I'm a bit confused about worrying about device count. I can't picture more than 10 devices in my household and three or four down at the shed. Plus my phone as I wander back and forth.

But I have no problem spending a few bucks more for something recommended. I will do further research.

I already anticipated running a cable the whole distance and throwing an access point out there. That's if the wireless mesh does not work which is a crapshoot.

I will not be buying any cable that requires my own termination. I'm not buying the kit and I'm not putting it on and I'm not taking the chance of being the one who screws it up. Those days are long over. Cables are cheap. 30 to 40 bucks looks like it should take care of what I need.

Cat5 versus 6 is a good discussion.

I will not be using power over ethernet. I have plenty of power throughout the property and the devices I use are charged via USB anyway.

I might set up a projector back there and an entertainment center but the bottom line is everything is constrained via gigabit from the internet. And that gigabit is easily 20 times faster than I need for the vast majority of what I use.

I have no high-speed servers in the house that need to pump data to the back or vice versa. So cat5 should be more than enough and will happily plug into one of my multiple ports.

If I go crazy and need to pump real data, I can actually put a couple of fiber connectors in my local house switch. And then throw a fiber line. I can go big later if I need to.

Further research shows I have two eero boxes that were part of my home internet install. They already have some type of mesh and it is incompatible with the box you posted above. Now I know I have to look further and double-check or I will get an additional eero which I'm not that fond of.

Or I throw the wire and put any generic access point out there since it's not meshing with the current Network.

That's why I ask, and that's why I do further research.

I see that it opens up my universe of possibilities for choices. But in my case I would want the PoE coming from the distribution switch at the shed rather than from the initial point of where this long cable is running.

At that point I wouldn't bother with Wi-Fi and have a couple of cameras running directly cabled in.

Those little power injection/ repeater devices are interesting.