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Internet-Ready Houses For Sale
nilrake writes "A bit on NY Times talks about new homes are that being built
Internet-Ready. " Hmm...I always figured a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house *grin*.
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I wonder how much bigger the home's price tag gets because some contractor calls it "internet ready" I certainly wouldnt buy a house based on the fact that it was already wired. I'd rather wire it myself, that way I know its done right, and if anything goes wrong, I'm able to fix it because I know what I did in the first place.
A few days ago when showing one of my apartments for rent, a potential tenant asked me if internet connection was included.
I had thought it a stupid question at the time, but perhaps that is what is being demanded these days.
Lucent puts out a product called HomeStar that is what you are talking about. Essentially a Structured wiring kit for residential use. A patch panel that they recommend goes in the basement or garage, and then your choice of modular wall jacks. You can have 75 ohm standard cable-style coax, RJ-45, RJ-11 and RCA-style coax if I remember correctly. Pretty neat stuff, but not all that revolutionary.
Already last year some major construction companies here in Finland announced, that all new houses they build will be fitted with permanent Internet connections to every flat.
As in the philosophy of taking the fiber to the cornerstone, the telcos are more than eager to offer their fiber & ISP-services to these new houses as a way of getting new customers easily and also getting an imago boost by beeing "on the bleeding edge" of the Internet society.
As a sidenote, all the Helsinki area student appartments are to be wired also, afterwards.
My 2c =)
This is a great idea. Microsoft House. Where you have to open a browser window to look in your filing cabinet, and when you flush the toilet it says "FLUSH32.DLL Damaged or Missing" and lets loose a tsunami of turds through the kitchen sink.
The front door GPFs when you open it and the central heating system belches out methane gas and carbon monoxide for eight months until you buy the Service Pack, which causes the carpets to catch fire and the ceilings to drip a strange, gelatinous sludge.
But the good thing is it does it at 10Gb/Sec.
I wired my parent's house with cat5 7 years ago. A port in my bedroom, a port in my dad's office, a port on the kitchen counter for my mom's thinkpad. We strung the cable from basement to attic, in a southern colonial style home.
Now that I'm thinking about my own place, and rental, not buying, as well as relocation being a possibility, I'm not prepared to enrage landlords and invest in tearing up wherever I land to make a network possible...
I don't need gigabit bandwidth, especially for internet. Why doesn't the apple airport with a few lucent waveLAN cards meet the need here?
I mean, HELL YES, I found it fun to take out the drill and string cable, and yes, it was cheaper than buying an airport and a few pcmcia and pci cards, but wireless is easily relocatable, as in, I don't have to leave my investment in the home installed when it's time to move on.
(besides, I keep reading about the various hacks here, antenna range extension and 128-bit security-- who says slashdot doesn't read slashdot!)
The old bathroom upstairs was way too small, so they've used one of the bedrooms as a huge bathroom and the old bathroom has become the server room.
I have 21 (RJ45) ports about the house wired up to a neat little 32 port patchpanel that comes in it's own wooden cabinet (rack mount is a bit overkill for a house don't you think). I used CAT 5 cabling, though I wish I'd gone for CAT 7. (Although it isn't ratified yet, it supports a bandwidth wide enough to take TV!!).
The ports about the house are multipurpose: phone, internet, speakers and whatever else I can think of (but alas no tv).
I have the phone line entering the house and going straight to a port on the patch panel. From there it can be split to any number of different ports (so you can have a phone in the bath if you want).
I also plan to locate a hifi system in the server room with speakers plugged in wherever I see fit (great for parties!)
Hmmm... sounds fun. Oh, wait. I already do that. ;)
In the words of Homer Simpson... "Mmmmm... beer."
In the words of Homer Simpson... "Mmmmm... beer."
Certainly home-buyers, especially us internet-savvy post-IPO-vested nouveau-riche, will decide which housing estate to look at based on positive reports about good connectivity. Housing developments that only offer AOL will soon find the money goes somewhere else.
Unless you're buying down at Geek Estates, you'll
always be subject to what the homeowners association decides is best for the community. As soon as Sammy Spammer moves in next door and the community finds itself RBLed, there will be some action taken and you probably won't like the results.
I assume that the collective intelligence of a group is in inverse proportion to the size of the group. Thus it is practically guaranteed that the association will do something stupid in the future.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
I had the great opportunity to wire up my fraternities houses when I was at college, and I gained quite a few insights from the process that will definitely help me when I build my first home.
1. Wire every room. With big rooms, wire two places in the room.
2. Use standard cabling. Cat5 for preference. Two or three 4-pair sets to each outlet should be plenty.
3. Connections: I suggest using standard RJ45 connectors, because its easy and everything can be adapted to it. One thing we eventually did was to wire a cable to break a few pairs out to RCA audio plugs to send analog stereo signals through the house wiring. Why? Well, we wanted to hook the downstairs stereo to the upstairs computer. This ties in nicely to:
4. Plugboards in the wiring closet. These are beautiful. Hook the phone lines to any room, easily.
5. Don't count on the phone company being nice. One thing we did was inform the telco that we needed more line capability (24 line max). They installed a new large box outside that we wired onto our plugboard in the obvious manner. Result? Well, when they actually installed the new phone lines, they rewired their box for no obvious reason, such that we had to rip out and rewire that plugboard. Bastards.
7. Hubs, switches, etc.. Get them when you need them, but be sure to leave space in your wiring closet. Also, be damn sure you have a power outlet in there on it's own grounded line. We didn't have one, and installing one after we'd put all this cat5 terminating in there was a real pain. And runnning a ground line is a real pain if your house isn't grounded properly already (most older buildings never are).
Just my thoughts.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's funny how people believe that an "Internet-ready" home involves something that it's a tie-breaker for a house. Just tell your builder to run cat 5 when he runs phone wire.
Whoop-dee frickin' doo.
I talked to a local builder about this that was under the impression that an unfinished basement would be a good place for a hub. I explained that most people wouldn't really want to run cabling all the way down there, least of all to a firewall box or something in a musty basement. This was a surprise to them.
This post is going nowhere. I'm done.
-Waldo
I used 1/2" (id) ENT (electrical non-metallic tubing), aka smurf tubing, so-called because of its baby-blue color. Yeah, but if you run plenums, you need to use plenum-grade wire.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Don't bother putting up a page unless you can do better than Ars Technica's Physical Home Networking Guide.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
That's damn amazing. You probably live less than 30 miles from me, which would explain why you know these guys' work so well.
