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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.
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
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
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)
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.
Yeah, I was going to wire my bathrooms too, but my wife nixed that.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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:
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
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
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'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!
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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
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)
"...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.
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
My local building codes basically treat it like another phone line - no problems at all. I've heard of some places that require Plenum (sp?) grade cable (this is the stuff that can be run through air ducts - doesn't give off harmfull fumes when it burns/heats up).
...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.