How I added Ethernet to every room of my home for under $50

Published Oct 20, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. I had a dream. A dream where I had a stable Ethernet connection in every corner of the house. But wiring up the whole place was impractical (and borderline impossible), so I've almost resigned myself to using Wi-Fi, which is famously unreliable in my area. But then, I decided it didn't have to be a "this or that" situation. I could still get Ethernet everywhere without spending thousands of dollars on a whole remodel. All I needed was one strategically routed cable and a couple more useful things. I nearly turned a simple networking upgrade into a renovation I wanted wired connections, not a construction project So, am I a big fan of Ethernet, or am I just anti-Wi-Fi? Eh ... Can I say "yes" in answer to a this-or-that question? As a person who's had more than their fair share of network issues, I tend to value stability above all else. To that end, taking devices off of Wi-Fi and switching to Ethernet is the best way to deal with connectivity problems. If I could, I'd connect everything straight to my router, but my router is a singular device, and it lives in one room. So, that gets tricky. My original plan involved running Ethernet cables to every room, complete with wall jacks and all the other stuff that makes a wired home network feel properly finished. But the more I pondered the logistics of it all, the more I realized it wasn't going to be doable. Drilling holes, routing cables through walls, figuring out where everything should go... I didn't want to suddenly pick up a second job in construction, after all. Eventually, having ditched that plan, I realized I was overcomplicating things. I didn't actually need a separate Ethernet cable running all the way from my router to every device. All I needed was one longer cable to bring the connection into another room, and a way to split it between multiple devices once it got there. A switch, a few cables, and nothing particularly fancy This whole plan revolves around some of my favorite networking gadgets, and the key thing is, of course, an unmanaged Ethernet switch. The Netgear model I bought barely cost me above $18, so yeah, you don't need a fancy switch for this. In fact, there are even cheaper ones available, such as a five port option (mine has eight). One port connects you to your router. That leaves you seven for other devices. That's a whole lot of wired connectivity for not a whole lot of money, and there's no complicated setup involved. Depending on how many rooms you need this for, you'll buy more than one switch, of course. The rest of the budget basically goes toward cables, and you'll want long ones to make this work. Then, add a couple of shorter five-foot cables to connect your devices to the switch. Trust me, you'll come in at under $50. Getting the cable into the other room was the hardest part No drilling, no wall jacks, just a bit of patience The biggest challenge with this setup isn't getting the networking equipment, as all it took for me was to go on Amazon and enjoy some online shopping for a few minutes. No, the issue was always figuring out how to get that long Ethernet cable from my router to its destination without creating some total eyesore. Much like anyone else, I'm not a big fan of visible cabling. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid turning your house into a server room. Before you buy anything, make sure to measure the actual route the cable will take, following the walls and accounting for corners, furniture, and doorways. Don't just measure the distance from point A to point B and call it a day, as that's not exactly the length you need. Fortunately, Ethernet cables can run for up to 100 meters under standard copper Ethernet specifications, so a typical room-to-room connection is well within the limit. To avoid drilling holes everywhere (which is why I chose this in the first place), I ran the cable along the baseboards and secured it with adhesive cable clips. It's reasonably tidy and not at all the monstrosity I was worried I'd create. One cheap switch gave me Ethernet where I needed it Sometimes, the smallest stuff makes the biggest difference Once I dealt with the largest Ethernet cables, everything else was easy as pie. I plugged one end into my router's LAN port and the other one into my Netgear switch, connected said switch to power, and that was pretty much it. Ethernet port bonanza in a room that normally had a whole zero of them. I ended up repeating that whole process with a second switch, but you may not need to. The reality is that not every room in the house needs Ethernet; if there are no stationary devices in that room, you might benefit more from setting up mesh Wi-Fi to get better Wi-Fi signal in that particular room instead. Before you get right to it, remember that there's a small catch with this whole Ethernet switch scenario: all the devices share the exact same uplink to the router. So, the more you split the connection, the slower individual performance is going to be. For me, the trade-off was definitely worth it, as the connection got way more stable. I got the network I needed without the one I originally imagined Doing this did nothing for my network speeds in any of the rooms, but that was never the goal. The goal was not having to rely on my tiresome Wi-Fi and having a stable connection in every room of the house (that I used for purposes that required internet, that is). I was able to achieve that on the cheap, and I'd never go back to using mostly Wi-Fi now. NETGEAR 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch (GS308) This cheap switch is going to be the foundation of the whole project. A 10/10 purchase for me.