Not to say that all the contractors our here suck.
Long signatures suck.
Water pipes are nothing, how about then gas lines? A friend drilled most of the way into one of them, got a real bad feeling, stopped and checked out what was slowing down the hole boring.
Somewhat related to this is the trend by lots of fascist homeowner's associations to ban even mini-satellite dishes (that could be used for internet access) where they are visible from the street. Interestingly, the FCC has set down rules thwapping the homeowner's associations, and freeing homeowners to put up dishes. The only thing protecting us is that most homeowner association directors are so hidebound and archaic, they probably don't deal with the internet much (at least, not in my association...bunch of cane-wielding nazis).
I've seen powerstrips that are "designed for Windows 95". That's when I learned about how Microsoft had embraced and extended AC power.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I wish :-( ... maybe it's cause my house it almost hitting the old 100 - lath and plaster do not make the quick&dirty - drill and pull some cable process anything close to easy - plus the wiring here is ancient, to say the least (grounding why would we want to do that - why waste the copper ...).
Still when we had the shingles done a few years back and the house was 'naked' I had them put in a few extra circuits to my office - but running all those machines to get my rc5 rate up to 100MKeys/sec is starting to strain that :-(
Seriously though the best thing you can do is at admit to yourself that you don't know what you'll need 5-10 years from now (fiber to every room? or after the Y2K.1 bug hits cans and string?) so just put conduit in the walls and figure it out when you need it
For under $300 I was able to wire my entire house for 10/100 ethernet. The largest part of that bill was the ~$190 that I paid for the 10/100 switching hub.
I have been thinking about throwing up a page documenting the process.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
While it's great that they are running more hi-capacity cable through communitys and such, it seems kind of lame for a few reasons. :).
:)
1. DSL technology requires nothing but a pair of copper. Since you already have a pair of copper in your house, it's a moot point (if you are close enough to the CO)
2. A residental T1, which I have though Intermedia (digex.net), only requires 2 pairs of copper. Of course this can't be the same as your primary telephone line (unless you are willing to be splitting up B channels and all). However, most houses built in the past 20 years have between 3 and 8 pairs of copper, meeting the needs of residental bandwidth.
3. With cable systems, you are on a shared trunk using existing Coax cable. Unless the companies are trying to shrink the size of the trunk (which is a good idea) addional field equipment isn't necessary.
4. Odds are, you aren't going to get an OC3 or greater to your house (even though I wouldn't mind having one
So, this being said, what do you need at home? This depends on the service you want.
1. For DSL or Cable service, you need a cable or DSL "modem" (modem is such a poor word...), a box to provide IP Masq since most Residental customers get one IP addy (dynamic at that), a hub and some good ole Cat 5.
2. For Telco Lease Line customers like T1 type service, you need a DSU/CSU and a router with a HSSI port. From there, is the Hub and cable thing again. The benefit here is usually you get a routed network.
Installing Cat5 in one's house is also reletively easy, especially if you cheat and use your existing phone wires to thread it (well, and new phone wire). Stick your server(s) in the basement to stay cool and plug it all on in.
So, all you'd really ever want out of an "Internet Ready" house is a patch panel in the basement and a ether jack or two in every room of the house. Sounds simple enough for builders to do, especially since they can already deal with coax, electrical, and phone. How much harder can it be to run Cat-5 at the same time...
If only they learned sooner.
All homes are "Internet-Ready". All you need is a phone line. Internal cabling is "networkable" or something.
Which reminds me of one of the dumbest things I've ever seen: I saw a, swear to God, Interet-ready power strip at OfficeMax about a year ago.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
What i do like on the techie side of the net is the fact that it moves .... and it moves fast.
If i would buy such house I'de have to move or upgrade the house more than once i a while. I'm sure "upgrading" the house to newer network technologies (IPV6 comes to mind)wont be has simple has apt-get update;apt-get upgrade.
none Yet.
The problem is that communications technologies will continue to improve and may require upgraded wiring. For example, a friend of mine paid to have his house wired with Cat5, cable (with central hub), multi-room stereo, etc.
Since his house was built, the local cable acess provider has upgraded its system to support cable modems, but my friend's hub is too old for it. Gigabit ethernet requires either fibre or copper with a grade higher than category 5. Now, good home theater preamps support multi-room video as well as audio. He will need to upgrade his wiring anyway if he wants to take advantage of this new technology and his house is only a few years old.
The problem exists because people tend to keep their houses longer than the cycle of obsolescence for computer components. As a result, even people who purchase these wired homes will have to pay large sums of money to upgrade their wiring if they want to stay on the cutting edge.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I hope the houses don't come with windoze installed... I'd hate to perform an illegal operation and have my house come crashing down around me.... Although I wonder if it would be possible to get the clouds in the sky to form a BSOD message......
Why, we'll make Rock Ridge think it was a chicken that got caught in a tractor's nuts!
I am a professional.
Yeah, I was going to wire my bathrooms too, but my wife nixed that.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This story shows a construction company that gets it. They are laying 2 conduits for fibre directly to each home in their estate, just like they now add connections for all the other utilities like electricity, gas, water and telephone. All that an internet provider has to do is lay a line out to this development, and tie into hundreds of waiting customers.
And then the homeowners association votes to accept the bid from AOL to provide Internet Services. Doh!
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
I would not *want* a home that already had a broadband net connection; that would probably mean that my provider has already been picked out for me and that the cost of the house might have been offset by the fact that I would have to sign a x-year binding contract with said provider, otherwise, tack another $10k to the home cost (or something like that).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Hey...we could sell that as a kit. "Slashdot's Internet in a Box" :)
Why not ducktape the lines down then cover them with a mat. I use a cord protector I salvaged from work.
People who have been in my apartment wonder why there is a carpet square between my A/V stack and coffee table. It's to cover the power and network lines. For those interested, my firewall box and web server reside in the A/V stack along with the TV, VCR and the stereo components. Maby I should start calling it my A/V/D (Audio / Video / Data) stack.
Cost me about $600 to terminate and test two runs of cat-5 in every room of my house. That counts jacks, and a 110 block at the other end. Total of 11 pairs of runs.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This reminds me of when I moved into the dorms at College...I was so happy that I was able to live in a place with built-in high speed connections! I know what type of house I'm going to buy!
