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Wiring A New House?
jbp123 asks: "I'm building a new house. Once the electrician has run the phone lines I want to run cat5e ethernet cable. I figure two drops to each of the 6 rooms with phone lines. I've never done this but my plan is to run the ethenet cable through the same path that the phone lines follow. I'll use up the rest of the 1000 foot spool by running a third cable to a few of the rooms. Ethernet cable is cheap. I found solid cat5e 1000 foot spools for $60 delivered so the decision to run cat5e cable is a no brainer. The question is should I run fiber? I really don't know how much the cable costs since I don't know what cable to use. It is much easier to run cable before the drywall goes in so I want to make an informed decision now. Ten years from now will I need/want fiber?"
Put in fiber.
You'll only regret it later.
In the long run you will be better off
You might try running the cables on the outside of the walls. Easy to upgrade, easy to run. Buy some clamps, and paste the cable, then paint it. Just an idea.
Everything is mainstream now.
Not like this hasn't popped up on slash a few times before, but why only phone, cat5 and fiber?
What about running Svideo and RCA to everyroom or an extra drop of cat5 to run sound on?
And as far as running the cat5 parallel to the phone, if your building the house why not set your cables into conduits, that way you can upgrade to whatever cabling you need in ten years.
As long as you're using shielded cat5 cable and your phone lines are shielded, you shouldn't have a problem running them through the same conduit. Be aware, however, that if you run your cat5 cable within 6 inches (safe margin) of electrical sources, you will see interference and will experience performance problems. I'm not sure what your electrical people are doing, but it's common to place electrical outlets near phone outlets (fax machines, cordless phones, etc). Just FYI, be aware of this.
Just use the Cat5 for everything. An RJ-11 will fit in an RJ-45 jack just fine. Tie it all back to a patch pannel in the basement and then you can patch phones/ethernet/whatever to your hearts content.
make a fiber backbone, and design for future expansion...
KISS
Fiber can be a pain in the ass to put in. Make sure you don't touch the actual glass... you'll never get those splinters out.
If you have the means to put in fiber, though, go right ahead... but don't get secondary support equipment for it, as that might change by the time you want to put it into use.
Im just guessing at numbers, but fiber is expensive now. It will get cheaper. Lets say the Cat5 isn't worth replacing for 10 years or so. In ten years fiber will be a _lot_ cheaper. Possibly cheap enogh to offset the cost and trouble of rewiring? Dunno, just thinking aloud.
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
but why don't you set it up so that in future years you can put in what ever cable you want?
I always imagined having a duct built into the floor of my house, running along the walls, with a grate over top. I would run whatever in there, be it fibre or cat-5, etc.
And if I ever went wireless, I could just fill it up with beer and use a really long straw.
I don't know if the economics deem it worthy... Atleast for home usage, installing it now hoping it will be useful in a few years seems like a waste of money. By the time you maximize the usage of your current setup, there will probable be more attractive performance for price wireless products.
But then again, if ya got the dough to blow... why not!
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
If you run conduit, no matter what happens, you can run new cable later.
If it was me I would run the cat5e now and include a string with the pull. Later you can attach whatever cable you want and pull it through. It will be difficult if you don't have conduit.
My future plans include 802.11a, so I am not worried about fiber. I just need one run to the middle of the house for my AP. I am using 802.11b now and I am happy with the speed/wire trade off.
Good luck!
http://packetnexus.com
By the sound of the post, you feel that this is an urgent matter before the drywall goes up. It doesn't have to be. What you should be concerning yourself with putting in is conduit, not the wiring, if this is a house you plan on living in for a good long time.
With good conduit, running wires is a fairly painless process. Install the conduit, let the contractors install the drywall, then run the cat5, fiber, whatever. After X many years, if you decide you need to upgrade to fiber or whatever is current enough for your needs, pulling the existing wire and replacing will be a cinch. By putting in the wiring now instead of conduit, you are speeding up the depreciation and obsolescense (sp?) of your house, not increasing it. Good conduit even helps with events you didn't plan, such as if you figure out you need to pull RCA cables for house-wide stereo, or additional coax, or whatever.
Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
Unless you really wanna spend mega dollars on the fiber, cat5e seems like the best choice. Although fiber doesn't experience Electro Magnetic Interference, if you run two fiber jacks to each room, you're gonna need something that's capable of plugging into that.
If money is not a factor, I say run both Cat5e AND fiber. Use the Cat5 now, and you can always use the pre-run fiber in the future...
You might just want to run Cat5 for the phones - it would simplify things and you might save a little bit. I'm planning on doing the same thing on an addition I'm planning. Now if I can only get some cheap fiber and termination hardware :^)
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
How about just using slightly larger cable ducts in the walls? Then you can always thread more cables or fibres later without screwing up the plasterwork.
Escoutaire
When a dream dreams the dreamer, the dreams the real.
How about this stuff
A lot more expensive than plain cat5 though.
http://www.thehungersite.com
You may not be aware of this but you can use your Cat-5E cable to run your telephones over.
I don't think you'll need Fibre - doesn't Cat-5E support gigabit speeds?
cat5 runs gig ether just fine.. even in 10 years, would you really need more than that?
During the summers between college semesters I helped wire a factory. It involved pulling a lot of wires through pipes. We always pulled a few extra wires for spares and to act as pullwires.
Put in ducts and modular faceplates, so you can replace the cables when something better comes along. Have all the ducts go straight down to the basement, and a duct around the ceiling of the basement with access at each joint with a vertical duct, then put your router in some inobtrusve corner of the basement.
Have fun.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
... but for the next 3 years or so you will defnitly be fine with CAT5. Gig-Ethernet works over CAT5, there is even a standard for Fibre-Channel over CAT5. Nics with fibre-connectors still are expensive.
In 10 years however you will probably wish that you had spent the few extra bugs to put in multimode fibres.
Installing the two might be a compromise.
Edgar
Edgar
If this is your dream house and you plan to live in it for the next 30+ years, then put in fibre and deal with the costs. But if this is a house you're going to live in for no more than 5 or so years, put in cat 5. This was a decision i recently faced not at home but at work. I know it's not the same thing, but it's a similar situation. The person before me put in Cat-3 cable (10 years prior) and used dummy terminals, and i had the joy of ripping out those Cat 3's and putting in something better (this is a 6-story building!) (Yes, i had some professional help, otherwise i'd still be running cables now). I had the option of using optical, as well.
There's a fine line between using the cheapest thing you can find and ripping it out in five years (not a problem if you aren't going live in the house that long) and breaking the bank to run fibre which will be viable for some time to come.
Fiber is highly unlikely to be necessary or desirable in the next 10 to 20 years in residential housing. Install Cat5E cable, it'll handle gigabit which should be fast enough for just about everything.
Instead of spending money on fiber, spend money to install conduit. Conduit conduit conduit! Conduit is nice since you can later on pull fiber or additional wires more easily.
In ten years everything will be 802.11. So does it really matter? Just run the cat5.
Do yu really need that much pr0n,
that quickly,
in every room?
My god man, your a machine!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If you want to upgrade the cable in 10 years maybe you can tie the new cable to the old. Then pull the old out of the wall while simultaneously installing the new.
Fiber breaks fairly easily - its a big problem. You might put it in there, and have it work fine for a long time, and then something breaks SOMEWHERE and you don't know where, but you do know that you've lost your connection. Copper is far more durable. If you put in the fiber and the CAT5, you could use the cable as a backup.
Having said that, 100Mb per second is pretty fast for games, X-clients/servers and harddrive reads and writes, unless you really want all the computers to act like one computer. Maybe that's what you want. I don't really care myself. If I want to work on another computer, I walk over to the other one and sit down. So even in the future, I'll probably always be happy with CAT5.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Dropping wire down the inside of a wall isn't a hard task (even with drywall up); all that needs to be done is to first find a spot (inbetween studs) that you want the wire to come thru, put a hole in the wall (small hole, about the size of an american quarter), get above the wall (this is hard with a ceiling, but i have seen it done from crawl-spaces) to the desired location along with a nut and some string (fishing line works great).
Tie the nut to the line, and lower it down to aprox. the location of the hole. Tie the other end of the line to your wire/fiber etc... and get yo' ass back to your hole. Now fish (thru the hole) your line/nut and pull it out of the hole. Eventually your wire will come following along. So hypothetically, if you didn't lay fiber now and wanted to put it down later (or whatever other new fangled cable types we discover in the next 10-20 years) all you would need is to have some way of getting above the walls.
As far as co-running your lines with the phone lines, you might want to inform anyone else working on your house as to what you've put in, you wouldn't want to later discover that some phone-co employee has removed your extra wires thinking that they were mistakenly laid phone line. (get the idea?)
I'd say run fiber now, it's fairly cheap and even if you never hook it up to a computer you could always have cool looking dots of light scattered about your house to really confuse others in the dark.
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
Right now, I wouldn't even consider using fiber.
You would need a lot of other hardware to make it work.
With Ethernet, hubs and switches are cheap... you can wire everything back to a patch box and from there have it connect to your ADSL or cable modem.
I'm not sure what the costs are on actual fiber cable, but it's certainly not as cheap as CAT5. What's more, you would either need a NIC in your computer capable of accepting fiber (over $US300 I think) or you would need a Fiber-->CAT5 converter box at each point where fiber comes out of the wall. Those boxes aren't cheap either.
Really, it just comes down to this. If you want super-fast communication between your computers in your house, and are willing to pay a hefty premium, them fiber it is. But it's not going to make your Internet connection much faster. Your Internet connection will only every be as fast as whatever the Cable or DSL modem has going out... and that's usually a 10Mbs connection running at 2Mbs download max.
Personally... if you want scalability, I would just make sure that the CAT5 you string is high quality and has *all eight conductors*... that way it is good for Gigabit Ethernet... which is slowly coming down in price and is already more affordable than Fiber for LANs.
enjoy
Good point. Certainly a better approach than trying to predict what kind of networking technology will be "in" ten years from now!
Why not forgo the whole cabling experience and go wireless instead? You can connect every room in the house with a single hub. It's cheaper than buying the cable and hub/switch, and a whole lot more convenient.
You should run two drops of Cat5 and two drops of RG6 Coax to every "main" room you may have people. Run it to a central cross-connect in the basement or garage.
:-)
The reason you want to run two coax drops is that if you get a dual-tuner sattelite decoder (like a DirectTV TiVo) you will need to lines going out to your dish or to your multiswitch (which splits the signal between >2 lines, so you can put receivers in multiple rooms).
You could also run a Left/Right RCA audio system to each room, but audio will travel decently over Cat5, so you shouldn't have to worry about that.
Fiber would be useful, but frankly you don't need it now because nothing we are doing iwll need fiber probably for 10 years. If you want to prep for it, you can run conduit (probably 1.5" would be sufficient) to each room, to make pulling new cables in (or pulling old cables out) easier in 5 or 10 years. Run it to a modular mounting jack so you can change stuff out if need be.
Having just recently gotten my DirectTV TiVo (and hacked it to 146 hours of storage), I know my next house is gonna need twin coax to every main room.
...do you really want to have to standardize on fiber adapters for all your devices?
Besides, GigE over copper is here now. I've just purchased an old house that needs a lot of electrical work -- while the walls are open, I plan on running Cat 6 STP cabling to my drops.
GigE might be the last gasp for copper. Then again, some were saying that about Fast Ethernet when that debuted.
Trying to build in anticipation of what the standard will be in 2012 is an expensive crapshoot. Go with what works now (i.e. Cat 5e/6) and count on the size of the installed base to ensure continued support for it.
Shielded conduits would be more useful. More expensive now, but makes it dead simple to upgrade ten years from now.
Looking at this page it seems to tell me that fiber is not very cheap. Albeit I couldn't tell you which exact type of cable you would be needing (ST/ST, SC/ST, SC/SC), none of em are affordable in a practical sense. I am sure the hardware for this stuff isn't nice on the bank account either. As far as what you want to do with this fiber I am not sure. Run it straight to the computers or end up converting it into rj45 ports in the wall or something and running cat5 from the computer to the walljack.
Rather then running seperate conduite for cableing, use the cold air returns. talk to the HVAC (heating/vent/Air cond) and makesure that you have a main return running straight from the basement to the atic, and floor and celling returns in each room (good practice for ventilation anyway.) And you should have no problem running plenum rated cable (fibre, cat5e whatever) through them.
as an asside, if you plan on having 1 room in the house with most of your equipment, add extra registers to get more Cooling in summer and dont forget about fans in the ducts to improve air circulation)
Good luck with the project!
df
...as running through the street naked singing "I'm a little teapot, short and stout" is to modesty and sanity.
No offense, but even the best wireless security solution can't compare to having an actual cat5 cable you can control access to.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You really should consider plentium grade Cat-5 cable if you're going to put it inside walls and throught he ceiling. My understanding is that this is a fire safety issue, this type of wire does not emit toxic fumes when it burns. I know that it is required for commercial installs, maybe home installs are different. Whatever the case, it will probably cost a LOT more than $60 / 1000 feet.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
802.11 and bluetooth will you best bet, don't waste time and $ with wires.
don't secure the wire to the studs in the wall. That way whenever fiber is more prevalent, you can use the Cat5 to pull the fiber down into the wall from the attic.
:/
Pull the Cat 5 to a central place down inside your house - locate your router/hub there - maybe even your home server.
Think about providing excellent grounding and maybe even heatsink capability to your server closet. Run a separate breakered power to the server closet.
Run coaxial cable for TV - double shielded - to each room and have it go either to the attic for split or better yet have them terminate at the power mast outside the house - leave plenty of extra cable.
Wire your house for security prior to putting in the insulation - insulation and sheetrock guys just love to cut wires that are in their way.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I'm gonna run into the same situation in a few month. However, we're not building the house ourselves, but rather purchased a new construction to be completed in spring - so while this will be "our house", we don't really own it until settlement, after construction is completed. I've already talked to people that run the alarm package and offer the "onQ" home wiring solution, but they are such morons ("We'll give you a state-of-the-art 10-baseT hub") that I wouldn't trust them to run a phone line. Besides, they are way too expensive.
So my question is, at which point can I legally and pratically get into the house and run my own cables? And who do I have to tell? Is it enough to bribe the electrician with a case of beer? Or do I have to get this whole thing approved by the builder? Does the builder have to let me into the house at all, or can they insist that I use their security contractor for the wiring?
This will all be low-voltage wiring, so I don't think I have to be a certified electrician, right? But I'd like to get CAT5e, coax, audio, and possibly fiber (what kind?) into most of the rooms, concentrated in the basement. Also, I'd like to have this connected neatly in the rooms, via phone jack type of in-the-wall boxes. But then I have to get the people putting the dry walls in to make the appropriate cut-outs, complicating things some more.
