Moving the Fios Router out of the closet

[DCI1]

I live in a town house.  Currently, we have a patch panel cabinet in a closet in the basement.  This is where the Fios Router currently resides.  The wireless is spotty in various areas of our 4 story townhouse. I would like to move my Fios router up to the second level of the house to get better signal.  My neighbor indicated that by putting a switch in the cabinet between the ONT and the router would work.  So I bought an unmanaged 5 port switch and conneced the ethernet from the ONT to the switch then from the switch to the Cat5 cable where I wanted to install the router (house is prewired).  This configuration worked for and hour or so but then the connection would drop.  I could either reset the router or reset the switch to bring it up again temporarily.

Is there a better option?  Moving the router out of the basement improved the signal throughout the house immensly.  I know I could go with a mesh network device, but those are costly.   

[Edg1]

Why not just connect the ethernet that's going to the second level directly to the ONT. There's really no need for a switch in between the ONT and router. 

[Capricorn1 · Accepted solution]

What @edg1 should work as that's what I ended up doing. In my case though, the cable from the ONT (outside in my case) had a fixed male end, so I used an RJ-45 coupler to connect another cable to that which goes directly into my router. I could have run another cable from the ONT outside, but I already had a cable through the concrete block. I could also have cut off the male end and installed a female socket. I took the path of least resistance. 🙂 

There is a limit to how far an Ethernet cable can run without being "retransmitted" via a switch or the like. It's theoretically 100 meters, but in reality, even with good CAT-6 cable, it's more like 100 feet.