Doh!
But shared internet service for office buildings and apartment buildings is becoming a huge industry, just as wiring apartment buildings for cable TV and telephones is pretty universal. A typical building will use Cat5 or maybe fiber risers, and feed a T1 or maybe a smaller frame relay connection, and higher-tech office buildings may do larger connections. DSL turns out to work very well for large buildings - put a DSLAM in the basement, and use high-speed connections inside the building and whatever amount of upstream the building needs to buy.
The question of who runs the infrastructure has a variety of answers. There are a number of companies like Allied Riser that contract with real estate companies to get access to their customers. Alternatively, the real estate company may do it themeselves or hire somebody to do it. Phone companies and Alternate Access Vendors like Worldcom's MFS and Brooks and AT&T's AT&T Local Services put fiber in large building basements. Cable TV company Hybrid Fiber Coax is also providing similar access. (And a couple friends of mine strung their own Ethernet in a Palo Alto apartment complex a decade ago - several members of their startup were living there
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I seem to be questioning whether it is up to code or not. Does anyone have a good idea as to what it takes to be up to code for running Cat-5 in a residential home? I would hate to go to sell the house and have to tear out all of the ethernet!
Run conduit. I ran some, but not enough. I should have run it to every room.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I've run cable to every room, I have several RJ11 phone jacks, several cable jacks, firewire, speaker, and RJ45 ethernet jacks in every room in my house. The price to do that during the construction of the house is negligible. Wonder why it's taken until now for home designers to start doing that?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
so I guess when they say Internet-Ready, they make up the cost of running cable and stuff by not installing windows, right? I mean, who needs to look at this thing that's called the "outside"?
BilldaCat
.. The obligitory link without login
-
air and light and time and space
Haha. My apartment building (late 1800's / early 1900's) is absolutely gorgeous, but doesn't have grounded outlets, and I can't even get ISDN there, let alone broadband. That's OK cause I'm moving in 5 days, one of the reasons being so I can get ADSL.
If I were anywhere near St. Louis I'd be down with it, but I'm not.
Well, just putting the structured cabling in the house isn't particularly newsworthy. And a house having structured cabling isn't going to make that much of a difference at resale...it's quick and cheap for alarm companies to wire a house, and adding data cable isn't much different.
The news part of this is the fact that builders are fronting the money for the infrastructure to the house, and actually acting as a service provider.
And if you watch shows like "This Old House", nearly all of the recent jobs have included CAT5 lines throughout, as well as open conduit for future use.
SOHO cable set (crimper, tester, rj-45's, punch down tool, booties) - $110
Tie wraps and glue clips - $6
Beer to convince friends to help - $24
The ability to surf porn and IRC from your room - Priceless
When the wireless solution you bought doesn't work with Linux, there's always Mastercard.
(Sorry, just did this project last week. `8r) )
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I once had a DSL connection at my last place. I moved - still only 4000 feet from the central office. The problem is that US West can't figure out how to get a pair of copper wires into my apartment from the telephone pole. Really. By the time I get it installed (I've been waiting 8 months now) I will have already moved out to some other place. And almost every DSL provider has a 1 year contract. Ouch! :o
http://p artners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/biztech/art icles/26build.html
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
... ?
Actually, in about one or two years, I fully expect to be using my WebPad as I drink a cafe' latte' on my deck, thanking Linus for his latest contrib to mobile Linux, and telling my son to remember to dock his GameServer when he's finished playing with it so that it can recharge.
But could we make a Beowulf cluster out of such devices
Will in Seattle
I've jumped into a project that might be of some interest to some folks here.
:).
I've recently purchased and begun renovating a 114+ year-old house in North St. Louis. The neighborhood is pretty run-down, but it is going to come back to life in the next few years (I'll make sure it does). The house is about 4000 ft^2, and cost me $4,500. It's an all-brick structure, but in need of a complete replumbing, rewiring, and refinishing inside. The windows are boarded up, etc.
The place is gorgeous, though. It has big, nice wide woodwork, a spiral staircase, balcony porches, and a big, big room in the attic that will be my lab (I even have computer-room flooring to put in it now...
What I'd be interested in are opinions here, and maybe leads to more information - are there other geeks out there who, like me, love beautiful old houses and unique architecture, who can (and are eager to learn how to) remodel houses, and who would like to participate in a NAN (neighborhood area network - did I coin a new term?) with perhaps a shared fat-pipe to the Internet?
I'd like to be able to get together a partnership with a/some telecomm company who'd like to score a big PR coup, and to accelerate the rejuvenation of this beautiful neighborhood.
Will geeks move buy and move in if such an opportunity arose?
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
And when you suggest this to your contractor they will laugh at you. You wouldn't believe how many disasters I've seen because the owner thought they could do a better job than a professional.
The Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers are already around, and it's pretty typical for phone company craft workers to belong to one of them, take advantage of their training and apprenticeship programs, etc. Non-union electrical contractors also do a lot of this sort of installation.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why not ducktape the lines down then cover them with a mat. I use a cord protector I salvaged from work.
Hardwood floors and duct tape don't exactly get along well.
When you pull the tape up, it leaves waffled goo all over the contact area, and, well, our landlord doesn't like that too much...
(-:
No, both in combination is best.
I envision desktop (and despit the hype, most people will do most of there work as a desk just because it is so convient) with wired access. anytime you move you get the portable (laptop or palm I don't care) and it will be wireless. wired has no bandwidth limitations, doesn't get over crowded with neighbors... wireless allows you to put the instructions on rebuilding your engine under the shade tree next to the car.
Both are useful, and so long as people use wired where it is possibla and leave wireless to those situations where wired is impractical things will work well.
Oh yea, and if your house could travel through time, that would be cool too.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I've looked at a couple of "internet ready" homes in the last couple of years. The houses were wired internally with cat5 cable and a small ISDN router, but there was no permanent broadband connection to the internet. That is not "internet ready" by my standards.
:-)
:-]
This story shows a construction company that gets it. They are laying 2 conduits for fibre directly to each home in their estate, just like they now add connections for all the other utilities like electricity, gas, water and telephone. All that an internet provider has to do is lay a line out to this development, and tie into hundreds of waiting customers.