OK, just one more: How about any type of outside wiring, e.g. inductive loop under driveway; low-vol line to mailbox; cable, audio & power to the back yard?
Are you allowed to work on or modify the house before it's completed? It seems most home builders will not allow you to work on the home during the construction. This is for insurance/liability reasons and others. I don't know if this only applies to only building/trim type stuff.
Have you checked with your home builder yet?
Den
If you're gonna put it in ducts--even in a single dwelling residential--check your local codes. They may require you to use plenum. Most business codes (and either the NEC or the TIA/EIA-568-A can't remember which one) requires that for offices cable installed in ducts must be plenum rated and installed in conduit inside the ducts.
The danger is non-plenum cable gives off a lot of smoke while burning, if the cable is in the ducts this can quickly spread the smoke to areas that aren't on fire and hinder peoples escape from the building.
Fire codes are basically designed to do two things, 1) slow down the spread of a fire 2) make it easy for people to escape. And if you can't see, you can't get out (so the theory goes), that's why plenum is sometimes required. (plus non-plenum burning vapours tend to create a strong acid when mixed with water, iirc).
Long and short, always check your codes.
Bryan
Cat5e will "only" get you up to 1000baseT. For 10000baseT you need Cat7 aka class F. Sadly, I didn't find a real price comparison of copper and fiber but I did find this quote: "Class F will probably cost twice as much as Cat 5-an even higher price than fiber cable!" here. Makes me think the fiber itself will be cheap to put in, but the price tag to be able to use it might make you gag later. :-)
It's hard to predict what you'll want to run between your walls in the future. Technology changes every few years - but house ownership can last for decades.
The key is to install conduit between key locations in your house. It usually isn't that hard to run cables between the basement and the first floor, or from the attic to the second floor. But it can be a big effort to run a wire from the basement to the 2nd floor. Or to get a cable to a location where it isn't accessible from the attic or the basement.
When I had my house built, I installed a conduit from the wiring panel in the basement all the way up to the attic, with access points on the first and second floors. I also installed a conduit behind two bedroom walls on the second floor - walls which are diffcult to get behind without a lot of demolition.
Now if I want to bring in a new fiber or CATV or doorbell, it's very easy to draw the cable from the basement to the attic, and it's easy to cleanly distribute the cable to any room in the house.
My only mistake was a lack of a conduit between my house and detached garage.
Oh, I just thought of something.
It will be a little more expensive, but you might want to think about stringing "STP" CAT5, instead of UTP... that's Shielded Twisted Pair instead of Unshielded.
STP is what is plenum graded, so that it doesn't catch fire as easily. Also, it's better shielded against interference from other electrical sources that might be in the wall.
It's not a requirement or anything... but it might be worth considering simply for safety reasons.
My father was building his new house and wanted it "wired for the future". My brother and I were to develop his idea and install it (after the electrician and before the drywall).
We decided that is wasn't practical to run fiber. How much speed to really think you will need? How much faster can a home user get? Even if the broadband ISPs upgrade their system to allow anything faster than a maximum of 10mbps...are you _REALLY_ going to need that?
If you are concerned about the speed in your home area network, then just make sure your network equipment is 100meg...that should be more than plenty for every person in those six rooms to be swapping high-quality multimedia back and forth.
The point is, fiber really isn't for the home user...it's more for other intensive bandwidth situations. What I can definately recommend is that if you can afford it and it won't break your budget...then by all means go for it!
However, if it _will_ break your budget, or you want to spend that money on a bunch of X-10 equipment for a semi-Jetson-type house, then run conduit and pull strings. So if you ever get the cash or get the itch to install fiber, all you gotta do is attach it to a pull string and go...it will slide nicely through conduit.
As for the phone and other stuff...just run Cat-5 all the way through. You can use it for phone and sound (maybe other things). If you want video, just run a coax to each room and get a fancy distribution panel to manage all this neat stuff. I wouldn't recommend running S-Video throughout. Have you ever bought a 6-foot s-video cable? They are expensive. Coax does its job just fine. Make sure you run the high quality stuff.
Of course, if you run fiber you can pipe it all through the same wire, but each room will need an EXPENSIVE thingy to split all signals to the designated device.
Be concerned about places where the fiber woul;d have to take a bend (elbow).... the curve will upset the full potenial of bandwidth that can be carried over the fiber (light likes to travel in straight lines). The way that a signle gets around bend in fiber is that the light-beams refract/reflect (i can't remember, i'm dumb) off the sides of the cabling repeatedly until they can get back to what they like. this added latency will have only a minor draw on what it can fully hold, but it will none-the-less have an effect.
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
Basically, get some PVC code-approved conduti big enough to hold some RG6 coax (for the cable TV), puls a coupel strands at the end of cat5e and leave extra room to pull anything else.
Thisd way, when/if fiber becomes pratical, you just pull the old cat5 out, and using a pull-lead pull new "fiber" in. Nearther to the main runs and the junction/swithc, you change to a larger pipe/conduit, to hold more cables. Also, if you use PVC, it waterproofs against any potential water exposure (borken pipe, kid overflowing the tub and leaking intot he wall, etc).
Think about it - no ugly (exposed) wires/cables along the baseboard like with an external install, and you can upgrade easily and selectively with the latest and greatest medium without having to tear up your walls.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I went through this with a friend recently.
Never mind upgrading problems, think about just moving your desk.
He wanted to run that stuff with RCA/coax/cat 5 together.
That means long cords and everything in one spot.
PLAN WHERE THE FURNITURE WILL BE.
He wanted to go wireless. I don't have 802.11b but I can't even talk on my 2.4Ghz phone while using the microwave. HE RAN CAT5E.
Cable is what, max 4mbps? Unless you are streaming something fat, gigabit will be fine for a long time.
By then, real wireless should work.
I wired my own house a few years ago.
Here is some advice based on what I did. Note that I was at the time a licensed communications wiring contractor, so the house is wired a litte more than perhaps is usefull, but here goes.
1. Put muliple locations in each room. I put to faceplates in each bedroom, typically near a corner and opposite each other ( diagaonally opposite corners ) a cable from the outlet can be run along either adjacent wall for convienience in locating phones or computers. In each outlet are two cat 5 data cables and 1 4pair telephone cable. In one of the two outlets is an RG6 CATV cable.
2. Home run telephone wires - I ran all the telephone cables directly from the outlet to a telephone junction box in the garage which was mounted directly above the one from the phone company. The phone company box faces outside, mine faces inside and there are some holes in the 2X4 seperating them for cables to run through. I mounte 4 type 66 punchblocks in the inside box and terminated all 32 cables there. All multiple jumpering etc. is done in that box.
I ran all the data wiring ( 48 cables ) to 4 dual gang boxes inside the master bedroom closet. Using ortronics IMO2 dual gang faceplates with 6 double port modules, I got 48 ports in the 4 outlets and its is not cludgy like a patchpanel on a swingout door would be- it has a finished look. I also got the electrician to put a utility outlet inside the closet close to the ports to power the switch and localtalk bridge.
3. Put a telephone outlet near your CATV outlets - if you want to use satellite tv or some other service which requires a telephone connection it will be very good to have.
4. Put data outlets in common rooms - the livingroom, dining room den etc. These areas could end up as common homework computer areas for the kids. I have a table in the living room and one in the dining room ( we eat in the kitchen ) with some older computers on them that the kids use for homework.
Note that the contractors installers may be very helpful if you offer a 6 pack or two of beer to help grease the skids. I got all kinds of built-in bookshelves, nooks and other cool customizations this way.
Another suggestion !! Put in the return line for a circulating hot-water system during construction. If you can not afford the pump now, you can add it later, but it is a pain to put the return line in.
Also consider insulating hot water lines and putting insulation inside the inner walls to give some soundproofing.
Good Luck
Zoot
enough is too much
Want futureproofing? Run innerduct to each of the locations. In the future, you can pull whatever you see fit to the location, should you choose to do so.
Any monkey with a side cutter, a crimpmaster rj45 crimp tool, and maybe a type 110 punchdown tool can do a wonderful job of wiring a house - two cat 5 in every room, a nice ortronics patch panel in the basement, and whatever layer 2 switch you decide to run.
... a Cisco 2621 router with a Catalyst 1924 switch. The 2621 handles ISDN and NAT to my cable modem, one of the two 100 mbit portson the Catalyst is used for vlan trunking, the other is reserved as a sniffer port.
If you decide to use fiber you need expensive termination tooks, expensive cable, an expensive fiber access panel, expensive fiber to UTP ethernet converters, and a crazy expensive switch with fiber or a UTP switch with a media converter shelf. The only reason anyone installs fiber these days is a need for gigabit ethernet or ethernet runs that are vastly over distance for copper.
"But fiber is faster!"
So fsckin' what. Do you really have a *need* to move data faster than 12 mega*bytes* per second?
10/100 ethernet is going to be around a long, long time. I mean a really long time. Its like that plain ol' pots like - once things got to where they were useable (circa 1940) not much changed.
I'm pretty sure I am in the upper 1% of wage earners and I have a side business selling used communications gear. I have all the skills necessary to do what the article's author described. I work at home and there is a heavy design & prototype component to my job so I have lots of stuff that needs to be connected.
My elite home network contains
You heard right folks - all the knowledge, a lot of the stuff around, and nothing here *needs* to go faster than 10 mbits.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, dear article author, you're caught in analysis paralysis - stop agonizing and get the lines in before the drywall guys come along and seal them.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Just a couple of random thoughts:
jacks/patch panels.
If there's no conduit, perhaps they've just drilled holes in the studs and ran it through, I'd suggest getting some thin flexible smurf tube to lay in. It'll be a lot more work, but the advantage is you'll have a pathway through which you can later add more cable.
My suggestion would be to not lay in fiber now, but have a method for easily adding it later.
I work for a company that operates some large hotel operations. In the past year we've opened approximately 6 major buildings comprised of 400+ units. We custom designed a composite cable that has 2 strands of multimode, 2 co-ax, and 2 cat5e. We had our contractors lay about 6 of those cables in each unit (1 - 3 bedrooms + kitchen, etc) plus a feed back to riser closets. A few years ago we thought it would be overkill, now we're wondering if we should have included more.
----- obSig
I don't see anyone that's mentioned it yet, but you should probably run CAT-7 for gigabit ethernet speeds. I agree that most gigabit ethernet equipment is expensive at the moment, but prices will no doubt fall soon (New G4 macs come with gigabit ethernet, including the G4 Powerbook (!) ). Gigabit ethernet is the future as far as home use. Fiber is a pain, CAT-7 is a copper wire so you should be able to make your own connectors. I'm not sure what the price point currently is on CAT-7.
My father-in law recently put a addition on his house and in each room of the addition on each wall he ran flexible plastic tubes and a junction box to underneath his house. Now if any new technology comes out that he needs to wire for he can just slide the wires in the tubes and the drop out in the basement. Fiber is expensive but one day may be common place now he can upgrade easily for anything.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
I'd be happy to email you some pictures.
One thing you need to for sure is run conduit. Now, I'll be the first to tell you, I spent a LOT of money on wiring my house. But the conduit has saved my butt on several occasions. Especially when running a new cable to an outside wall of the house where the insulation is. Without conduit, its a real pain!
I decided to use the closet under my staircase as a wiring closet. All of the cat 5, fiber, RG-6, and telco comes into that closet. I have a 19" wall mount rack where I put my patch panels, DSL modem and switches (all rack mount).
All in all I spent about $6K wiring my house. But the funny part is that when I put in 802.11b wireless about 8 months ago, I hardly ever use any of the cables I put all over the house. Most of them were for my notebook and IPAQ. But now I just use the wireless NIC. It's just so much simpler.
Just remember... conduit is your friend.
Mike
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
And wireless only gives you 11 megabits, as opposed to 100 megabits for wired ethernet. And that assumes there are no neighbors emiting local packets for you to collide with.
It's curious that everybody assumes that, except for the cost of the transceivers, that wireless bandwith is free and unlimited. There's only so much radio spectrum to go around, and we're already running short, even without 3G cells and ubiquitous community nets.
Be *very* careful in choosing a good electrician. I too had a "bean counting manager" who hired a really cheap ($25/hour) contractor and we later discovered that many of our outlets were miswired, some with floating grounds and some with switched hot and neutral connections - can you say "electrocution hazard"? My recommendation is to find a non-union (e.g. "non-surly" and "non-lazy") contractor with a proven track record to work on the place where your family will be living for many years.
how do you figure cheaper?
wireless access point > 100$
"nics" - ~100$
vs
8 port switch ~60$
nics 10-20$ (or, since all the computers you have already have them, free)
cable 1000' = 60$
50 rj45 heads = 12$
crimper = 12$
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Just create some cable raceways and run Cat5 for now. Use STP if you have interference issues. Fiber isn't worth the cost or the hassle right now, and in 10 years wireless technologies will probably be the way to go anyway.
I ran Cat 5 to every room of my house when I built it 3 years ago. Since then WiFi has gotten really cheap. I now find myself using my 802.11 card in my laptop most of the time.
I still use Cat 5 in my office and my wife's office but when roaming the house the WiFi is greater.
Remember that the cable is cheap but the faceplates in every room and the patch panel will add up quickly. You can go wireless more cheaply.
Also, I would run big fat conduit to the rooms that you will have your TV/stereo, computers, etc. It will make it easier to upgrade to newer technologies in the future.
I wired the house with cable and two CAT5e cables to each telephone housing, plus security and some audio cabling to a few select areas. I also set up the internal vacuum system.
Do Not, I repeat, DO NOT wire anything before the electrician has wired for power. Plan with the electrician so that you can make sure your wire is at least 1 foot, preferably 2 feet away from his wire when running in parallel, and otherwise crosses at oblique (near to 90 degrees) angles. Master electricians are smart, but the workers they employ are morons. We had to yank out a lot of wiring because the electricians laid power cable in all sorts of unfortunate places right next to ours. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Do nail in wire protector plates onto wood just like your electrician does for the power cables. They're to keep the drywallers from wrecking your wiring with their drywall nails.
Do consider running a little conduit, but only a little. Don't conduit the whole thing: what we wound up doing was running conduit from the basement up to the attic. The house is two-story. That way if we absolutely had to, we could wire things in the future without massive rebuilding.
Do run everything (phone, cable, network, fiber) in a star configuration to a central hub.
