You have a couple options. The easiest is to buy an adjustable power adapter. They’re about $20 on Amazon. They come with a bunch of “barrel tips” so it is very likely you’ll have one that matches. I have one of these adjustables to test and validate devices when the power adapter is missing or suspect. Pretty handy.

Otherwise, you need to know the voltage, polarity, minimum amperage, and jack size. The first three are easy because they are almost always declared on the old brick or the device itself. You don’t have to match the amperage, but the new adapter needs to supply at least the amperage of the original. For example, if your old supply was 1000 mA, a 1.5 Amp supply is fine but a 500 mA supply will not provide adequate power.

The physical jacks: you get to learn what they are through experience. The most popular are 2.1mm in diameter and 5.5 mm in length, with 2.5 mm diameter being the 2nd most popular. But there are many others. Sometimes if you look for a replacement adapter for your device the specs will actually say. Otherwise you’ll need to measure your old one.

Maybe. You’ll need to check to see if the cabling is set up for Ethernet or Telephone. Most houses have it set up for telephone. A tester can help validate the Cat wiring situation.

Big streaming services use distributed servers. They likely have a copy of their streaming services in each city or even in your local ISP’s data center. This saves everyone significant bandwidth costs. A few hundred TB of storage for their most demanded content is cheap money.

To be clear, a switch will not give you these things.

• no additional data.
• no additional IP addresses.

If your home router is “dropping bands”, it is likely that the power adapter has weakened and can no longer deliver enough amps to the device to keep the radios operating properly, or not enough power to keep the CPU from losing bits and crashing (LEDs on, but not reliably functional).

I’d replace the power adapter with one that can deliver more amps. These adapters have to deal with every power transient and are often powered up for years. And they are often mediocre.

With that I’d go with something like the Deco X20. They are affordable and support wired backhaul. They are easy to install and are very hands off. It is easy to add more nodes.

Only two radios within each unit, but you won’t have the mesh wireless backhaul “using up” the 3rd radio.

That will work fine. Of course you will have to open your http port, and if your http server (or something inside of it) has a vulnerability then it could be compromised. So risks do remain.

I agree with that. And for best performance, centralize it as well as you can. Avoid burying the router in the cabinet under the TV in the corner of the living room.

How big is your house, what is it made of, how fast is your service, how many users in the house?

Are you an advanced user, or set-and-forget type?

Yes, you can create new networks and just ignore the existing wiring. You might want to uplink to the provided service. Lots of options.

I’d likely get a fully programmable and manageable router and switch and AP and start with that. Maybe get one of those little racks.

Have fun.

Band steering isn’t something I’d consider in a typical home network. I do enough admin work at work.