with shorter hours. She said yes. She called me up with a proposal and asked if she could convert my garage (Also known in Florida as a storage room) into a living room for her, a room for our washer and dryer, new bathroom and an added upstairs bedroom for her. We both said yes.
At my house I nerd out, I have Sophos Firewall and two POE AP's (AC, 4x4) with excellent coverage all over the house. Internet wise, I have Frontier Fios 1GB service for $62 a month. The problem is she wants the entire TV package: Box, DVR and On-demand. I have not had cable in 15 years except to provide internet. For my husband and I, everything has been Netflix, Disney+ and and other for different services with family members, lol. We spend $94 a month for ISP and online services. Frontier partners with DishTV and doesn't offer "Cable Box" service anymore. I don't want a sat dish on my house as I already have an OTA digital dish for my TV's over coax. She is coming down in three days for 10 weeks. I researched Spectrum and they have a package that is $129.99 a month (tax included) for the spectrum app (All the channels and ondemand) and Internet (600/50) The guy came out today, I own a DOCIS 3.1 modem and had him use that to provide her TV services. In order to use the Spectrum App (No need for a box anymore) and all its features, it requires a spectrum connection.
I had the guy run the cable modem onto a table next to my desk in the my main living room. (My Frontier connection is an ethernet ran into my firewall that sits next to my desk where I hardwire into my home network) Question is should I load balance the two connections? I do this at work with our two ISPs for various reasons, so why not at home? I could reroute all of her devices over its own Wi-Fi connection to the spectrum connection with bandwidth to spare. Since I like to play around and have my own sandbox, I said why not since she is paying for it. There is a lot of network traffic as I up/download files that are sometimes multiple 200-400GBs at a time. This happens three/four times a week. On my firewall, you can load-balance and give priority to the connections. I hooked the spectrum up to my firewall with my FIOS disconnected to test the spectrum app and it worked fine and the speeds were pretty close as advertised. I unplugged it and put the Fios back on after the cable guy left.
Is it worth doing just to have fun? I can move the cable modem upstairs and plug it in with it's own Wi-fi (I have an older netgear system) I really don't want another wifi system in the house though. As long as she can watch her tv, everything is cool.
Opionions?
Now, onto the situation: I purchased my first house (2br/2bath) late in 2019. The house had all the major work done and need cosmetic updating. We've redone the bathrooms, repolished the terrazzo flooring, opened up the entire kitchen and living room by having a professional put in a load bearing wall which also allowed me to rewire the entire house with Cat6a and new Coax with two punchdowns in each room. We left the kitchen the same for now as we don't want to go over budget. Also did a lot of manual labor landscaping during the covid stuff. In July of 2020, my mother called and told me she wanted to semi-retire. She has been in the medical field for the last 40 years and divorced the last 20 and is a workaholic still at 68 and pinches pennies. Her hospital chain offered her a position here with shorter hours. She said yes. She called me up with a proposal and asked if she could convert my garage (Also known in Florida as a storage room) into a living room for her, a room for our washer and dryer, new bathroom and an added upstairs bedroom for her. We both said yes.
At my house I nerd out, I have Sophos Firewall and two POE AP's (AC, 4x4) with excellent coverage all over the house. Internet wise, I have Frontier Fios 1GB service for $62 a month. The problem is she wants the entire TV package: Box, DVR and On-demand. I have not had cable in 15 years except to provide internet. For my husband and I, everything has been Netflix, Disney+ and and other for different services with family members, lol. We spend $94 a month for ISP and online services. Frontier partners with DishTV and doesn't offer "Cable Box" service anymore. I don't want a sat dish on my house as I already have an OTA digital dish for my TV's over coax. She is coming down in three days for 10 weeks. I researched Spectrum and they have a package that is $129.99 a month (tax included) for the spectrum app (All the channels and ondemand) and Internet (600/50) The guy came out today, I own a DOCIS 3.1 modem and had him use that to provide her TV services. In order to use the Spectrum App (No need for a box anymore) and all its features, it requires a spectrum connection.
I had the guy run the cable modem onto a table next to my desk in the my main living room. (My Frontier connection is an ethernet ran into my firewall that sits next to my desk where I hardwire into my home network) Question is should I load balance the two connections? I do this at work with our two ISPs for various reasons, so why not at home? I could reroute all of her devices over its own Wi-Fi connection to the spectrum connection with bandwidth to spare. Since I like to play around and have my own sandbox, I said why not since she is paying for it. There is a lot of network traffic as I up/download files that are sometimes multiple 200-400GBs at a time. This happens three/four times a week. On my firewall, you can load-balance and give priority to the connections. I hooked the spectrum up to my firewall with my FIOS disconnected to test the spectrum app and it worked fine and the speeds were pretty close as advertised. I unplugged it and put the Fios back on after the cable guy left.
Is it worth doing just to have fun? I can move the cable modem upstairs and plug it in with it's own Wi-fi (I have an older netgear system) I really don't want another wifi system in the house though. As long as she can watch her tv, everything is cool.
Opionions?
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