Do do both the telephone and networking and cable yourself. It's simple. Don't pay the electrician to wire for telephone if you're going to wire for networking; you're just wasting money.
Do Not use plenum, braided, or shielded CAT5e cable. Plenum cable has basically one use: to be run through air ducts in old office buildings as a fire precaution. Shielded CAT5e will turn your network into an antenna if not properly grounded. In general, you don't need it unless you're running along with lots of electrical lines in close conduit areas. Braided cable is only for patch-cord use.
Do consider the new combination cable available, which has fiber, cable, CAT5e, low-power DC, and audio all in one bundle. But it's a pain to wire because it has to be bent at very gradual angles. Might be a good way to go though, and cheaper.
Do not expect that security is wired in a similar fashion. In particular, 4-wire smoke detectors cannot be wired in a star configuration at all: they must be wired in a specific, unusual serial topology.
Do remember that your hub must be in a locked area.
I just bought a house and instead of wiring it up, I just use 802.11b for the bedroom computers. However, my 802.11b access point / firewall also has a switched hub, so my workstations are hooked up with CAT5. This is more than fast enough for any kind of internet connection you are likely to get in the near future.
... ahem ... "experts" telling you to install fiber. In my day job, I work in research on fiber optics technology (mostly for 40 Gb/s+ DWDM long haul and metro networks). Fiber equipment that I am familar with is not made for the consumer market.
...) Or what kind of connectors you would need? Or do you have the access to the equipment necessary to splice fibers (it's not cheap to do it right)? Do you know what kinds of equipment to attach to the end of the fiber (modulators, switches, splitters, NICs ...)? And exactly what are you going to hook up that requires fiber's speed?
Don't listen to the
Would you even know what types of fiber to buy? (multi-mode / single-mode, C-band / L-band / Extended-L band,
If you are worried about an upgrade path, the smart thing to do is install conduits. When fiber goes to the consumer market, you will be ready.
Kevin
Everyone is telling you to put conduit in ... this reminds me:
The Cambridge University Computing Service, several years back, wanted to run a network round the city to connect to various University departments, colleges etc. To pay fo this they had to persuade all these bodies to cough up a significant amount of money as their share of the capital costs.
Trouble was that people thought they were being asked to pay for high-tech stuff which would go out of date in a few years, so the marketing job was to persuade them that they were actually being asked to pay for an extremely low tech hole in the ground, through which any appropriate type of cable could easily and cheaply be drawn in years to come.
This worked. The hole got built.
Just wire the entire thing with cat5. You can run phone and/or network as you wish. Don't need a phone outlet in a room? Use the outlet for network instead.
I just wired my apartment, and I only put in cat5. I can run my phone over it or I can run network, as I wish. Fiber is terribly inflexible and the gear is pretty damn expensive (try finding a fiber 100Mbit switch or something similar - it'll cost you more than the entire installation).
Another thing : You can't just connect a hub to a fiber outlet if you need more gear connected.
But if you have the cash, stick fiber next to the cat5 and leave in unconnected, in case you need it in ten years.
Ideally you would have installed conduit, and on an unlimited budget, strung combo cable (twisted pair and fiber) through it.
... no need for coax!
However, plain old twisted pair is extremely versatile. Having more than one cat 5 cable is not a bad idea. Did you know that twisted pair makes an excellent medium for line-level audio distribution? Just put balancing transformers on either end
-Joseph N. Hall
i dont think my harddrive transfers that fast
damn
Remember, if you ask this question at Slashdot you will probably get too many answers. Please, remember to sift thouroughly. A good advice too many is no advice, as my late uncle always said.
However, my friends cousin's wife knows somebody who is pretty wild with cables. But I'm not sure, so take any of his advice (if you meet him, of course) with a pinch of salt.
Notwithstanding any unforeseen issues, and otherwise, why not live in a Faraday cage?
Hello...
... for an hour or so. Let the expert do it and save yourself some grief.
If the electrician is running wire anyway. ask him to run the cat5 also. have him run the phones and cat5 to 2 or 4 port faceplates. If there is a jack, there is a phone and ethernet both. run all the cat5 to a patch panel. Running cable is fun
Christopher McCrory "The guy that keeps the servers running" chrismcc@gmail.com http://www.pricegrabber.com
If you are looking for a short term but prepare for the future network. I suggest running cat 6 in plastic conduit.
Amp sells cat6 not sure who else LINK
And besides, toxic fumes are toxic fumes, even if they're legal!
If you run fiber, there's a chance you'll never use it. Since a big part of the cost of fiber is the termination, if you want to run fiber just run the cable and wait to pay for termination until you're ready to actually use it.
I ended up running 2 runs of Cat5e and 2 runs of quad-shielded RG-6 to 6 drops.
You will want the coax... trust me. While I'd like to run everythng over UTP or fiber, the costs of locating things like VCRs, and satellite receivers at a head end, and streaming video digitally are prohibitive compared to the costs of running the coax. You may want to plan for the day when everything is streamed over IP and carried on an ethernet or fiber physical layer, but I think it is far better to have dead cable in the wall than to use horribly expensive equipment today as opposed to your neighbor who just hooks up the new TV to the cable outlet and is done.
Fiber. I didn't run any, but mostly because of the cost -- it's still too expensive. Also, don't forget headend terminations for all those fiber lines -- they are expensive. If you can afford it, by all means. In my case, I figure I'll sell the house and build a new one before I have a real pressing need for fiber: am I really going to want to stream full-resolution uncompressed video room to room? I doubt it.
Do put in as many drops as you think you'll need, and then some. You have an advantage over me: your walls aren't up yet. Plan for a minimum of one per room, more if there are multiple entrances. For example, many central family rooms open up to formal dining/living rooms and kitchen -- place the outlet on the "wrong" wall and you'll have to snake a cable across an entryway... not cool.
If you can afford the cabling, make EACH 110VAC outlet have a co-located (but not sharing the box-- that violates code) coax/data drop. That's excessive, and you immediately have to separate the AC and other cables to avoid interference, but you'll have a drop whereever you need one. Personally, I'd probably stick with one outlet per continuous wall segment, more for bigger rooms.
I ran 2xCat5e and 2xRG-6 (quad-shielded). You can get combo cable (speedwrap) that contains this (with or without fiber) in a single jacket that makes for easy pulling, but expect to pay double over individual cables. If you're paying for installation, the reduced labour might pay for the more expensive cable. Note: the reason for two runs of coax is in case you want to run a video stream back to the headend, like, perhaps a baby monitor camera. However, with recent PVR having TWO tuners, you'll find you need to use both coax cables, espescially with satellite systems (the receiver sends a signal selecting satellite and polarization to the multiswitch over the coax -- you don't have all channels on the cable at once). If you want to do this and send video back to the headend you may need three coax cables.. though a cheap PC and webcam might do the trick over the Cat5-e instead (and I can think of creative uses of satellite diplexers to use two coaxes for two satellite signals, one cable/off air signal, and a backfeed, but I haven't tried it).
As for plugging phones into RJ-45s... why bother? Just terminate one of the Cat5e cables in an RJ-14 jack, leaving one pair not connected... you can have up to three lines on that RJ-14. Alternately, split it out in the box to two RJ-14s. You can always require for ethernet later, if you have to (or use a PBX that requires 8 wires). This also ensures that you don't accidently plug the phone in the wrong outlet (confusing the coax ports is bad enough).
I'd post more, but have to go.
You could've hired me.
As for wiring a new tech-savvy house, you should consider few things. The technology is always improving and fiber is not a cheap material. Therefore technologies like Gigabit Ethernet are getting closer to users via copper. I would say use either high grade CAT5e or even CAT6 for the whole house, and you should even think about running phone wires over CAT5e or CAT6 as well. Who knows if you ever want to move up t Digital phones or VoIP later? You never know.. For your basement, where it will be the "MDF" Main distributio facility for your house, you may want to think about fiber there, as a backbone cabling. But then again, all this is just infrastructural cost. In order to really take benefit into this, you will end up having some enterprise class network in your house with tons of money spent... Think about what you really want... Good luck
I did this to my house last year.
If you go the Cat5e route, be absolutely certain to pay the extra few bucks to get Plenum rated cable instead of PVC. Plenum rated cable won't put off toxic fumes if it catches fire. Also, your local fire marshall will love you.
I recommend running wire, the night that only one side of the drywall is placed, this way you have something to anchor it to and get a reference of where your plugs are and need to be.
Phone cables now are typically Cat5 or Cat5e. Don't use them unless you must, crosstalk can be bad.
Lastly run 2 cables everywhere a computer can fit. Do you want an automated house in the future? Plan now! Maybe you don't but when you sell the house do you want that as a selling point? HTH
5 years, I bought a new house, but did not get to spec it or anything else. So went through and retrofitted it. What I would suggest is to plan for the future rather than trying to know exactly what you need (like coding, you will never know exactly what the future holds). In each room, install a double or quad gangbox and then bring 3/4" conduit out of it into the basement or the attic. Make the runs straight (or very little bends) so that in the future you can switch to Fiber. I would also suggest doing this by an electical box so that you can use power if you need it (not likely). While, this may seem costly, I have already run cable through all of these and found that to add it to every room took only 3 hours (lots of cimbing in the attic). Also, if you are like me with a 3 stories, I run the conduit upstairs to the attic and the middle floor to the basement. In order to connect things easily, i have 1.5" conduit going from attic to electrical closet on 2'nd floor and a 1.5 " from electrical closet to basement. I wanted to add Speackers everywhere, but I will need to increase the size of these trans floor conduits. I would suggest 2" of better.
My company is getting ready to develop some equipment for Wireless. ONe of the things that I want us to develop is a switch that provides POE over cat 5, but manual switchs. This idea of doing it automatically is for the birds and every expensive. During that time, we will than develop some hardware for house (strong arm device with card bus/cf , audio, ethernet, and several types of displays (small to large). Even if we don't do it, somebody will.
Plan for it.
Fibre comes in 9 micron, 50 micron, 62.5 micron, and 125 micron. Also comes in single mode fibre and multi-mode fibre. Each of these has different applications depending on what you want to do (although 50 micron and 62.5 micron can usually be used interchangably) Also, what type of connectors do you need? LC? SC? ST? again, it depends on what your using the fibre for.
This is funny you posted this today, as I just got back frrom wiring a house that's being built for me. Some things to keep in mind.
1. Make sure you do your wireing after the electrical inspector has been through and before the walls go up. This should give you probably one weekend to do it.
2. Buy a can of the spray filler for the holes.
3. You can use the holes your contractors have drilled for your current phone and cable runs. The foam stuff punches out easily.
4. I ran a cat5 cable to every cable box and phone box in the house. I also ran two cat5 cables to the phone and cable boxes in my study.
5. Make sure you have in mind how you're going to connect everything when you're done. In my case, I did it the cheap way and ran all of wires to the closet in my study. I put in a double wide box. This is enough for my 12 connections.
6. When you run the wires, use wire tacs to tac them down. This will keep contractors from screwing up your cable runs when they are doing their work.
7. It shouldn't cause that much of a problem in a home to cross electrical wires as long as you don't run them parallel along the electrical wires for a very long distance. Shoot, most network cables running in a house, even to the hub is going to run close to an electrical wire at some point.
These were just some pointer I learned this morning while running my network cable in my new house.
Put in a phone/enet drop between every door in every room.... anyplace you can conceive of putting a desk, a wired picture frame, or an MP3 decoder. You really don't want to run ethernet across a door. Much better to have lots of wall boxes so you can decide later where to put things.
I'd put the boxes in, pull the wire and then on the long winter nights you can terminate the cables that you need.
If you put in fiber, it will be multimode fiber, because it is cheaper and you can get fiber ports for multimode relatively cheaply. Right now you can do 1 Gbps over multimode. However, it isn't clear that future high speed nets will work over multimode. Singlemode fiber is too expensive to really consider, except possibly for putting in dark fiber and hoping that the singlemode fiber ports will magically become cheap some day
Cat5e gets you to 1 Gbps, and it's cheap. It's highly likely that it will be possible to go faster than 1 Gbps on it, even if you might never reach more than 5 Gbps. Just put in plenty of Cat5e and conduits so you can put in whichever fiber standard turns out to win in the end, if you should need to.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Loads of u are talking bout running special non burning cable :) cant u lot think positive for a change :) if my house is going to burn, id like it to burn good :)
Secondly, make sure you're using the right kind of cat-5 for the job. PVC type is cheaper, but is less resistant to heat and can cause noxious fumes if burned. Plenum type insulation is more resistant to heat, and is certified for use in air ducts because it doesn't produce the fumes that PVC will. Unfortunately, Plenum is more expensive. In any case, keep track of heat sources when you're wiring. The fireplace and oven, for instance, may cause you problems if you run cable right behind them.
You may want to run 2 different colors of cat-5, one for voice and one for data. Cat-5 can handle up to 4 voice lines through one cable. In any case, make sure you label everything.
Finally, don't forget to run coax (as well as any other cables you may need for ANYTHING, such as speaker cable, RCA, etc.), as you may need to add a TV or cable modem connection. No one likes having their cable modem sitting on the TV. e
Why would you want to run fibre? Let's just run through some of the reasons why...
:)
Fibre doesn't suffer many of the EM interferance problems that electrons-in-wires do. Useful, in a high noise environment...
...then again, my computer doesn't crash when I turn a light on nearby when the case is off. Not running parallel to AC-power carrying wires is a must though - long parallel lengths will introduce crosstalk. Just don't do it, or when you do maximise the distance between the power cable and the data cable (or use data cable).
The transmission length of a fibre is much greater than that of a wire at high speeds...
...but then, how big is your house? 100BaseT ethernet over Cat5 gets you 100m typically... is your house so large that it won't reach? If you need more bandwidth, then Gigabit ethernet over balanced copper gets you 25m... but if you really need that then compression will have gone out of fashion.
Reasons why not...
Fibre is expensive! (Copper wire is cheap.)
One thing which is also worth noting is that 10BaseT and 100BaseT only use 2 pairs (4 wires), and CAT5 has 8. This means you can put one 10/100BaseT stream and still have 2 pairs left for 2 audio/phone lines, a second ethernet stream or whatever.
This is obviously a contentious issue, and isn't flamebait on purpose (though it is perhaps possible that a fibre-in-the-home advocate might see it as such). IMO, copper wire will be around for a very long time - it's actually not too bad as long as you don't want to move data over to the other side of town....
Ian Woods
Why not use CAT6 ?
You can easily get Gigybit-Ethernet over Copper with that when it gets cheaper.