I'd really like to see housing estates with a clued-in homeowners association running their own router for the area. Then different ISPs would be invited to connect to the estate's POP, and each homeowner could choose their provider and switch between them depending on service and price. The estate could then run fibre to neighboring estate POPs and run local routing which wouldn't need to traverse an ISP, a true Metropolitan Area Network. Since the fibre would have a lot of unused bandwidth (except to my house), they could re-sell the bandwidth to local businesses and cut out the phone companies completely.
Aaaahhhhh, but I'm dreaming of a distant utopia
the AC
[ for those who are building an internet ready house, where I live there are 7 routers, 100baseT running to all rooms in the house, with DSL, cable, ISDN, and wireless connections to several different ISPs in the area. Beat that
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
We just bought our new house last August outside of Dallas. We started the process in Feb. 99 -- 6 month build time -- and the "Home Networking" package was available then. We had them install full CAT-5 cabling hooked to a switching hub located in the master bedroom closet. Additionally, all phone jacks are CAT 5 enabled hooked to a nifty little patch panel in the closet too. The cable TV lines are ALSO centrally located in the same panel and then dispersed out from the house from there. It wasn't that much of a cost -- $500 or so. The hub had the uplink port for hooking in the cable modem, which also sits in the closet with a dedicated coax line hooked to it. We can't DSL YET where I am (I was 800 FT 'too far' for SBC to hook it up) -- it'd be the same setup then, just a different cable into the uplink. I guess our house was pretty much "Internet Ready" then. In my view the story was only about 1 year and half late.
Amazingly enough, this is pretty much how it has worked in England for many years. The mail carrier walks from house to house (with a big sack or cart), dropping mail through a slot in the door or wall. Of course, it's generally not a large slot, so packages of any size still require someone at home to receive them, but even so... The same slot can be used by FedEx, &c, for deliveries that actually fit into it.
.3 m, a little big to fit in a slot.
Keyword big. The computer's I've received have generally been in large packages, maybe 1m x 1m x
Also, in the US, our mailboxes are the property of the US government, bad things would happen if a FedEx employee used a USPS mailbox.
Now some UPS and FedEx employees will leave a small package between the storm door and the front door, but that makes me uneasy when the contents of the package are over $50.
George
This also seems more true to the architecture of the internet, the "network of networks". Instead of trying to establish a high speed connection to the centralized, monolithic phone company, just plug in to your neighborhood LAN.
Only problem is you lose the freedom to choose your ISP. If you live on a street with lots of over protective parents who demand content filtering or if the people running the connection are just incompetent, tough luck.
Of course the Town of Blacksburg complained incessantly, but nobody had time to rewire the house--not with 1 to 3 shows (w/ 3-5 live bands each) going on in our living room each week. Man, we played all sorts of network games in the most chaotic, overcrowded, noisy, dirty, smelly, filthy conditions you'd never care to see in your life. I remember waking up in the "server room" (in which the 56k modem connection was shared) one morning after a party, drinker floaters and starting to play networked Syndicate Wars and choking on a cigarette butt while several members of some band I'd never heard of from Oregon dozed on the floor with coils of ethernet and serial cables draped around them.
So if you really really want that geek look, run your wires on the outside! But I wouldn't recommend trying to raise a family there.
[pink beam of light]
Sister just moved into a new Aprtment in Allen, TX that was pre-wired for DSL. Her apartment manager bills her the extra $29.95 a month for the connection to be live. So, yes, it is available.
I live in a new townhome development that has high-speed Ethernet in every room. Ooooooh, cool.
EXCEPT, the nearest DSL station is over 19,000 feet away, so we have to pay $80/mo. for a 202k bridge connection. Double that for a router connection.
So, if me *and* my roommate want to share the DSL, we have to have a separate box to route to our two other computers. Or, one of us gets cable (yeah, like my Mac can spare the PCI slots for the separate NIC).
Wonderful. Great cart, crappy horse?
Just wanted to point that out.
Hey, it's a small town, and I'm easily amused. Give me a break.
I've seen alot of advertisments regarding new homes over on the eastside that are network and possibly internet ready. I bought a home in Issaquah, WA a few years back and had it wired for a home network. It was an easy change for the builder since they were already running CAT-5 wire for the phone lines within the house so what's a few more cable runs.
The thing that was missing was a high-speed internet connection. Neither DSL or Cable was available at the time (2 years ago)and so I simply setup a gateway firewall system that used diald and we were able to share a dynamic modem connection among multiple systems within our home.
Our situation improved greatly about 3 months ago as I found out that @Home cable modem service was available in our neighborhood. It's so nice to be able to download large files and have it take only a few minutes rather than hours. @Home isn't perfect and has it's ups and downs sometimes but my home is 21,000+ feet from our CO and so the only DSL technology that might be available to us is IDSL. IDSL has the same bandwidth as an ISDN connection and costs much more than ADSL service so I have to be content with a cable modem connection.
@Home didn't give me any hassles about using Linux and the tech thought it was pretty cool as I was the first customer he had seen using Linux. He watched over my shoulder has I setup my second ethernet card on my SuSE Linux based gateway/ firewall system. The big shocker for him was that I didn't even have to reboot the box to enable the second network card.
I currently work for a company whose working along these same lines. Its only been in the last year and a half that living communities have started thinking along lines of high speed internet for their residents. But it has quickly gone from the "why should we?" to the "why haven't we already". The larger management groups have finally learned that this is important if not crucial to the future of the resident communities.
The thing that has made the biggest difference for us as of late is the increase in quality and decrease in price of the different wireless solutions that are out there. Now we can go to almost "any" living community and offer access, even those without any type of centralized infrastructure.
To me, a fully connected (wired or wireless) is a given to happen. Its' just up to all you hardware guys to give us something we can put in our grandmother's "internet thingy" so that she can get access from everywhere (not just anywhere).
not if you can certify your cabling and your contractor can't. i already can see them pull some shitty cat3, with no map nor non-standard pinouts on the jacks. great ...
--- d'oh
Forget DSL. I want fiber.
Built in the 1930's, American Foursquare, I know what you mean, I love the oak trim and the stained glass.
Though it will pain me when I start to put cat5 ports in my study, having to drill through the oak molding, yikes.
Good luck with it, I prefer city living to suburban.
George
Wake up folks, your missing the big picture here. We all know that tcp/ip was never intended to be used as a secure protocol, yet we want to build our homes in such a way that they incorporate these legacy technologies. Just take a small look at the spec for ivp6 and you'll learn that it looks better but it's all just fluff. So what's the next logical step here, toaster over ip, ready built into your home. HA... that's just what the criminal element wants. So your out at the bar knocking down a couple bud lights and your wife is at home geting raped because some script kiddie cracked your toaster. Think I'm kidding, I'M NOT.
