Network switches, PoE equipment, VPNs, firewalls, and cabling guides. Everything for building a fast, reliable home network.
Gigabit Ethernet was the standard for home networking for over two decades. in 2026, it’s showing its age. NAS devices, home servers, and Wi-Fi 7 access points all benefit from faster wired backhaul — and the best 2.5G switches for home network use are now affordable enough that there’s no reason to stay at 1G….
If you want secure remote access to your home network — or you’re tired of sending sensitive traffic over public WiFi — setting up a home VPN is the right move. The two best options in are WireGuard and Tailscale. While they’re related (Tailscale uses WireGuard under the hood), they serve different needs and different…
Your router is the most important device on your home network — and one of the most commonly attacked. In March , the DoJ and Europol dismantled a botnet made up of 360,000 infected routers and IoT devices that had been running undetected for 16 years across 163 countries. Most of those homeowners had no…
If you’ve been following the open-source firewall world in 2025 and 2026, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in chatter about the OPNsense pricing change 2026. Search traffic around “opnsense pricing 2026 change” and “opnsense controversy 2026” has spiked, and home network users are asking the right questions: Does this affect me? Should I stick with…
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a hobbyist toy. in 2026, the Pi 5 is a legitimate network appliance platform — not just a hobbyist toy — and the Raspberry Pi home network projects space has never been more capable. It runs Pi-hole, WireGuard, Home Assistant, and a print server simultaneously on hardware that costs less…
Running separate power cables to every access point, IP camera, and VoIP phone in your home is a mess. Power over Ethernet (PoE) eliminates it — one cable handles both data and power, and the best PoE switches for home make it affordable and easy to implement even in a single-family house. The options range…
Running Ethernet cable through your walls is a long-term investment. Unlike a router you’ll replace in three years, the cable you pull today will be in your walls for 15–20 years. Getting the cat6 vs cat6a vs cat8 home network decision wrong means either leaving performance on the table or spending money on overkill you’ll…
Netgate quietly killed the free lunch in 2023. pfSense Plus — the version that actually gets new features — now costs $129/year if you’re not running it on Netgate hardware. pfSense CE still exists, but it’s getting slower updates and zero priority. If you’re evaluating the pfSense vs OPNsense home network question in 2026 —…
A whole-home audio system used to mean hiring an AV integrator, running speaker wire through walls — see our home network wiring guide for cable routing tips, and spending five figures. in 2026, you can build a genuinely excellent multi-room audio network for under $1,000 using networked speakers, a decent router, and the right software….
MikroTik and Ubiquiti are the two dominant brands in prosumer and home lab networking, but they represent fundamentally different philosophies. Ubiquiti’s UniFi ecosystem is built for centralized management, polished dashboards, and approachable configuration. MikroTik offers raw control, extreme feature depth, and aggressive pricing — at the cost of a steeper learning curve. in 2026, both…