Cable tubes are another option
One other point is that conduit pipes should be run vertically. Running a 2" pipe through all of your wall studs is a Bad Idea, but running such a pipe vertically is another matter entirely. It also makes it easier to install the insulation. (You want insulation on interior walls for the sound proofing. A little money now will save a lot of headaches when your kids are teenagers.)
You also want a large pipe that's a straight shot from attic to basement/crawlspace.
The idea is that you have good access in attic and basement/crawlspace, so they don't need special treatments. But walls are a real pain once they're sealed, so you want to keep it as simple as possible. And nothing is simplier than a large vertical pipe with no bends in it. Even if the pipe is completely empty (e.g., you sealed in a few extra pipes "just in case"), you can pull a line with nothing but a string and a lead weight.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I have a newly built house that was wired with Cat5e for the phone
drops (near radio transmission towers). I have been trying to
figure out what to do with the situation and have found:
ethernet uses *1* twisted pair (Cat3 or better)
fast ethernet uses *1* twisted pair (Cat5 or better)
POTS uses *1* pair {phone line and better)
gigabit uses *4* twisted pairs (Cat5e or better)
(fast ethernet over Cat3 uses a similar setup)
Cat5e has *4* twisted pairs
Can anyone tell me why I can't run POTS and fast ethernet on the same cable with the pairs
terminated to their respective terminal type?
POTS terminated onto an RJ45 might not be such a good idea
because the line voltage will fry a NIC if they used the same hot pair (?).
Keeping the pair twisted until the last 1.5cm will maintain the signal even if the cover is absent and there
are no other adjacent twisted pairs since these are unshielded cables (?). The twists
are what prevents signal loss, and the diff. between Cat5 and Cat3
is the number of twists per unit length.
I do a fair bit of wiring for clients when the project is small - and I am trying to move my wifes station back upstairs - so I do have some expierence here...
From someone that has run one of those long drill bits right out through the sheetrock and numerous other damage while trying to run wiring different places - I have a suggestion.
A simple NMC (PVC) conduit run into a few rooms in strategic places whouldn't be too time consuming, and would make any drastic decisions moot. You could upgrade the Cat5 to 6 or 7, or fiber or whatever follows. Sure it's more work, but it maintains the ability to do more later.
If I build a new house, I will run 2 sets of conduits everywhere -1 for electrical, and one for data phone. Sure, it'll cost me time and money, but I'll be happy as a pig in a mud bog!
If you choose to not do this, the suggestions of others to put in coax everywhere too is a good one.
> In the long run you will be better off
It will be very long time befor you are better off with fiber.
You can use Cat5 UTP cable for gigabit eternet. So it is going to be a while befor fiber becomes a necessity.
I am preparing to build my own house as well and have been looking at this very issue.
What I have decided was to run 6+ normal CAT5e wires to each room. This may seem like a lot but... Comready.com has 1000' spools for 40+$ so price is not that great of an issue.
Now for the secret ingredients. First of all.. For network just use 1 or more standard CAT5e cables to do that in each room. You can then run up to 4 phone lines on another CAT5e cable. You then have 3 left.
Milestek.com has cat5 baluns that let you transmit everything from S-video to Broadband Video in case you ever want video in any room.
That also leaves a couple cables free for intercoms and such.
If you want to lessen the cable runs or hook more things up in each room in the future you get something like the NJ-100 that we saw the article on slashdot about a couple weeks ago.
Happy home hacking!
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
While your doing this, just put a cat5e drop everywhere, dont worry about phones. Since phone works over cat5, I would put real cat5 drops everywhere, with color coding for the one that will be "mostly" phone. Just get a colored jack.
s . May cost more now (hey, thats what building a house is all about) but it will make your life SO much easier. It also prevents things like the chunk of coax that my dad had hotwired directly from the satelite reciever, into the attic, down his closet, across his bedroom, and to his tv. After he died my mom spent months wondering what that was before I told her.
Then, keep your patch panel and hub in the garage, make the phone people install somewhat close to it (or run from the outside phone box to another patch panel thats just telephone). Then you can use patch cables to go from phone patch to wiring patch, or from the wiring patch to your hubs/switches. This kind of setup lets you use any jack, anywhere for whatever. And please listen to the people that say run rca/coax/sheilded speaker/any-other-wire-that-anything-you-have-use
Another thought i just had. Has anyone suggested 802.11b? If thats your thing you could forget wiring anything but an access point (or maybe2 depending on how big your house is, stories, obstructions, interference). I've not messed with it much, but it seems like a rather elegant solution when compared to so much wire. Consider security drawbacks and the like
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
When building my new home I ran conduit from the basement to the attic and then into the office, bedrooms, etc. and now when I want new service I just pull wires. Piece of cake
of where all of the wires are run and all of the other utiliities for future reference, in the event that you want to fish other wires/fiber later.
Do this before insulation or drywall is in place.
I had the builder of my house run cat5, and it was something of a mstake for the following reasons.
:-)
First, the electricians didn't know the difference between running cat5 for phone service versus for ethernet. So the first time through, they ran all the cat5 in series. Ethernet doesn't work so well that way.
Second (saw this elsewhere, but duplicating because it's important), use plenum. When it burns it doesn't release toxic gasses.
I saw someone mention 802.11 as an alternative. Wireless network protocols will always be vulnerable to timing attacks. In the meantime, it's much easier to just brute force the lame-ass crypto most vendors ship with.
I would have liked to have installed PVC conduits, but I never got very far in reseraching it. It probably would have been a good idea, especially since the electricians who installed this staple-gunned the cat5 directly into the 2x4's. Grr.
A school i worked at 3 years ago, every time a phone would ring or the bells would ring, computers in some of the computer labs would lock up. Ends up there was way too much cross talk between the cables they ran side-by-side.
Just something to think about.
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
A big question to ask your self is are you running 10 or 100Mbit ? If your only running 10, your only using 5 wires out of the cat 5 cable. (Or is it 4) 100Mbit uses all of the cable. If your only running 10 (Which I couldn't understand, with 100Mbit cards so cheap these days) You can run the phone line inside of the same cable.
:)
:)
Personally, I would run 2 cables in each room. Unless you have 2 offices. Think about it, with 100Mbit you can have a smaller hub in each room if you *REALLY* need it. Chances are, you won't be using that much bandwidth all day long.
Plus, with the new 56Mbit wireless standard that was just released, I am not sure how many people will keep using cat5 cable across there house. I have my main machines running at 100Mbit (There in the same room), and everything else in the house is via wireless connection. Once I get IPSec working, it will be less of a hassle to worry about the security of the network
At any rate, 2 in each room seems plenty for most home LANs. Unless you have 400 computers. My old house at 40 machines running 24/7, and 100Mbit was more or less required. (Don't ask
until (succeed) try { again(); }
I guess fiber will always be faster but it seems like wireless will be the way to go. I'm sure they'll have good speeds by then.
Of course, I wonder if sunspots will affect wireless internet?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A couple of years ago I was researching acids and that lead to a web page devoted to the tremendous safety hazards involved in handling hydrofluoric acid. A few links later I found a web page that stated that most common cat-5 cable sheathing contains fluorine because they haven't found any good alternatives.
Plenum rated cable either doesn't contain fluorine or the extra shielding is designed to prevent the emission of fluorine compounds in the event of fire.
The list of compounds detected during the combustion of cat-5 sheathing looked like something from a chemicals weapons manual. Can't find the link right now. Maybe the Department of the Interior had this information exterminated.
you can only go a few meters with Gigabit over Cat5e before attenuation takes effect. fiber doesnt have this limitation
cat-5 everywhere but maybe leave conduit through the most awkward barriers (timber framing, concrete, ) for future easy installations.
I just moved into a home that just had built. I wired each room with several jacks. Each jack has Cat5 for phone, dual Cat6, and dual RG6QS home run to a wiring panel. I think this will set me up for several years to come. I looked into fiber (and could get about one-half of what I needed free) but the other half that I would need to get was two expensive for something that I might never use. But I also figure that can always to go the upper rooms through the attic and the lower rooms through the basement. This way I can add it later if it is needed.
That way you can change the cabling, and easily add more as the occasions arise.
I have Cat5E running through-out the house. The only rooms I didn't wire were the bathrooms, and I already regret it.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Much of my experience is the same as some of the other posters but I thought I'd share anyways.
We're currently in the process of renovating a 100 year old house. Part of the process has been gutting the house down to the studs, re-insulating, upgrading electrical and drywalling. I have been going a little extreme given my geek nature. Every outlet that gets put in is accompanied by an empty box that has conduit running to the attic, or the basement. I'm not pulling any wire now, but this leaves the option to put any device almost anywhere. I can use these empty boxes to pull the wiring for my surround channels. I can use it for data wiring, more electrical wiring, telephone wiring, home automation, etc...
Basically, my 2cents is - Use Conduit. As soon as you pull in all your cat5 and coax, there's going to be a new standard or a new innovation in fiber or something that is going to cause all your work to be useless. The only nearly sure thing is conduit.
Some people actually have good taste, mind you.
Plenum graded, iirc, actually means that were it to catch fire, its shielding and outer casing is made of a material that won't release toxic fumes into the airway (which often runs along the plenum--the space between the real ceiling and the drop ceilings found in many offices).
I've got a good question actually, I've been pondering on networking myself to my friends house for some time now.
Just how far will Cat5 or Fibre go between two standart NICs without any form of signal amplification?
Hope someone replies.
labor?
SPEEDWRAP!!! fiber,data,phone,video
I thought about this a few years ago, and despite what people presume is a Moore's Law equivalent for bandwidth, I remain skeptical.
Assuming a 100BaseT switched network (i.e. one room contains the switch, wires fan out from there), that's 100Mbits/s to each node. Assume about 40% efficiency. What would you use that for? Maybe watching movies-- figure a 5MB/s stream (a lot for MPEG-2)-- that's five simultaneous movies on each computer! And you'll probably be using MPEG-4 in a few years, which makes 5MB/s ludicrous. Mind you, full-screen video conferencing can't compress well, but I still can't imagine it using all that bandwidth.
There are only two uses I can think of that would need fiber-- real-time volumetric data and transferring really bloated software. I can't think of a household use for volumetric data transfer (if you need it real time you can probably reduce it to video and polygons.) And I'm skeptical that programs you need to transfer all the time will bloat that much.
Chances are, 90% or more of your network usage will be to and from the outside internet. Thus, you aren't any faster than your ISP. Until you have the equivalent of dedicated fiber to your home-- not just fiber to the neighborhood-- you won't get much use out of fiber within the home. As it is, good old 10Base-T is overkill for DSL or cable. And I don't expect the situation to get any better any time soon.
So not only aren't there any applications right now that require fiber, there won't be any in the foreseeable future. You're better off taking the money you would spend on fiber, put it in a conservative investment, and spend it when you need fiber. Since applications follow availability, when you have an application for fiber you'll also have really cheap fiber.
I started wiring my home for Ethernet four years ago. Two years ago Wi-Fi (in the form of Apple's AirPort) came out. I haven't finished wiring, nor do I plan to. Wireless is just too convenient. You don't want to drag cables across the back yard every time you wander around with the laptop.
Here is my suggestion: Get 4 boxes of Cat5e wiring, and tell your electrician to run all 4 bundles at once. NO phone, no fiber, no nothing else. You can (easily) use the Cat5e as phone wiring, and if you're going to pull cable, why not pull a bundle of 4, as opposed to a "bundle" of one.
From there, you'll want to have someone (I don't know whether you feel comfortable doing it) set up a termination site at the home run, probably somewhere in the basement. That is where all your phone lines will converge, and any rack/patch panel system will go up.
Now, if I were you, I'd have all 4 data drops wired with ports that can accept phone or data lines (RJ45 or RJ11 lines). You can get that kind of equipment from Home Depot.
For ease of use, I would also suggest using 2 colors, when running your wire. Maybe, for example, red for the phone (which, remember, has the CAPABILITY to double as data, if you want), and white for all the data. That will make it easier to keep track of what is what later on.
BTW, I would invest in a good cable crimper set, and a line-testing set as well. You can probably pick up both @ Home Depot, but I would suggest going to a local GrayBar if I were you.
Now, with regard to cost, from our experience, doing the cabling before the dry wall goes up is about 1/3 to 1/4 as expensive as snaking wiring later on. Not only that, but it's also a MUCH, MUCH easier thing to do.
I have seen a few comments regarding the running of other types of media.. that's really up to you. You might want to, at a minimum, run cable/audio, and speaker wiring. Again, if you're electrician is going to be running wire, it's just as simple to run a bundle of 4 wires as it is to run a bundle of 6 (4 data, 1 audio/video, 1 speaker.)
If he trys to charge you more, tell him to get lost and just run the wiring yourself. If you take that route, then really, all you're looking at is an incremental cost of.. less than a few hundred bucks (relatvie to the cost of a new home, several hundred THOUSAND dollars), which is nothing, and a few hours of your time. The end result is a home with (theoretically) a higher value, since it's "wired and smart home ready".
Now, regarding fiber... several home owners have asked us whether we would do fiber for them. The truth of the matter is that it's just too expensive for residential use. Not only that, but as a residential user, you likely won't need the power that fiber gives you. Your broadband connection will be the limiting factor, and I doubt that you'll be transferring files too large for standard Cat5e wiring to handle quickly. Not only that, but installing fiber requires more time, and is definitely not something the "do it yourselfer" should try.. not unless you've got a LOT of patience!
On a side note.. as ironic as it would sound, the vast number of clients that our company takes on end up wiring the house... then installing a wireless network. Go figure.
Either way, though, I would highly recommend running a bundle of data lines through the house. It's a solid investment.
Please note that I have made it a point to leave my company's name out of this discussion. I wanted to make sure I came off as helpful, and not opportunistic. If you have any further questions, or want to know more, email me (jyamisha@hotmail.com) and I'll be more than happy to write more.
i want to live life, not just go through the motions
Perhaps going a bit off topic, but, one other thing to think about, before you sheetrock, is deployment of sensors for eventual energy management (smart-house) systems, and fire/burglar alarms and intrusion-avoidance systems. Typically, these systems require shielded 1 or 2 pair leads to analog boards which then convert to digital and feed the controller. Having these planned and at least the wire in place can save unsightly wires on the wall later.
Fiber if fine if you are going to have large amounts of AGREGATE traffic, but for a home lan, Cat 5 is fine.
I did a test at my office once. Rateshapped users down at the switch port. Went from 100 Mbits/sec to 1 Mbits/sec before most of them noticed.
The moral of the story is that unless you are a server, you don't need 10 Mbits/sec, much less, 100.
