Hello,

I have optical fiber connection coming to my house, and it has four ethernet outs. They are all just direct ports so no router or any firewall etc.

I have several Decos, five actually, on three floors. Small house, but gonna need a few more maybe later, one outside the house as the signal doesn't penetrate windows or my walls, which are wooden but have aluminum paper moisture sealing in them, so faraday cage basically I guess. Need to connect everything not in line of sight by cables or they just don't work. My fiber connection is gigabit.

Do I connect it all in "series" so that I will use only one of the fiber ethernet outs, and run that into the main deco and after that put a switch and divide it into ethernet going to the three floors, where they will be connected to slave decos?

Or would there be any benefit to connect them in 'parallel' ie run the cables to each floor directly from the fiber, ie. I would basically have three 'main' decos which would then be slaved further?

Which is better? One deco handles all incoming traffic, or should I divide it to three? And the three would then all work as routers? But still join the same network? Router mode or AP mode in this case?

Seems easier to just use one deco as main router and divide after that via the switch, but I'm worried how well can one master handle all the traffic as it will indeed be likely gigabit level a lot of the time with a few dozen clients, cameras, computers, you name it...

So to clarify even clearer: Option A:

raw fiber ethernet >

> Deco 1 > switch > decos 2 and 3 > switches after each > decos 4 and 5, with switches/machines...ie all connected in 'series' if you will

Or parallel,

raw fiber ethernet >

> Deco 1 > switch > deco 4 > switch > machines

> Deco 2 > switch > deco 5 > switch > machines

> Deco 3 > switch > machines