Sure, all you geeks are so smug you think it can't happen to you. Guess again.
Why bother with CAT 3 at all?
matt
What are the general zoning laws for this kind of stuff? I know that if I were to build a house today, I would insist each room have a twisted pair jack somewhere but is there a possible zoning specification to be worried about?
This is the norm.
When I did have DSL service from US West, it did work well. The problem was that I routinely got monthly bills for $800 - out of the blue - double billing, extra installation charges, long distance at $0.60 per minute. I spent hours per month on the phone each month fixing it up. A co-worker had the same problem, just not as bad. It never ended even after I moved out. They're still trying to sue me for $150 that they billed to me after I moved out and disconnected my phone line. Really :o
Ok, I'm gonna geek out here for a second and simply express myself.
Since I was a kid, I've always thought of designing my future home with walls that had removeable panel insets. Something akin to what I saw as a kid in Dr. Who's TARDIS, or on Star Trek's various ships (I did warn you that I was gonna geek out!)
These insets would be removable via some kind of leveraging mechanism. Perhaps even recessed lighting of some kind to give that "well lit, but no obvious source" look.
Yeah, it'd probably look pretty strange for a home, and perhaps more appropriate for a new office-type building.
Just thought I'd say something that's been a buried in my brain for more than a decade!
-buffy
I have CONSIDERABLY more bandwidth than YOU!
I don't think so
I have enough bandwith to DoS you and still Napster Metallica songs.
(To the mods. If that wasn't flamebait, I don't know what is)
I ran across this guy , who has collected a bunch of product links and notes on how to wire your house for ethernet.
Of course, they also had exquisite computer desks built into the walls. Beautiful woodwork, rolltops, and specially designed space for every peripheral and accessory and CD-ROM your little heart could desire... except for the actual computer (You know, ma'am, the big box you load the CD-ROM into?) I still crack up at that one. And I still don't trust "wired homes" unless I can see it work with my own eyes.
The interesting part here is the homeowner's association getting into the act. If the neighborhood covenant is created with the intent of making internet connectivity a given, then it makes it practical to do something like get a serious internet (OC3 or better) connection for homeowners and pay for it using neighborhood dues.
I really hate paying as much as I do for HOA dues (given what I *seem* to get). However, I know that, now that I have a reasonably fast 'net connection, I'm not going back. Applying my dues toward bandwidth seems a good deal.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Now available in five fruity colours.
My Webcam
As if HOA's weren't bad enough!
How long before home builders/developers and content providers merge?
I can just imagine an AOL/Time Warner/Kaufman & Broad combo in the future...
Talk about a captive audience...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
All homes should come pre-wired with gigabit fiber backbones, dammit! Heh...
..or just fiber period. Let the home owner and his/her ISP decide what equipment to put on either end.
The first phase of internet ready homes just have to market the fact they have a connection.
The next phase of internet ready communities will have to differentiate themselves by allowing several choices of connection, or perhaps just route to a regional tier 2 carrier with no filtering or firewalling. Or to be family friendly, offer a choice of a raw pipe or tie the connection to the community firewall/filter system.
There were several companies mentioned in the article who are jumping into the market to run the connections for these housing estates. It certainly sounds like a niche market for some smart people. I hope they are smart enough to offer more than just AOL, @HOME, and some other lame pseudo-internet connections. Certainly home-buyers, especially us internet-savvy post-IPO-vested nouveau-riche, will decide which housing estate to look at based on positive reports about good connectivity. Housing developments that only offer AOL will soon find the money goes somewhere else.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Is it DSL really worth the extra price on the house? I mean if you have to pay 10k-20k extra on the house you could spend that on a leased line or wireless DSL (like I have) - and then live anywhere you want. Besides, DSL will probably be thing a the past long before you sell your house.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Here in NJ/NYC it's fairly common in new setups...the new 63 story condo in Miami is going to have it, too...
Funny you should mention that. I ended up on the Board of Directors for my HOA because the HOA was trying to make rulings about satellite dishes. I explained the FCC rules to them and talked them out of making any rules -- make a rule that you can't enforce and you weaken all of the rest of the rules too -- and they practically drafted me the next time they had an opening on the board. I do my best to keep any extreme ideas from seeing the light of day.
Don't fight the HOA -- get involved with it and subvert it from within!
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
I had a similar experiance with USWest. For 3 months they couldn't keep my router trained. They kept insisting that it was my Linux box, and I kept telling them that the router doesn't even know what it is plugged into. Finally after many angry phone calls they got it fixed. I'm not sure this is the norm, seems to me that USWest is just an awful telco. I heard somewhere that the FCC ranked them last in customer service/satisfaction and after this experiance I can believe it.
sig this
Curious. How much would one of these houses cost? [grin] :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Even in the technological backwater that is California's Central Coast, it's starting to make a difference. We're selling our house at the moment, and one of the selling points is that it's already wired with Cat 5 and has DSL service. On the other side of that, one of my biggest criteria in picking a new place has been distance from the central office. I found a place that's a bit small, but it's tempting since it's about 100 feet from the CO. =]
True. Contractors don't exactly have the best reputations, often deservedly so.
Still, I would wager large amounts of money that earnest-yet-clueless homeowners have done far more damage than arrogant & ignorant contractors in residential construction.
God, it's good to live in a state with the 3rd lowest cost of living. My house is in a highly desirable part of a highly desirable city (on a cul-de-sac to boot) and has your pick of cable or DSL and cost less than $80,000 . . .
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Just be sure your network is secure, or Mr. Lots Timeonhishands is going to find it amusing to lock you in your own house. :)
Long signatures suck.
...what about Dome homes?
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Except for radio/microwave interference...I wouldn't want to lose connectivity everytime my neighbor has a conversation on their 2.4GHz cordless phone...
Home PNA networks are the way to go in my eyes, unless your home is really really old (with similarly old phone cabling).
Unless of course you can afford to run RJ45.
Long signatures suck.
Sort of like a mailbox, lockable with a one way door, where a delivery person can deposit your latest ebay winnings, thinkgeek loot or fatbrain order without fear that it will be plundered.