Buy fiber and all you are paying for is bragging rights. Connected it to DSL or Cable LAN and watch people who know networks laugh. There's the bottleneck, and little you can do about it. Better off buying dedicated bandwidth from a reputable ISP and wire with Cat 5 than to waste money on Fiber.
If this is a new house, and the cabling hasn't
been run yet, is to use conduit. That way, you can run shielded cable, and then move to fiber without ripping the walls apart. Check the building code in your area, also; some places require cables to be stapled to the wall beams
(as it is in my house).
http://www.homedirector.com/
Use ALL CAT5 (no "standard" POTS lines) for phone and data, and RG-6 quadshield for satellite/cable TV connections. Have it all terminate at the Home Director box... Congradulations, you can now rewire any jack in the house to do whatever you want from one single location.
This is how most of the new homes built in central FL are now wired.
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
Err... At least the last tiem I looked into Plenum grade cable it came in UTP & STP... Of course STP I've seen lately is also limited to CAT3 (unless you know of some strange place that claims better)... On top of that Plenum's only advantage is when it catches on fire it doesn't give off highly caustic smoke...
So all in all, since you've not been right on much of what you said I don't think he should listen all that muc to your suggestion...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Here's the straight-up truth. You don't know what you need 10 years from now! Neither does anybody else in this forum. 5 or 10 years down the pipe, you're going to want to drop in some new cabling/communications wiring, right? Maybe you will want to run audio/video cables through the walls like one poster suggested. But the point is not to NOW lay every single possible cable you'd want. What you want to do is to future-proof your house.
In my opinion, the best way to do that is to use conduit. Conduit will let you easily drop in new cables to your house's framework. That way, just drop in your cat 5e and telephone wiring now, and then, as you need it, drop in other transport media.
I might caution you as to using long-haul analog cabling media, like stereo RCA - long, straight wires make excellent antennas and the audio quality by the time it actually got to your speakers would be undoubtedly subpar. If you have the money, running something like optical S/PDIF would make more sense, as it's digital and won't lose signal quality over the kind of runs you're likely to have in your house.
Good luck, and kudos on putting together a fabulous new home!
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
of Course it is a no brainer to wire your house with cat5e (in fact when my dad redid our house 8 years ago he made sure they installed cat5)
But from another perspective AFTER you wire the house (and before the drywall is up) run through your house with a CAMCORDER and record where all the wires are placed this will become an invaluable resource when you have to do expansion!
look, ive doen this to two differnet houses. Its going to cost you a LOT less to do wireless. Just take the plunge...that wired shit is going to be antiquated as hell in a few years.
________________________________________________
Consider using a modular connector system like this one. I saved a lot of time and hassle using them and the result looks great. You can also intermix CATV, voice, data etc. however you like.
Use a star from a cable closet (could be a cabinet in your garage or next to the water heater, doesn't matter). Consider running everything to a patch panel. If you don't want to spring for the connectors etc. of a patch panel, at least create a 'virtual patch panel' where every circuit is tagged and accessible. Leave good documentation in the cabinet 'cause you'll forget what goes where.
Follow the Cat5 specs: minimal bends, minimal tension when pulling cable, loose cable ties, no regular tie intervals, cross AC power perpendicularly and rarely. Pick the cabling spec you'll use and stick to it. Avoid doing what I had to do: running voice on the unused two pairs of my 100Mbs data circuits (even though I've had zero problems).
Be sure you have power near your drops and plenty of power and some shelf space in your closet. You'll be terminating your outside internet connectivity here as well (DSL, cable modem, etc.) so be sure to plan space accordingly for routers, console connections, hubs, UPS, etc.
See the remarks elsewhere here about using plenum cable if you're not installing conduit. But conduit would let you use fiber or other more advanced media in the future.
Invest in some cheap test equipment so you can verify continuity, correct pinouts, etc. in all your cables.
HTH -- Spiny
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
It's usually not too hard doing this stuff in a single story building, especially if everything is new and clean, since you can just run everything in the roof space, or sometimes the floor if it is not a concrete pad. But certainly it is much easier to provide holes down inside the walls now than to add them later. Then leave a piece of wire down it to use to draw whatever you want in later. Just keep a record of what you have where!
Why hasn't someone come out with a wall system like in the movie Brazil, where 2 ft square panels are removable? It would not only be good for wiring, but also for inserting surround speakers and hallway data-screen terminals.
also -
CM - non-plenum
CMP - plenum
but, if you're running your cable thru conduit the whole way then CMP is not required in regards to fire protection. cat5e isn't gigabit, it's about 120 MB/s instead of 100 for plain old cat5. gigabit is sold by lucent, and they refer to it as cat6. i'm not sure if the standard has been stamped out just yet though.
help out.
research cat7. you can do VoIP.
:)
http://www.siemon.com/
if u have the cash put fiber, but dont forget about the fiber switches.
1. are you gonna have fiber NICs in you computers or 10/100/1000 NICs.
2. i want a tour one u get all this set up.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
Since this is new construction, go the extra mile and feed each data outlet with some sort of conduit (PVC, EMT, or flexible). That way, when you want to upgrade or expand, it's a no-brainer and you don't have to rip things apart. EMT conduit has the added bonus of providing RF shielding to your copper cabling, provided it's properly grounded (which it should be). This also gives you the advantage of only needing to put in the plumbing before you put up the sheetrock, and then running the actual wire later.
Also, Leviton makes a very nice modular structured media system that allows you to do neat things like audio and video distribution in addition to phone and data - they have modular patch panels that make it very easy to do.
Lastly, whatever you do, TAKE PICTURES of everything you do before you put the sheetrock up - you'll want them for reference when you make changes later.
I can't imagine what a single AV channel running through the walls could be used for. Obviously you're going to want to have Coax for broadcast/cable channels (to be selected individualy in the diffrent rooms). But really, what good would it do to have one global broadcast to the whole house?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Don't you read slashdot everyday? Shame on you if you don't!
Just a few weeks ago there was this article about 3com faceplates. You can consolidate all your phone and data into 1 jack while running just 1 cable run to your rooms. Now if you got money to burn, you might consider one of these babies from Cisco. This is their media convergence server which will combine voice/data/video into something that can run over cat5. A MCS will cut out your need to run separate phone and video lines. Hey want to hire me to set this stuff up? I'm totally jobless right now and could really use the money :)
Good luck on your house!
You can get UTP or STP cable that's rated CMP (communications plenum, aka "plenum cable") or CMR (communications riser, aka "PVC cable").
f la meratings.pdf
p vc .pdf
Really, the only difference between the two is the outer insulation on plenum cable is supposed to give off less visible smoke when set on fire. This is important if the plenum area in a ceiling is used for a air return, and you don't want your HVAC system recirculating blinding smoke.
However, in a house, I doubt this is the case. Your HVAC will be getting fresh air from your in-air vent. If the house were to catch on fire, smoke from your furniture and carpet would kill you before the CAT5e cable would. Plus, if you're running the cable in conduit anyway, where's the advantage of spending extra $ on CMP?
Check out these links for standards info:
http://www.diamondwireandcable.com/techtips/nec
http://www2.superioressex.com/techinfo/plenumvs
I think current fiber prices are $5+ per meter (and you'll need a pair of them!), which will make this a fairly expensive wiring job. However, you should consider running an *empty* conduit for future expansion for when fiber is a bit cheaper...
Untill then, get yourself a good non-blocking switch, I'm sure you'll be pleased with the performance...
I think you confused your products. The LinkSys switch with 8 ports all gigabit, the EG0008, as an MSRP of $1400 and is selling on the street for about $850. That's not $189.
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
What amazed me is that nonterminated cable is just fine for that purpose! He literally just fished the glass (and cladding) through the wall and mounted it in brackets at each end.
Consider stubing conduit boxes from each room into the basement or atic. If finishing the basement, put in a suspended celing. Then if/when you need something different, it's very easy to pull new wire in without pulling out walls, etc. You might want to consider boxes in multiple walls for larger rooms. It's a cheap simple way to make your life easier in the future.
Dan
If, later, you need to run fiber, you can use a string to pull the fiber through along the same path.
Vi(m) is the crappiest applications ever written! even worse than windoze!(!(!(!(!(!)))))))
Its unstable, impossible to use and only geekazoids and nerdasaureses use it, and even they like emacs better!
SO FUCK VI(M), delete it, rip it in to a 1,000,000 pieces and join the anti vi(m) world (and that is like 99.9999% of the world) FUCK VI(M)
Check http://www.centralite.com/... I've seen their demo. Really Nice!
If you really want value, as well as protection from technological obsolescence, have them run conduit for the data lines. That way, you can shoot cat-5 now, and fibre later (or whatever comes along). Moreover, I shudder at the thought of an electrician handling fibre , not to mention the hassle of repairing a failed cable of any sort, once the wallboard is up.
--- Bill
My parents live in a largish appartment, in a small complex with 30 similar appartments. There is some money around, so I was thinking about building a LAN there. A lot have to be digged down into the ground, and I have been thinking about persuading these people to dig down fiber. Around here, it isn't that infeasible getting fiber all the way.
When thinking about bandwidth, I've been thinking along these lines: If bandwidth is more expensive than CPU, then compression will be common, if CPU is more expensive than bandwidth, things will be transmitted with little or no compression. And this may change quite rapidly, so what is the application I can think of that I might realistically see that takes the most bandwidth? Uncompressed HDTV. And that is, AFAIK, 1.45 Gbits/s, right? I know of no copper that can do that. It stops at about 1.2 Gbits/s, right? So, if we take the expense of digging something down, it can't be copper.
Inside the house, I have planned go get a diskless old box with a Fibrechannel card and use as router and firewall. Then, making conduits inside the house so that other cables can be replaced with not too much effort. From the router in the basement, I'll have a standard copper cable, cat5 or whatever to the server, which is a box that will run whatever I need of e-mail, web, the lot. Then, there will be a similar cable to the main workstation. Finally, there will be a cable to the TV.
Other than that, I'll base it on wireless. People here have voiced concerns about security, and indeed, it must be made in such a way that the firewall isn't made pointless. But putting a lot of wire when you can use Bluetooth (which has been my primary choice, but I don't know), or 802.11 seems a complete waste. You can't wire all the gadgets I want anyway (I want the fridge online! And the washing machine, and the... :-) ) so most things must be on wireless anyway. However, with Bluetooth, I need at least two points in the house, so obviously I need cables from the router in the basement to the points where the senders and transmitters are.
OK, these weren't advices, just a few loose thoughts, but I figured I'd share them.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
My expiriance with wiring from the ground up is that you cannot plan for everything. You'll always think of something else that you wanna do with your existing scheme, and need to pull more wire. So conduits are the only option.
As for fiber, I've never had to pay for it, but I've had to work with it. Its not worth the effort to use it, go high quality cat-5, and if ya want, then ya can go GigE. I'm told fiber is cheap to buy, expensive, and hard to run, and the hardware to talk over it is murderously expensive. But maybe even the cable itself is expensive, I dunno, used it, don't like it, don't wanna think about paying for it.
Conduits, and loads of them, will make your life easier, and will greatly improve the value of your home, wish my house had conduits, but mine predates WW2..... and has power consumtion issues. *cries*
As for what to put in the cables, its whatever ya wanna do with it. Me, right now, I;d run s-video, cat5, and coax, and maybe whatever the current "buzz" cable type is, and at least 4 outlets in each small room, 6 to 8 in big rooms. Else, your wife/significant other will go mad when she can't move the TV. And put em fairly close to your electrical outlets, so ya can just take all your cables that are close together, and tie em together with zip ties, and make the mess behind your euipment a little more pleassent.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
:) It's hard to read such emotional posts :)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Running the fiber will increase the value of your house. That might make it worth doing even if you never use it.
While running conduit is a good alternative to fiber, do not use metal conduit. It hurts cable performance.
If you run shielded twisted pair, or STP, instead of the usual unshielded twisted pair, or UTP, you need to ground it properly. See for example this link .
Consult your fire codes and follow them. You might need to install plenum cable in certain spaces. When in doubt, install plenum.
Whatever cable you run, leave lots of slack on each end. This is cheap insurnace against a cable problem.
Try to adhere to a standard when you install the cable, such as EIA/TIA-568 for Ethernet.
If you are worried about Echelon type spying, you will need to run fiber and take other precautions.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
Also, don't forget to make sure that your data cables (cat5, rg6, whatever) are always at least 6" away from the power cables.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
From what i read, the cabling standards are supposed to be
good for about 5 years. Then they figure the tech. will have changed
so much that theres no chance to know what to do.
So one solution is to run conduit. This will survive whatever
new cabling technology will come through (however note it will be a total waste if suddenly everything is wireless...).
But it will also make anything you have to do at all to your cabling
including diagnosing problems, replacing, etc, a whole lot easier. you wont have to rip
up any drywall at all you just pull apart the conduit at strategic places (you can get it that plugs together loosely) and
pull the old cable out. then put a 'cable snake' ( 50 bucks ) thru and pull your new cables. Note this is also potentially alot more secure if your cables run through any 'high traffic' areas at all in your walls/ceilings.
i have read that fiber is 'the next thing' but good luck
finding alot of fiber-capable network cards, wall plugs etc. which brings me to my next point
cabling is a miniscule percentage of the money you have to spend to put in a network.
each drop you need will, depending on if you care about things like
whether your installation can withstand kids pulling on the
cables, or mom running her vacuum over the cable and 'JERK'. if you awnt to stop that you will need some
sort of electrical boxish type thing nailed to the studs
in your wall. You then put the drywall over that
while cutting out a hole for it (just like w a light switch or
power plug etc). then you put your face plate on that. but you will have to buy a special
face plat for network stuff. and you will have to buy special cat5 female plugs
to stick in this face plate. and unless you are getting 'self-terminating' type of plugs, you will
need to buy some kind of 'punch down tool' to terminate your ethernet
cable into the plugs. these can be from 10 bucks to 100 bucks depending on if you are lucky
enough to find a place that sells cheap little plastic ones.
now, what about your 'wiring closet' where your ethernet all comes together?
if you do fiber maybe you wont need this.
but if you arent using fiber you will need a couple things:
rj45 crimper to crimp some plugs on the end of your ethernet cable. crimpers can be from 30 for a cheap one that will break if you use it too hard,
to 200 bucks and up for steel ones with replacable 'crimpers' that snap into the handle.
then you will need a hub or two. but guess what? hubs take power.
so you will have to route some power to your wiring closet.
and if its really a 'closet' you probably want a light bulb in there too.
now think about the safety of lights in closets,
power plugs distance from ceilings, etc. you sure you can DIY and keep your house from catching on fire?
oh yeah, dont forget that if you put your wiring closet on the same circuit as another circuit in your house,
you need to add up all the wattage and figure out how much is 'left over'for your wiring closet.
and then guess if youa re going to add stuff into that closet in the future like maybe a cablemodem
or a dsl-whatever. maybe more hubs? now, with all that
youre going to need more than one power plug. youll need more than two in face, so how are you going to do that?
get a power strip or get a bunch more plugs?
oh yeah, and since you are just now considering this
AFTER youve done the phone line, it probably means
you havent thought about it at all and will need to
rip up / drill through some of the boards etc.
oh PS dont forget, dont route your ethernet within so-and-so inches (i think its around 3 feet) of any gigantic electrical motors like
attic fans or ceiling fans. and then there are the fluorescent lightbulbs and etc.
if you get your cables too close you will get EM interference and then your cables will not give you 'trouble free' performance.
oh yeah, dont forget to spend a couple hundred bucks getting
all this fancy cat5e cable tested and rated to 1000Mbps to make sure it actually runs
at that speed. what? you dont want to do that? ok, then
just ftp a couple files at 100Mbps and say 'well, it works pretty good.'
as you can see, the price of cabling itself is
a miniscule amount. the crimper alone could potentially cost more than the cable.
cat5 female wallplate sockets can be 3 to 7 bucks, each. how many drops were you going to do again?
congrats, your wall sockets will cost more than the cable.
and good luck finding any of this stuff anywhere unless
you live in a big city. this city of 1million people (metro area) has
2 places to get it, one an obscure electronics shop and the other
is 'home depot' and all their stuff is behind gigantic metal cages that are locked away from customers.
