I am about to build a garden room remote from my main house. I will run 2 Cat6 cables from the house router to the room (as a contingency) but am wondering if I could connect one directly to my new Sonos amp while using the second cable to connect directly to a wireless access point to establish my wi-fi. Any downsides to this and any recommendations for a new access point would be appreciated. I assume if one of the Cat6 cables fail in the future that I could use a simple ethernet switch upstream of both the access point and Sonos Amp?
Failure of one trunk cable would simply mean plugging in the backup cable instead.
As for local switching arrangements, a small dumb switch would be cleaner. However you could always daisy-chain the connection to the AP through the Amp as suggested. The downsides to the daisy-chain are that the AP would be restricted to 100Mbps, and during Sonos system updates the connection to the AP would be interrupted for a short while.
If lightning strikes are common in your neighborhood, install lightning protection on those CAT-6’s.
I’d stick with an AP that matches the one you have now, keeping things simple is almost always good.
If you want a full featured AP the Ubiquity line are great. You can use them with a smart controller or an app.
I dislike daisy chaining but it does work.
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