I needed one today when FedEx tried to deliver my Palm, no one got to the door, so I have to pick it up in person.
George
When I went house-hunting, I certainly checked on whether or not a house was DSL-ready and cable modem-ready. One house that I liked was snapped up in days, and they advertised that they had full DSL service.
When I put my house on the market, one of the selling points was that it was both DSL and cable-ready, and that it already had working DSL (1.44) and digital cable at the moment.
And the townhouse I bought, I checked to be sure it was in a service area for DSL - apparently, in Fremont, Center of the Universe (part of Seattle), up to half of all home buyers are techies or graphics artists, so this is a big deal.
Will in Seattle
What kind of a house has all the network wires run in the walls? That takes all the fun out of having wire runs along the ceilings and the floors! It totally ruins the nerd look.
Sort of like a mailbox, lockable with a one way door, where a delivery person can deposit your latest ebay winnings, thinkgeek loot or fatbrain order without fear that it will be plundered.
They have these for sale at Fred Meyer and various other home hardware stores.
Will in Seattle
Basically, you just move in, order your high bandwidth connection, plug it in, and you're good to go. I'm guessing you can order/swap out the hub with a 100BT or whatever else suits your fancy...
How about internet *controlled* houses? If you haven't seen the MisterHouse project, it's worth a look. MisterHouse is an open source, mostly perl-based system which allows you to control your home (and most of its electronics) via a web browser. Anywhere.
The link is misterhouse.net
Do you all have any other ideas? The family's not real technical, and I'll be stuck setting it up, so try and keep it simple.
Thanks!
Given the OS preferences of the average /. user, it took me a while to figure out why "not installing windows" was supposed to be a Bad Thing.
Has anyone tried porting Linux to a brick-and-mortar architecture?
I'm actually a bit suprised that this is 'newsworthy'.. I would think that by now a lot of homes should be built with some sort of consideration toward a high speed connection - apparently this is not the case.
According to Jo Chapman, director of surveys at the National Association of Home Builders, only 5 percent of new homes come with "structured" wiring, the fatter in-home pipe needed to get the most from broadband service.
And just how 'fat' are those pipes anyways? I always thought that if I built a house I would do the basic ethernet cabling, but I would also put in some sort of open-ducting in the walls so that 'fatter' cable for other purposes could be run from room to room fairly simply in the future.
-
air and light and time and space
That's what I did for my sister's house. Phone, Cat 5, RG-6 cable to all the rooms, some with multiple outlets. Brought everything to a board in the basement, wired up all the lines to punchblocks, and they are ready for just about anything. Got them these really nice wallplates that can hold up to 6 outlets (just change the plate itself out, the old connections will carry over). Makes a real nice housewarming gift. Cost: about $250, mostly for the higher end wallplates (and the number of them).
Of course, her husband put about 120 electrical outlets in as well, so this place is ready for just about anything.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.
FWIW, I'm remodeling my 10-year-old home now (not worn out, but it suffered from terminal architectural boredom), and I used to be a telecom consultant making recommendations right down to the wiring, so here are my general recommendations:
First, I'm cheap, so I only want to spend money where I'm fairly certain I'll get it back. You can pull fiber everywhere, but then you'll choke at the cost of network electronics (priced optical hubs lately?), and you still won't have the right type or grade 20 years from now and will pay a premium to deal with weird media. You have *no* idea how much really expensive cable I've seen abandoned in place just because someone decided "we might use it someday".
What to pull: The most I could justify is two jackets (w/ 4 pair ea.) of Cat-5 to each location. This is enough to still let you keep analog and digital in separate jackets and you still have plenty of pairs left over for future use. (For instance, in the digital jacket you'd use just half the pairs for 10 or 100 Ethernet, and in the analog jacket you could have two phone lines, the cable, and still another unused analog pair - that's probably plenty.) Try to keep analog and digital in separate jackets, and remember that although the phone loop itself is 48V max, the ring signal is a 90V square wave. If you're still paranoid and have money to burn, pull a third jacket, but I bet you'll never use it.
How to Pull It: This is one of the most important considerations. When doing my remodeling, I took advantage of a leftover triangular space to put a storage niche and wiring center. You want to "home run" everything, that is, everything is a star topology running from the outlet to your wiring closet. You may need more or less space depending on what's going to be located there. Although your first inclination is to put your servers, etc, there, you might later find this is inconvenient. I have one rule that works for me: If it can't hang on the wall (there's a sheet of plywood there to act as a substrate), it doesn't go in the wiring closet. Consider ventilation and power requirements, especially if you want many computers there. This is the one reason I'm a fanatic about low power machines for server use (I use a Laptop and a "cash register computer" for my Linux servers): I hate paying for all the KW-hrs big servers burn, and I also don't want to have to worry about special A/C or power requirements. Remember the trend is for things to become much lower-power, so skipping the dedicated 30A circuit and A/C duct should be fine. Hard conduit, whether steel or PVC is quite expensive and is not required by code in most places, so avoid it if you can. It can make pulling things later much easier, but if there's much "snakiness" in the run you'll usually wind up using whatever was already in there as your pull-cord for the new stuff, anyway. Electrical and building supply places sell a blue corrugated flexible conduit commonly called "smurf tube" that can be great for getting through the tough spots or as a tough sleeve when for instance, crossing through metal studs. Just keep in mind before you start that it's *much* easier to pull wire in new construction before all the walls, cielings and floors are there than aftterwards. You can spend all day failing to get wire into some places if you're not realistic about your experience level.
Cable Wiring: Some purists may disagree, but the frequency response and noise immunity of good Cat5 cable is so impressive that I really don't think there's any need to go to the trouble (and considerable expense) of pulling coax any more. Use balun transformers instead - you can even buy them integrated into F-connectors now, so your coax gear plus right in.
Termination: This is where things can get expensive, especially if you go with the slick looking prepackaged wiring boxes like they're putting in the new homes. In reality, most of them are just way overpriced 110 blocks, RJ jacks and cable splitters. Again, if you've got money to burn, you can go that route. The home automation guys have this stuff (try smarthome.com, worthdist.com, and homecontrols.com), but I really don't recommend it because in addition to expense, the box itself my limit you before long. I prefer to simply terminate all the wires into RJ-45s and then patch them into whatever is needed. On that subject, I recommend the EIA/TIA T568A terminations, as they're the most common. (You can use T568B if you plan on any AT&T phone gear.) Leviton has some great low cost 8 and 16 jack surface mount termination boxes (what I use instead of the expensive fancy deals), and they use the same little plug-in adapters (RJ-45, RJ-11, F-type balun, etc.) that fit in the really slick little Leviton faceplates. (I've seen these with from two to eight positions for a single gang box, which should be plenty. They're available at Lowe's, Home Depot and the like these days for less than the specialty places.)