I think, instead of trying to think of all things in advance, I'd try to make my house more easily rewireable. Think about putting conduits to the ceiling at reasonable places, patches, tubes in the floor somehow accessible.
I can't imagine what the best practices are for this but I'd bet somebody's figured it out before. Then you're not stuck with whatever you think of now. That would be *really* cool.
The company where I was employed one year ago had shared plugs for ethernet and phone. They set up every plug in the wall according to their needs. This could be very good, since it gave all the things a good modularity, but they had lots of problems (mainly about performance on the ethernet side). I can't tell you whether this problem was related to the shared plugs or to the ethernet structure. I know nothing about how this could have been done (except that they didn't use Voice over IP). Just be warned about possible problems of this solution...
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
The electrician is already running wire .. in many/most cases the wire is going to terminate close to the electrical drops *anyway* so he can do the CAT5 while he's doing the electric and phone. Hell, he's probably better at it than you are anyway. If you take into account how valuable your time is .. it's probably cheaper and easier to let him do his damn job.
I haven't done a house this way - but I DID wire a 20 person office this way. The electrician did a competant job of running CAT5 to where I wanted it, and I had the network guys come in and fix up the punchdown and patch panel to spec, then test the pairs. Worked fine.
You *might* consider (since you're still a-building) putting some kind of ductwork for future expansion.
Display some adaptability.
I wired every room with two runs of cat5: one for telephone, one for data. I ran conduit to a few rooms. The conduit has proven much more valuable than the cat5. And given the expense of terminating and testing every run, it would have been much cheaper to run conduit (NMT aka smurf tubing) to every room.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
As long as the cable isn't hooked to anything behind the walls, its not hard to upgrade the wiring. If you can get to the attic, I say run the wires straight up, then over to whatever central location you have. Use cat5 now, and label both sides so you know what wire goes where. Also, don't tie them together until they are out side the wall. That way, if you want to upgrade your wiring later, you can tie the new wire to the old wire and pull it through very easily. Fiber is way too expensive right now comparedto cat5. I've helped a lot of guys at work wire their houses, and that is the easiest way.
wor
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wgr
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wbr
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I am planning to do some work in my house too, I'd just like to know if it would be allright to put shielded cat5 cables running next to 220V cables (+phone+cable+sound+obiwan kenobi) ?
I agree with several other posters - use conduit, it'll make your life much easier. Keep it away from high voltage runs, and use CAT5E for your phone and data lines, all going to a patch panel in the basement/wherever.
Rather than fibre, you might try running Cat6 - it would be cheaper.
Make sure if you're not using conduit that you use plenum rated cable - it's more expensive, but then having your house burn down would suck more. Also, make sure you don't kink the cable in any of the wallspaces.
Last piece of advice - contractors these days are hip to this stuff, so talk to your GC about this. Tell him about your upgrade and management concerns, and see what he thinks. I'm sure the electrical contractor can do your runs for you, and you'll probably be happier in the long run (no pun intended).
I use Cat-5 for telephone lines, and it works very well.
Be SURE that each telephone line is on two wires that are a twisted pair. If you run telephone lines on wires that are in adjacent pairs, you will get terrible crosstalk.
Bush's education improvements were
Many comments suggests using fishing wire to pull the cables into conduits etc.
;-)
My advise is that this is a good idea, but once you've finished with pulling copper leave the fishing wire there and voila, you've got a cheap optical fiber ready to go!
I'd say use around 20 pounds tested wires to get a clean signal
delete free(system.gc);
but they are low current.
and the newer ones are twisted pair.
thats why i read it was ok to string eth
right alongside them.
If you're going strictly for ethernet, screw wiring. Just use wireless. 802.11b is available freely, 802.11a is also available if you need more bandwidth.
Hire a 15 y.o. kid and pay him to move the TV, bring you the phone, copy from pc to pc using floppys and pay him per hour the minimum wage for a 15y.o. in your country. The kid will be very happy, it's a great job! I do it all the time (hire them, not work for ppl) ;->
girl
Got evicted? Living with the parents again? Perhaps this article could be redone as "Moving back into the womb with a bag full of access points, hubs and switches: wiring the place up right" or... "Liberating your parents with Wireless Ethernet"
Screw fiber; copper is here to stay for quite a bit more. Just be sure that you've left lead lines everywhere you run the cat5 to the jack, so if you ever want to add more (or anything else that's been suggested here), you don't have to kick a wall in our use the cat5 for lead.
Of course there's always the wireless alternative...
My first thought when seeing this topic was to suggest putting in big conduit and then you can change what you want to do later.
But thinking some more, I realised thats what I did with my phone system - only when I did it 10 years ago it was about putting a phone socket in every room just in case. Now, however, I have a few key phone points around the house and I run many more (far more than I had ever envisaged) phones via digital radio.
Anyway, you normally can't get the conduit to a simple exposure point in a room - I always had to do something like leave it under the floor boards and then ended up covering it with a fitted carpet that I didn't want to take up.
No, you do not need ANY fiber in a house. At least not any time soon. You will be fine with Cat5e. Depending on what the cable is specced at you whould be able to easily upgrade to a Gigabit system down the road on the same cable. So no, you don't need any expensive fiber equipment.
I would see about having special conduits put in so that in 10 years you can put that fiber in more easily. It'll be cheaper then anyway.
Maybe in 10 years there'll be some type of warm super conducting wire that we don't know about. Maybe you'll see it in 20 years if you're still in the house. Make it easy to run whatever is best in the future. Can you run voice over fiber? Maybe you'll want digital sound to each room that uses some new wire type....
The possibilities are endless.
Stick to CAT5 for now.
good luck,
sopwath
He's right. 10 and 100 Base-T use two pairs only for all modes of operation.
Bush's education improvements were
I would run cat-5 cable if I were you. It will be useful for the forseeable future... and who knows what you will want to have run in 10 years? Redo it when the time comes. In the mean time, for a house network, it's hard to imagine 100Mb/s not being sufficient for several years.
I've run cat-5 cable in two houses. After a few months, you forget how painful it was and are just grateful to have it. In my old house, which was very small, I only wired a couple of rooms, but it was nice once it was there. In the new house, I only wired a single room. I intended to wire several more... but instead got myself a couple of wireless cards. The desktop has a card, and I have a second for the laptop. I run them in Ad-Hoc mode. It's much more convenient this way. I had intended to have lots of drops wired in, so that I could run my laptop in whatever room, but now I can do that with a very minimum of pain. More expensive, yes, but more flexible and much easier to install in the first place.
(The one wire runs between the room with my desktop and the cable modem, and the room with my Wife's desktop. Since both computers stay in one place all the time, it makes sense to have wires for them. Since my Linux desktop is also the house router, it has three network cards: one for the cable modem, one for the house net, and one wireless card. I have two different private 192.168.x.x subnets in just my one house....)
-Rob
Color me ignorant, but does fiber have any advantage over 5e, except for the fact that fiber is (virtually) impervious to EM noise? If not, then why bother? A properly run cable inside a house should never have a noise problem to speak of, unless you are big into experimenting with HVAC devices...
If you are worried about what you will want 5-10 years from now, don't waste your time. 5-10 years from now, we'll be networking with things you never even thought of before.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
You'll probably running high-speed/secure wireless and it will cost you less then than running fibre will now.
And don't forget to put extra high ceilings into at least one room, so that you can accomadate large racks and raised flooring later...
As others have mentioned, forget running the phone wire. I just had my home built a year ago, and I ran 2 cat5e runs to each room (4 in my den) and 2 co-ax. I have a cat5 patch panel (I recommend NORDX) in my laundry room where all the cat5e runs terminate. When the phone company installed my main phone line I had them wire a single jack also into the laundry room.
Now with the patch panel, I just jumpered 6 of the unused ports (24 port patch panel) and patched one of these ports to the phone jack.
Now any cat5 port in the house can be either A) Patched to my 100mbit switch or B) Patched to the remaining 5 ports which are jumpered to the phone line. I can change them on the fly in seconds using regular cat5 patch cables.
Total cost was under $500 Canadian for the cat5e, white dual port face plates (also NORDX), RG6 and patch panel - plus the eletrician helped me with the runs before the gyproc went up. I'd like to have conduit, but that would have driven the costs and time to implement up considerably.
Cheers from Newfoundland, Canada
Wireless is the way to go. In ten years time, there will be enough wireless bandwidth to do all of those things that you think you might want to do...including synchronizing those 47 different multimedia streams that will comprise the infrastructure for SlashSurround(TM).
42
www.signaturewire.com is one cable with two Cat-5E, two Coax and Two multi mode fiber channels.
Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.
Gigabit ethernet, at least, is fairly cheap right now. Check dlink's site for a fair idea of what pricing is like.
Gigabit will run over standard cat-5 cable (it actually just runs slower signals in parallel over multiple pairs), so you won't even have to rewire for it.
The problem is hubs. I have yet to see a good gigabit hub for under $2k or so. Most of the gigabit-compatible hubs offered use gigabit for uplink, and a handful of 100-base-T links for the rest of the ports.
Has this changed in the past 6 months or so?
Using a PC as a router in place of a hub isn't an option, as one gigabit ethernet card will come very close to saturating a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Start streaming large amounts of data through the house and the router will fail to handle the traffic.
cat5e is definitely gigabit, according to my handy Black Box catalog.
cat6 hasn't been ratified yet, but will allow gigabit and beyond.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Cat-5 and 2 10bastT hubs. One is a Linksys 8 port, the Cable modem comes into it, and then to my Freesco router. Which then goes to the 12port hub. That is then connected to all my drops. I have a coax drop in my room + 2 nonworking cat 5 drops (They worked, then quit, no clue why), a drop in my sisters room, and a drop in my moms office. Thats it, It works and gets the job done.
Fibercables are expensive, and the tools used for welding contacts, etc, are *really* expensive.
:-)
(You can forget about running pre-made cables in your walls.
It's better to stay with the cat until you really *need* fiber.
When that happens, the technology might have dropped a bit in price.
Will probably be a while until then, considering that you can run 1GBps over cat6.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
this was an issue when i built my house in the phoenix, az area a few years ago. i ran all wiring while the house was just a frame and a roof. apparently, the wires throughout the attic were ok, but once i dropped them from the ceiling down the walls, the building inspector said they were a fire code violation. i had to pull them all back into the attic before construction would be allowed to continue. i did the drops when the house was done and beyond the scrutiny of the inspector. check your local building codes.
If you're going to do this, and do this right, might as well have fun.
Run an indistinct wire, (go for red or something equally ominous) along with everything else.
Ten years from now when you're pulling the old stuff with your buddies look terribly surprised or upset to see it. Claim that you have no idea to what it is, but always insist that THEY cut it any time one gets in your way...
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
The only thing that makes it cheap to install now is the ease of installation, and can be easily offset by that expensive fiber becoming useless by advancing technology; maybe the latest stereo equipment in 10 years needs a certain quality fiber and your stuff just doesn't match...doh!
;-)
Put in string/wire for pulling new runs into each room. Having the string to pull new cables will make installing the latest+greatest in 10 years a snap if you need it. Also think through how "hard" the house really will be to wire once it is built. Consider that very few rooms will actually NEED ethernet, and houses with a complete basement or underground space access and/or attic space access are pieces of cake to wire(I wired the downstairs of one house with a full basement with open ceiling(ie floor joists visible etc) in about 30 minutes; the longest part was triple-checking where to drill holes through the wood flooring and terminating the cables.) Attics make wiring upstairs just as easy. Drop a wire down into the wall, poke hole in wall, pull wire into room, cut hole for electrical box, install box, terminate, and put faceplate in. Done.
The trick/problem is when you need to go from the attic to the basement etc, or you need to get up to a room in the 1st floor and the area underneath it has a fully finished ceiling(like a plaster ceiling) and you can't just drill from below. Raised tile ceilings for basements are a great idea for exactly this reason, very easy access, and lower sound, too; some panels are very sound-absorbing, both reflective and transmitted(ie, sound in the room vs sound from upstairs etc) compared to a plastered ceiling. You can also sneak cabling up to there with a wire tube(some nice ones come with self-adhesive tape on the back, peel+stick after marking w/level etc) and just toss it across the tiles. Anyone who has worked at a startup company with a raised or open ceiling is very well aware of these advantages
Run the Cat5e now because it's not going to get much cheaper, it already -is- cheap, and its easy to install now(plus, its extremely common and unlikely to go flying out the door any time soon.)
Don't waste time having the contractor terminate the cables(it represents most of the labor) unless he/she can certify the runs(this means plugging in a VERY expensive piece of test gear, which runs dozens of different signal strength/crosstalk tests etc; the guy then gives you a sheet for EACH run that says its up to spec; Lucent, for example, requires this for use with their gear, as they do Lucent cable, which is some of the best I've used) otherwise, you're no better than they are and you'll save serious dough(server rooms where lots of runs are needed are a different matter; the pros can lay down cable, bunch it up and terminate it into patch boards into something that looks like fine art and works terrifically, plus they can certify each run, and you can have someone to scream at if the run doesn't work and the boss can't check his email; ALWAYS have a server room wired by the pros unless its less than a dozen runs and you don't need things to be critical.)
Consider a patch panel in your wiring closet, and make accomodations for proper power(one dedicated 15 or 20a circuit should be fine), lighting(I suggest a long flour. light, NEVER a bare bulb, you'll be able to see much better) and cooling(vents top and bottom in the door.) Put a weatherstrip on the bottom of the door, this will keep out dust bunnies.)
The patch panels are not -that- expensive, $100-200 for more wiring than you'll ever need. Same goes for 19 inch wallmount racks, they're very cheap and usually offer a swing-down design that affords VERY easy access to the backs of equipment. Spaced out, everything will keep cool, be easy to clean, and isn't going anywhere.
Oh...also consider plenum instead of PVC. PVC puts out some -really- nasty stuff when it burns, and it's very thin, so it does burn very quickly(unlike thick PVC plumbing which is also full of water usually.) Plenum doesn't put out nasties when it burns(which is why its allowed in more places in commercial buildings than PVC is.)
HTH!
Brett
I someone that likes to rearrage furnature little by little over the years. Is it practical to run it to all four walls? Is the result a bit hole in the wall with wires comming out or is the conduit coverd by an big access plate with plugs?
How hard is it to wire through conduit? Would it meat that you have to gut the current wiring first? Would the whole thing take a full day, three days, a week of time to complete?
And isn't it a bad idea to have say 10 datawires running this close to each other?
Have a drop upstairs, a drop downstairs, and maybe one in the garage. And put wireless hubs on each of them. If wireless gets faster/better, you can just sell your ports and buy new ones, and everything keeps working, no rewiring.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Just run a 1 1/2" PVC pipe into the wall of every room. It's a pain in the a** to cut a hole in every 2x4 for it, but later if you need to add-change cables it makes it so very easy. PVC is also dirt cheap and very durable for this application.
BTW don't run these PVC pipes through the beams of load-bearing walls. That's common sense, though.
AND FUCK VIM USERS
Fiber, Coax Cat-5, or whatever, home run the cables to a single location ( closet in garage/ basement) i.e. run from the outlet to the closet. This will give you the basics for future growth. If you do it with conduit, then there is nothing you cannot handle, ecept when you want to move an outlet so make sure you put things in the "right place".
Here are things to think about:
Use highest quality COAX ( ever try running a sat signal over cheap RG-6?)
Use the highest quality CAT5 (There is a difference)
Leave pull stings
Speaker wire for whole house audio
Speaker wire for rear surround (Make sure you look at Dolby 6.1 and others)
Another one no-one has suggested is 1394! There is a up-coming spec for 1394 over 300 ft at monsterous rates.Plus look at DTV connections, they are slowly moving to 1394.
D
i mean, that glass fibre insulation stuff is cheap, non-flammable, keeps you warm in winter, cool in summer. another option is polystyrene. its cheaper and you dont get that darned fibre stuck in your skin. you're right, it'll be way expensive to put that stuff in after the drywall.
Don't forget the Pneumatic Tubes (http://www.ptubes.com/). I really want to build a house with a pneumatic tube network. Use it for sending things like sandwiches and martinis.
u ll.htm) while you're at it.
That and the network of toy train tracks running around the crown molding...
But seriously, dittos on the conduit; home wiring is traditionally held down with things like STAPLES - ewwww. And get yourself a good fish tape (http://www.wisecomponents.com/storecatalog/wirep
why run ethernet at all? you will probably be happier in the end with a 802.11b network in the house, since you wont have cables to deal with nor deal with the "oops, I put the drop on the wrong side of the room" stuff.
I've run buildings with miles of unshielded cat5.. so what do you mean? In fact.. isn't the spec for cat5 unshielded twisted-pair?
They most certainly ARE low voltage.
You don't get 200+ volt spikes on phone lines.
The only time you get AC with any voltage is during the ring-trip.
Adding the extra conduit before the drywall/plaster is put up is the best way to go. 2 drops per room is on the low side as all walls should have at least 1 drop per wall. You can run multipule outlets for tv, cable, sat, phones and cat5 to 1 double gang box but do not run them with your power lines. Hubbell, Belkin and others sell the covers that allow you to run 1, 2, 3, 6, 9 or more outlets of various types so check with an electrical supply house for what is locally available.
Run conduit or at least plenty of pull-wires/strings. That way you don't have as much of an issue and you can run what you like when the time comes. If you use conduit and pullwires, then you can pull/add/remove what you like.
Instead of trying to guess what you will need later run 1.5" PVC pipe in home runs from each wall to a central closet. Then run what ever wire you need in the pipe. Easy to change or add to later.
How about a cable conduct at standard height around every room?
:-)
You can get these in plastic by the meter readymade with snap-on and removeable coverbrackets. If you make shure that you sink them flat into the walls at a height where you don't wanna drill a hole to hang something you'll have all the time in the world to decide wether CAT 5, 6, 7, fibre or that brandnew Cat Tenmillion (TM) thats bound to leave the specs-drawer in just 6 months or so. No matter what cables come in the future, you can put the all into that conduct and never have to sweat about scalability anymore.
BTW: That's the way im gonna do that as soon as I build my first house.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In a residential installation you don't need to shield your phone lines and you don't have to worry about cat5 next to power.
I have a couple of rooms in my house where two of the cat5 pairs are running 10BT and the other 2 pairs are phone with no problem whatsoever.
As to the installation, if you can run "smirf tube" from a central point to all the rooms. Then you can pull whatever you want in the future.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Your spelling sucks.
You presumeably mean "you're" in your sig.
Only two drops per room?!? Not even close to enough! I would do two drops per wall (8 per room) at a minimum, and possibly 4 (2 pair) on rooms with longer walls (as many as 16 drops per room).
The rationale is simple. You never know when/where you'll need 'em, and s'long as you've got the wall open anyway it doesn't cost any more (beyond a few dollars extra cable anyway).
I wired my older house with tons of CAT5E and coax (use RG6 for coax, BTW). I ran 1 to 2 lines from each room to a central closet where I also installed an AC outlet. In the closet I have a firewall router, cable modem, fast Ethernet switch, and a UPS ($5 at a swap).
This has worked out quite well. With this setup I can control the cable and network of each room from one central location.
This was an older home. It was fairly easy to do since I have a crawl space below the house and an attic above.
If there are places that will be difficult to reach later, put in some tough nylon string to feed wires or cable through later. You will be glad you did. Also, it never hurts to run extra cat5e, as you never know when you'll need it. Cat5e also makes excellent phone cable.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
All
Instead of trying to figure out what to run and what not to run to particular rooms, it is better to run conduit to your specific rooms. This will give you the flexibility to pull CAT-5, Fiber, phone cable, etc. into a particular room without going behind the drywall.
Therefore, to give yourself the greatest flexibility, I would run conduit down each of the walls in your house. In addition, conduit will protect any cables that you run in the future. One of the problems I have seen with running "naked" cables - of any kind - is that nails or screws used to secure the drywall often end up breaking them. A conduit will protect your cables and "clothe" them.
In addition, if I was building out a new house, I would put in a few additional items that will make your life easier over the long-term. First, I would build a "wire closet" to which I would run all of my conduits. Second, I would create places in the roof to receive wireless points of presence, so that you can get full coverage over your whole house. Make sure that these wireless access points are appropriately wired for power and have a conduit with CAT-5 running to them. Depending on the size of your house you will need two to four. Position them by looking for a coverage zone of 75 feet (yes, I know that they claim they can hit 150 feet, but this will give you strong coverage). And third, I would look at running a home automation network that would allow you to control lighting, heating, etc. throughout your house.
Finally, if you haven't put up the roof yet, look at going with solar shingles with a grid tie power system. This will cost more than a standard roof, but with the buy-down that you can get in many states and the zero electric bill you will see, it will the same as a standard roof in the short-term and will cost less within 5 to 10 years.
for $60 I think the cable is not for installing inside of the wall, you might need the one that's around $120. They are different.
What I would suggest if you
One thing you might want to consider when running your Ethernet cable along with your phone (which in normally not in a conduit), is that local fire codes often require that any vertically-running cable be in a conduit or be fire retardant. You really can't get a 1000' spool of good fire retardant 5e cable for $60. Keep in mind that when wiring your house, the cable is probably going to be the least expensive component, but if you screw up and buy crappy cable (that burns like tissue paper or shatters when you try to crimp it), it can quickly become a serious headache and a serious expense.
I wired my (already constructed) house a few years ago with cheap cat5 ($50 a spool) and was later informed by an inspector that, if I ever wanted to sell the house, I'd have to replace or remove the cable that I used.
My suggestion to you is, because your house hasn't been dry walled yet (I assume), run at least one length of conduit to each room (If you want to have two cables going to each room, run one of them along the base of the wall) and use medium-quality cable. If you would rather not pay for conduit, use high-quality fire retardant cable, and talk to an electrician about your local rules and regs.
--
-- sometimes AND gates turn me on.
Some people have glossed over this in passing, but you should pay attention:
In some states, you are legally required to be an electrician (low voltage license) to do this.
Florida is one example; it was passed this year.
If you live in a state with this requirement, you might fail your inspection if you do this, and not be able to move into your house.
Further, if you are building in a development and didn't hire the builder yourself, you must coordinate this with them, or they might very well rip your wires out. I've seen it happen, there is a house in my development sitting empty because the guy put Monster Cables for his stereo through the walls one night, and they cut them all into pieces and threw them away the next day. He backed out of the deal as a result, and now it's an inventory home. They didn't really have much of a choice, since if they fail the inspection they eat the house.
I actually do run cat5 outside the house, down and through the basement, and up through the floor from there. The problem is that the outdoor cable is very exposed to static in the air, and especially during a storm may damage your electronic equipment connected to that cable!
A storm took out all the 3com nics on my network, but the intel nics survived. Needless to say, we run all intel nics now...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
It's clear that a certain dislexic California congressman has been checking out /. recently.
"Run Conduit!"
Okay, it was lame, I know.
Get wireless dude.
What I would do is build a patch panel or wiring closet in a basement or similar location, with all telephone/data/audio cabling to other parts of the house home-run to this location.
If you run 'smurf' (flexbible blue fire-rated plastic tubing) to each room, and two each to bedrooms, media room, then you should be ready for anything.
When you run the smurf, draw 2xCat5e to each room along with any necessary speaker cable. Most fire codes will permit you to leave in a 'pull line' of a code-accepted material, so you can easily draw more cables (fiber, etc) as needed.
When running the 'smurf' tubing, try to avoid running in parallel with power conduits, or if you must, maximize the separation. Where you pass power lines, try to intersect at right angles.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I just wired up my apartement in a similar way. The apt only had ONE phone jack in the living room and I needed one in the hobby room.
Bought two six-way wall plates and some RJ-45 and coax connectors (Nordx/cdt), and some cat5e cable.
I ripped away the quarter round from the living room to the bedroom, there was just enough room between the wall and the floor. Shoved a phone wire, RG-59 and cat5e in there and nailed the quarter round back.
Then I drilled from the bedroom to the kitchen (narrowly missing the sink drain pipe) and ran a raceway from the kitchen to the other room.
The wall plate replaced the phone jack in the living room, and I just poked a hole in the hobby room for the other plate.
Passing RG-59 lets me send my VCR's modulator output, allowing me to send video and stereo sound over one shielded cable. It's not hi-fi, but in the hobby room all I have is a 14 inch TV.
And the next guy can use the coax to use a cable modem in the hobby room, or whatever.
Cost me about 50$ cdn and a weekend of work. Oh yeah, while installing, periodically test the cables to make sure...
Well I dropped 4 lines per room with a phone line in the same box. If you have it done professionally, it will add value to your home. Remember it MUST be installed by a LICENSED CONTRACTOR to have the value added to your home. Unfortunately, after a week of climbing through the attic and threading cat 5 through the walls we realized that. On the upside we have 4 wired rooms, and have a server that plays DIVX movies and mp3's for the rest of the home to enjoy
This is no joke. Make sure there's enough space in the tubing, and put sturdy strings in them. That way, you can tie a string to a new cable and insert it into the wall without hassle, in a few minutes.
Cabling needs change. A few years back, there would have been coax, now it's cat5 or optic. What's next. Who knows. Maybe wireless....
the pun is mightier than the sword
Conduits is the only real anwser to the question of running fiber. What if the fiber you run for some reason or is the right type ten years from? Unlikely, but possiable. By running Conduits, it doesn't what you put in it now or tomorrow because it would be so easy to add or take away.
The answer is, run fiber if you want, but make sure you run conduits.
Actually, whether or not the cable jacket is plenum-rated (usually with Teflon) is completely unrelated to whether or not they wrap an extra layer of foil around the wire (shielded vs unshielded). If you're running unbalanced signals down the wire, such as RS232 serial data (Like Cisco or Sun Netra consoles), shielding is good. But Ethernet and Telephone send electrically opposite signals down each wire, so the electromagnetic fields and the twisting of the wire helps fight interference.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
then you can add anything you want later on....
Just two days ago I was at a company called Ultimate Entertainment in Scottsdale, AZ, and they said they run cat5 all over for automation, alarm, and even video distribution as part of their structured wiring package.
Apparently, they distribute HDTV throughout the home, and while they will also run coax or other normal structured wiring, this seemed interesting to me just because it would seem to simplify things a bit.
I actually went there looking into home automation work that they do based on a recommendation, including the fact that they are doing a project in southern california for $1.2 million in home entertainment and automation electronics alone. They are really focused on the entertainment side (as their name suggests), though, so I wouldn't consider them a superior resource for the other stuff, but a lot of automation devices can be added if cat5 is already run to the places you want it. If you plan ahead, you can avoid X-10 and have a system that works quite well.
I was particularly impressed with the wall-mounted touchscreens from ELAN and Crestron that they had mounted in their demo rooms, because they looked really great and make for a clean thermostat/security/lighting/A/V control panel.
Bottom line, Cat5 is useful for lots of other stuff in addition to computer networking. BTW, I am not affiliated in any way with any of the companies I referred to.
I just took a dump, and oh man, you really will regret it later if you don't put in fibre!
The non-licensed spectrum, especially the 2.4Ghz range where 802.11b lives, is open to all sorts of consumer devices. A couple of neighbors with wirelss X-Cams and your 802.11b network is drowned in noise, totally dead. (I have tested this).