Hope this helps. Now if there were just an easy way to add speaker wires!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
My basement has 9' ceilings and a good portion of it will be my office, within it will be a computer/electrical room(raised flooring, etc.). All incoming lines (phone, power, cable) will terminate in there. I'm home-running from the basement up two floors and into the attic.
As much fun as this sounds, I wish the damn builder would help out a little more.
Anybody know where I can learn to terminate fiber on-line?
I just bought a condo and luckily it didn't come with internet access. It did come with a covenant that says the outsides of my curtains have to be white and that I can't run a business out of my home, although according to one of the two agreements I signed, I can have a home office. Can I run a web server out of my home? Is that a business? The other agreement says nothing about business one way or another. (I also can't own "exotic pets" such as an iguana or a peacock. Oh, well.)
My covenant really isn't so bad, or I wouldn't have signed it. But I know that covenants can decrease the value of a home. Ask anyone who's ever been unpopular with the homeowners' association.
Oooo, and they got us now. Next thing you know, when your house comes with internet access, you'll be signing a covenant that says that, for as long as you live there, you won't buy internet access from anybody else, and that you won't run a server, and that you won't download porn (porn being defined as anything your seller considers objectionable, such as ads for his competitors), or allow people to download WAV files that you recorded of your own music because they take up too much bandwidth, or... or... [shudder!]
In a country where the bill of rights probably wouldn't survive a constitutional convention (it never did when we had mock conventions in high school), what do you think happens when the people vote in homeowners' associations?
You better read those covenants damned carefully!
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Agreed! Houses should be built a special closet somewhere that is a dedicated server room. A room that's free of mousture and temperature regulated. It should have rackspace built-in with fiber running right into it. Every room in the house would have Ethernet jacks running into this closet into an switch, for integration with your your network. When you move in it would just be a matter of setting up a server in that closet and starting your local fiber ISP subscription.
It doesn't seem to far away, and soon enough cost won't even be much of a factor.
Long signatures suck.
Good contrators do
Exactly, but it also depends on whether you're buying a pre-built spec, custom, or semi-custom. If you're buying a house that isn't built yet and they won't let you add data pre-wire you should find another builder.
I was wondering if this would create a new workers union like carpenters or plumbers, but the new union would be network installers or something. just a thought and question.
-motardo
I thought it said "Internet Ready Hemos For Sale."
... Jeffs. Little talking figures, maybe, with USB ports to download catchphrases and shipping with a (GPL) patch to enable support for the device in the 2.4 kernel.
However, that's even better when read into the sentence "Hmm...I always figured a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready hemos *grin*."
oh well. We'll still have to wait for ready-made hemoses, or hemosen, or hemae, or
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
CAT5 that is, not RJ45.
Long signatures suck.
Wow. I left off a zero. Make that 16000 feet.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
When RIT had new apartments installed, they put Ethernet, Cable and phone connections in each bedroom and the living room. Granted, it's college housing, but this was very important... (and they didn't think to shunt all 5 cable connections together the first time... and the same with the phones...) Oh well. That's RIT for ya. (RIT = Retards In Training)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
IANAL, but I think you can do whatever you want; the intent of zoning laws is not to quibble over what kind of wiring you have in your house, it's to keep you from turning your house into a shopping mall. Why, if we didn't have zoning laws, a city might have a house next to a factory next to a church next to a school next to a skyscraper next to an amusement park, and <SARCASM> we wouldn't want that, would we? Everything within walking distance, so that people wouldn't have to drive, and get stuck in the ever-increasing amounts of traffic? Hell, no! </SARCASM>
-- Sunlighter
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Just be sure you know where the water pipes are before you start drilling.
Don't ask me why I mention this; I don't want to talk about it.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
4 line voice-only is nice for home-office people (main, business, fax, teenage daughter). It doesn't tie up any data lines and doesn't need to be CAT5 quality.
If voice over IP ever becomes a common reality we will drop it completely. Right now we just try to build a system that's flexible and open to growth.
Considering yon embollence, I deny you the right to grant yourself an ulterior lifer like that. If you were I, as beautiful and as rich as I, yon unharboured wrenched \ escuse me
//ugh recapitulate
As we were contemplating, yon unharbingered wrenches would become as noble as yer mastrers and such as I / I measn we / would incorporate the best of thy ]]
Noi'm, s0o sorry, but you don't so we just can't (CAN'T CAN'T) do that the way we'd want to inundate. We don't read inunjader mag anymore, I suggest you getg rid of them as well. Think about "this is what I am thinking about" if "that is what you are thinking about" is what you are thinking about
Consequently, leave us alone to our slashlist-friendliness because:
1., It incorporates everyone's favorites games, and makes for easy replies, as follows:
I don't think so
Ha! You woudln't at all, WOULD YOU, yon gun-toting liberalfoot! I hate your mother's! Fool. d
2., Misquoting for the plagie = FUN.
(To the mods. If I am not a doopity dork, I don't know what is)
Haha, but you are! Haha, haha, yon, loony non doopity fool@mictrosoft.com!
3., And misunderstaing!
I have enough bandwith to DoS you and still Napster Metallica songs.
I don't use DOS anymore, haha, because we yes haave gotten iover it, and are not still i.
END OF LIST
Thank you for my incompeteredzs,
zeusjr, who is and was and might be for awhile
They should have taken the whole idea one step further, and just like central air, they should have had a centrally located wireless web router.
Bring something like the airport, already configured with the broadband line (whichever line you support), and have a bunch of relays throughout your home (depending on how big your house is and where structural items will interfere with the signal).
Now THAT would be an Internet-Ready house. It's simply not good enough if you're still restricted to attaching your computer to the wall. The computer wants to be free...
Just imagine, barbecuing outside while surfing the internet, beer in hand, on a beautiful Memorial Day weekend.
I'm pretty sure he only has terminals in 2 rooms, though. :)
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
New! Improved! Internet Ready Homes!
New Sheistman Homes now come with phone jacks in almost 4 full rooms! Also, as a welcome gift, we supply you lucky home buyers with a "10 Free Hours" AOL cd! Now how much would you pay? BUT WAIT! There's more!
Along with the AOL cd comes a FREE top of the line, state of the art, and other assorted buzzwords, WinModem! <font face="flyspeck 3 lawyerese">(a $1.50 value. Installation and phone cords extra)</font>
All this and more, in your new Sheistman Home!
Operators are standing by.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
So, if they were linked together, would that be a beowulf complex?
...explaining the 2nd phone line to a possible house buyer really impressed him and greatly helped sell the house to him. Of course, I live in South Carolina.
Peace.
I know a guy who loved the fiber connections, all the way from the university server right up to the dorm's hallway router. Loved 'em so much that a few months after he moved out into an apartment, he cancelled the lease and moved back into the dorms. Stayed there until he graduated.
:-)
It's definitely one big advantage over the typical residence... that and the 18-year-old girls in spring were my two big joys during my college days.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The article talks about how wiring when wireless is becoming popular might be a bad idea. One of the reasons for wireless is that it's hard to put in a wire infrastructure after a building is built. I would much rather have Ethernet in the house than a proprietary wireless connection.
Also, has anyone seen apartment buildings that offer Ethernet? It would be alot like college dorms. A manager would have to spend a little to get the bandwidth and everyone wired, but after that, they could start raking in some money. It would also give them an advantage over other apartments. I haven't seen any of that where I live (ND), but is this something that's common in larger cities?
"...a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house."
.325" sheetrock and outgassing toxic crap for the next 10 years.
Yep. I'm in my second house, fully "internet-ready" even tho it's a 1919 woodframe monolith. When remodeling the bathroom (walls & ceiling out), we took the opportunity to run several strands of cat5 from the basement to the second floor, install segmentable hubs, and provide ethernet jacks at most of the phone jacks. It was even easier in my old house (a quaint 1909 shoebox), where the panel upgrade to 200a was the perfect opportunity to put in isolated system power, hi-grade power filtering, and ethernet everywhere. It really ain't that hard.
Here's a tip: Go to Home Despot/Eagle/Lowe's or whatever well-stocked DIY store you can find, and buy the 5-foot long drillbit in the electrical section. It seems goofy, but it's a fantastic thing for retrofit wiring. Take it into your basement, and use it to drill up thru the 1st floor into the wall. If there is no opening in the wall (switchplate), use the 5-foot extension bit to keep drilling until you hit the 2nd floor/attic. Now you need a second person to hold the drill in place, with the bit poking up two floors above you. Go upstairs and grab a hold of the end of the bit (in the attic or thru an access/outlet hole). Notice that the bit has a small hole in the blade. Thread the wire thru the hole, and use the bit to pull the wire back down to the basement. Drill, pull. Drill, pull. Repeat as needed, pulling each wire back to a central point in the basement. A few rj45 crimps and staples later, add a hub or two connected to your dsl/cable/isdn/pots device, and you are the proud owner of an internet-ready house.
That one silly piece of metal with a hole in it makes the job tremendously easier. And besides, (a) it's an excuse to buy new tools [drillbit $20us, extension $15us, rj45 crimper $35us], and (b) it's oh-so-much classier if you provide networking in a house that isn't made out of
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
Their actual DSL division seems to have a clue, but they work as part of a company that does not know how to install cable properly. For the last year and a half, my phone line has been lying across my back yard & my neighbor's yard... I have to snake it through the trees every time I mow my lawn.
I have a problem with either their phone service or their billing department about once every 2 months.
Now my plan is to drop them entirely: I will get the 2-way cable-modem service from Roadrunner, and use my PCS phone for voice. Land lines are nice, but it is just not worth putting up with those idiots.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Mine already was (to some degree). That's why I bought it. The house is fully wired everywhere with Cat5 or better, plus a ridiculous number of studio-grade audio and video feeds, and the master junction point includes state-of-the-art networking, automation, security, and power backup.
Is it worth it? Definitely. Too expensive? No. It's not as pricy as you would have guessed. We rarely go to the movies because our home theaters (3 of them in the house, including one in my bedroom) look and sound so good. Unlike things like a boat, you receive benefits from improvements to your house ever single day.
Unfortunatly, those labs at RPI (VCC North and South) are now full of IBM IntelliStations running Windows NT. They moved the SGI Indys to the Library and the JEC building.
:(
Now, this summer, they're begun to filter out older UNIX machines (out of labs to other places), replacing them with newer ones from other labs that they're turning into "laptop labs".
With the recent upsurge in interest and availability, is wireless technology not a serious alternative to pulling your house apart with a bunch of wires which may need replacement?
.sig -
Apple, for one, is edging to having wireless as standard in their computers.
- insufficient power for a
-
Thank you. May the Spirit of the Lord be with you, Amen. And listen to loud music, especially if it comes free over the digital lightwaves coming through the back of your beige box.
--Hail Mary, for she has the largest shotgun of them all.--
I've been looking for a home in the Long Beach, CA area (why? I don't know...). After the birth of my child last October I long for things like a yard, a pleasant street, a den, a ... you understand. Things that an apartment just don't provide (here, anyway). So, I contact my friendly real-estate agent and arrange for a meeting.
First question: what are your needs in a home. First answer: we must be within 1600 feet of the local phone company switch.
Blew him away.
I explained: since ADSL came into my home I refuse to live without some kind of fast Internet connection at home. This connection allows me to work from home as if I was in the office (plus a few security hurdles, of course). This allows me to enjoy my son (oh, and my wife) much more than if I had to travel Highway 22 every morning to get to work.
The Internet has become a crucial part of my family's life: in a healthy way (well, except all the time I spend on Slashdot).
So, am I surprised there are stories about Internet-ready homes? Nope.
If you know of a good deal in the $230k to $260k range in decent parts of ADSL-capable Long Beach send me a note.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Wireless is the only way to go if you have an existing house (or rental). I know my landlord would frown on my taking a drill to the drywall and running CAT-5 through the rafters. My Airport base station along with Lucent Orinoco cards for my computers made my house internet ready with a few hour's worth of work.
...yes, really, (amazing who you meet on /., isn't it?) this isn't exactly a new thing. Homes have been pre-wired with for phones for 30+ years, cable for 20, security systems & stereo since the mid-70's, and data since the mid-90's. We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.