Security is also a major risk- wireless can easily be sniffed and is not difficult to spoof.Do you really want some script kiddie rooting your fridge?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
(sorry for posting AC but i don't have my /. password to hand.)
i did this in my house two years ago and it worked great. this was in ireland though so YMMV.
if i were to do it again i would do ONE thing differently: and that would be terminate all the wiring in the house with a patch panel. don't just leave a bunch of wires dangling in the hot-press/airing-cupboard.
also i recommend quad-socket faceplates as an absolute minimum because you never have enough connections where you want them. the components are dirt cheap.
get a pro to come in and test the cables and label (with durable dymo labels) them at both ends, this avoids headaches for you later and is worth the money (i rolled my own but wouldn't do it again).
remember that you can run your phones over cat5 as well, and just terminate with rj11 connectors or an rj45<->rj11 convertor (i prefer the latter option). don't run cat3 around the house, just use cat5 for everything; economy of scale should work in your favour.
you could put in a small rack in the hot-press for your router/switch/pbx/patch panels etc. but maybe that's overkill/outside a domestic budget.
any questions feel free to mail me vdm at vdm.cc.
its been said many times in this post, but it is by far the only fool proof answer. conduit conduit conduit conduit conduit
And if the contractor can't handle conduit (find a better contractor?!), you can do it yourself. Steel conduit is cheap (I know, 'cause I've done this), and conduit benders are not difficult to use. Of course, if you don't wanna use a conduit bender, you can buy prefab curved sections.
/. recently...
A few things to keep in mind:
0. Use METAL conduit rather than plastic - indefinite lifetime, RF shielding, and nailproof when hanging pictures. Also easily findable with stud-finder gadgets at need.
1. Use BENDS rather than square corners (and insist the contractor do so -- inspect before accepting...). Makes pulling cable more fun, and VITAL for fiber (if it ever comes to that)
2. If you do it yourself, make sure you debur the insides of all conduit ends with the little blade on the tubing cutter. It really sucks to have a short 'cause the conduit cut the insulation.
3. Check local codes and the building inspector on how to GROUND the conduit properly (one probably grounds this to the building safety ground at the electrical service entrance -- a definite building-inspector question). The building inspector can be made into a very handy resource if you social-engineer the interaction properly - you want him to take you seriously, and to understand that you want to, and are able to, do things right and with proper permits; at this point, he ceases to be an obstacle and becomes an ally. Also, be real clear to the building department that your conduit is LOW-VOLTAGE wiring and NOT power wiring; the code requirements are different.
Lastly, 3Com has a nifty mini-hub that fits into a wall box, seen on
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Remember CAT5 has a maximum length run of 100m (90+10), if you need a run of greater than that then you do need fiber.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
1....You want to be careful about running parallel data/phone, audio,video and power close to each other. Even with high quality cable, you can have problems.
2.....Do not strand boxes with wire inside them. Sealing over live boxes is a huge no-no. Why? Because what if you drive a nail into an active box. Many municipalistes will force you to correct this if you want to move.
3.....You cannot route wires through heating /ac ducts. Probably ovious, but I thought I'd note it.
4.....Always run more cat-5 than you need. If you are pulling two lines for net and phone, pull another. It's no real extrta cash and coudl save you later. Also, it's nice if you want to pull an extra line that is outside the firewall to your office for guests.
5.....Think about where you want your wireless for home coverage. I have a smaller house, so I don't have any problem, but if my house were more spread out, I'd probably hav eto move the antenna out of the basement, necessitating a run of cat-5 to wherever, with nearby power. It's either that or run a very long antenna line.
6.....Power, power, power. A computer + Laser Printer + Ups + Monitor + other gee gaws will suck up at least a 20 amp circuit. You don't want to over load a circuit. That's bad. I'm running 3 seperate circuits for the home office. 1 for fridge and other stuff, 1 for computer geear and 1 for lighting.
7.....Check references for all contractors if you aren't plannign on pulling bits yourself.
8.....Get familiar with your local codes. They are there to protect you, generally. Finding out where you are required to do GFCI circuits alone can save you trouble later.
Good luck.
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
have him run some string along with the wires, so you can easily do it yourself in the future. just tie whatever wire or fiber you want to the string in one room of the house, and pull from the other room.
There's always the opportunity of bragging rights if you have Fibre in the house. :)
A friend of mine recently had his house built, we ran 4 CAT5 drops to each room upstairs (his wife wouldn't let him wire the main floor) and then ran a fibre backbone from the upstairs to the basement for use in the future. His reasoning for this was so he can say "I have a fibre backbone in my house"....it's all about bragging rights
cheap CAT 5 wiring... oxidation and O2 content is rampant in the cheap wire and can give you serious problems downt he road.
There are nice, bundled, romex-like cables that have phone, cat 5/6, CATV, and Fiber all in one that can be ran to each room, and even some nice faceplates to hook it all up. Average foot/run cost is around 6 bucks, which isn't bad for a 5by cable.
The buried power box scheme is nice in theory, but many areas and their associated building codes will NOT let you do that. Be careful there.
Another interesting thing you can do is run some hidden plates for power, phone, and cat 5 to the middle of the floor... that and central vac (they can be co ran).
If you go with 5x wiring, you get the added option of Monster quality speaker wire (which can double up as home automation control wiring too with some systems).
If your house is rather conventional in design, with a space attic, run your cables vertically down the wall from the attic and put your routers and associated networking equipment in a sealed closet in the attic... make sure to provide adequate ventilation and environmental control to this space as well.
If you are doing a home theater with in wall speakers, be ware of most speaker installations and types, they are UNSHIELDED and can wreak havoc on your Cat 5 hardwiring (and possibly phones).
If I were to build a house, there are a few things I would do. Many others would have diffrent ideas, but I'll just throw in my two cents here.
First off, I would find a room somewhere in the house of which I would make my wiring closet. Generaly, you want this to be somewhere in the middle of the house and undisterbed. Under stairs, a spare closet, a small room, a section of the garage, whatever.
In this room, which will be for ever more be your wiring closet, there are a few things you want to avoid: Anything that could bring in moisture. Water pipes, sprinkler systems, avoid all that. Also, avoid florecent lights if possible, as they add alot of interfirance to communication lines.
Next, get some kind of conduit to each room. The wider, the better. If you want 2 or more places in each room wired (say, 2 oppesite walls) have a spot in the room where they split off from. All your communication wiring is going to go through this conduit: Phone, Cat 5, Cable TV... But not power. Power should have it's own route.
I picked up at my local Ace Hardware store a bucket of 6500' of tested 210 lb. pull cord, and it was $35. Buy this, and with the wires you pull, keep a line of this stuff in the conduit as well. If you have to pull another wire, make sure you pull another lenght of the pull line. Do this, and you can upgrade for the future.
Fiber is wonderful stuff, but it's extremely expensive. If the future of fiber is anything like what we have here, you will get a fiber connection to a 10/100 8 port switch, and it's Cat 5 through the rest of the house. That's the most likely situation I can see for the future of Fiber to the home.
Now, lable every conduit, so you know which room each pipe leads to. If you need to get the Pull line though, but you don't know how, here's a trick: Get a fairly powerfull shop vaccum, a plastic bag, and a roll of 10 lb fishing line. Suck the bag though with the fishing line tied to it, then pull your first pull line with the fishing line. After that, just remember to always leave a pull line behind after you pull again.
There are those who say "Don't put phone lines and coax cable next to Cat-5!" and "Buy the sheilded Cat-5e that's supposed to be Cat-6 rated, or you won't get a good connection!" While that's all good and dandy, don't worry about it that much. You can get fairly good connections with fairly poor wiring, and I've seen it. I even know a guy who puts his Ethernet, Phone and Appletalk all though the same unsheilded Cat-5 cable. And it works great. While phone wires aren't generaly sheilded, they are not really that bad compared to other hazards your going to have to get buy with your wiring. Coax is sheilded by nature, and Cat-5's twists are designed to prevent some of the interferance you'll get. This was all thought out long ago, so don't sweat it.
Looking into the future, yes: you may have Fiber optics. You also might be using 802.11g wirless, or even perhaps some other undrempt type of connectivity. You can't always know what's going to come... but hey, you've got the conduit to put it in, so you're set.
Pathway
I work for a comany that does structured wiring installs, and have wired quite a few myself. I would suggest finding a company near you that installs USTec equipment ( http://www.ustecnet.com/products.html ). You will be hard pressed to find a better product line, and if its put in by a certified dealer, it has a 15 year warranty. Don't stop with only 6 drops in the entire house--at least one or two in every room, and look at your floorplans and decide where you might want stuff in the future.
Suggestion: Use conduit. Have the electrician run 1" metal or flexmetal
conduit to extra wallboxes instead and insist on mild turns (no sharp 90's).
Terminate one end of each conduit at a wallbox and the other at a central
point in the house, probably where the phone lines enter in the basement.
Invest in a "fish tape" from your local hardware superstore so you can pull
wires through. Finally, attach a thick wire to all of the conduit and run
it outside to a copper stake in the ground.
Advantages: Run cat5/coax/fiber/futuretech to individual rooms as needed.
Use only as much as needed, of the types needed, when needed. The grounded
metal conduit serves as a faraday cage, keeping interference sources (such
as power wires) from impacting the signals. The no-sharp-90s rule allows the
fiber optic cable to work right (won't lose any signal out of sharp
turns because there are no sharp turns).
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That's worth a Slashdot article all by itself!
Don't forget to run the cables for a home theater system as well, while you're at it.
I have mostly cat 5e everywhere. Into each wall three drops. Then a drop is normally phone and the other two can be whatever. All run as a star.
I *did* run fiber and a Topaz transformer ultra-isolated AC circuit (with separate ground) to the stuff that then goes on to my antenna tower. The goal was to use the fiber as a 20 meter lighting gap between the stuff over there (soon to be a long-haul 802.11 link) and the rest of my network. So now when (not if) lightning comes to wreck my day, the worst that will happen in terms of data is the tower end of the data service (fiber hub, 802.11 stuff, some ham stuff) will all go POOF, but the core network will be safe.
If I had a separate garage, I'd run fiber (via a conduit) to there too. Fiber is *perfect* for longer hauls where lightning can be a problem. I buy all my fiber links from ebay, BTW... way cheaper than 'for real' and also allows me to avoid having to terminate them myself.
-- Multics
We ran cat5 in our house during a remodel. Be sure to put temporary connectors on each end and test every cat 5 wire before the drywall goes up. Also, be sure to leave plenty of extra wire in the blue box.
Also, make sure the wires go where you expect them to go. I totally missed that the electrician put all the cables in except one, the one to my front room with my TV/Stereo. So the idea of having my MP3 server play through my stereo is now no longer available unless I want to rip up the walls and route new wires.
Take photos of the wiring in the walls before the insulation goes in and the drywall goes up. Drywallers have a habit of plastering over anything that isn't moving too quickly. I've had entire AC boxes plastered over. With the photos you can check to see if you're missing any outlets and if so the photos will tell you where to cut through the plaster.
Don't let the electrician wire the outlets. Unless they know how to do it they will wire them wrong. Wire your outlets to wireing spec T568B. Be sure it's "B" and not "A". And don't untwist the pairs more than 1/2 an inch. Our contractor wired every one of them wrong and had 4 to 5 inches of untwisted wire. I was amazed that any of them worked.
While you're wiring it would be nice of all the ends of the cat5 cables came to a central point. We have an attic where they all terminate as does the cable TV cable, the phone lines, and a power outlet. That way I have my cable modem going to a Linux box running my firewall that goes to an 8 way hub. The hub outputs go to a patch bay with all the cat5 cables for each room.
But watch those contractors. And take those photos. I wish I had taken my own advice.
Could you provide some pointers to the cheaper solutions?
Guessing what we will need 10 years down the line is tough. However, I would stay to stick with regular copper cabling because fiber is just too expensive. If you can pay a little more, I would recommend getting Cat5e PLENUM Rated Cabling. The difference is that if plenum cable catches fire, it doesn't release toxic fumes whereas all the other forms do.
The other reason that sticking to copper is okay is because fiber's big thing is really NOT bandwidth, but rather distance and bandwidth. Most things that fiber can do, copper can do a lot cheaper but limited to 500ish feet. Assuming you aren't building a campus-sized house, I think using fiber is way overkill.
Besides, who would want to put fiber into their house if it is possible that 10 years from now that fiber is defunct and you would need to install NEW copper or fiber anyway?
Certainly run the cat5. Run as many wires as you can that you think you might have use for, but running fiber or anything else for ten years from now isn't the best way to go. If I had built a home ten years ago I would have run ethernet cable all through it - but that coax would either be going to waste today or become video cable! I doubt that anything you run today would be the right thing for ten years from now, and would likely be so expensive if it were the right choice that doing it now still wouldn't be right. I would suggest laying out things and perhaps installing conduit or even just string, wires or twine to help you pull other things through the walls later when new technology defines what you need. Don't forget speaker wires, perhaps video or RF (cable/satellite TV) wires and some extra control and alarm wires (even the latest smoke detectors I installed have a connection so that they can be networked together - if 1 senses smoke all can then go off to wake people on different floors).
You'll never guess right what you'll need ten years from now, and if you try tooo hard everything will just go wireless. Plan now so that if you have to pull wires later it can be done easily.
Everyone is talking cable and conduit, but what about wiring channels like used in studios or office building. You said drywall wasn't up yet, you'd have time time install the channeling. Then plenty of room to pull cable in the future.
Why not run PVC pipe to each of the rooms then when you want to upgrade your cabling you just need to run it through the pipes. It would save you the headache of upgrading later, and would allow you to use cat5 or even cat3 for now.
Why not use wireless?
The current thinking on home automation is to run qty 2 coax runs (rg6 quad sheild) and qty 2 cat-5 wires.
This gives you video in and out capabilities. If you need more than that, get a 3 channel RF modulator (settable channels) and put the video on a common cable as an RF signal.
Again if you need more lan cabling think of putting a hub in at each end of the wire, rather than running bunches of cabling. All the wiring runs back to central point where you have your splitters, amps, hubs, etc.
This is what I'm doing, and using one cat-5 for lan and the other for 2 phone lines, and a stereo line level feed.
Note that the standard for wiring up lans currently doesn't use the inner pair, which can be used as a phone connection, although it isn't prefered. (use a different jack for phone).
I found it impossible to pull this through 1/2" flexible metal conduit, so I'd suggest 3/4" up front. Metal conduit isn't required by code in most cases, howerver it does offer physical protection, RFI protection, and is upgradeable in the future.
That is this weekends (week, month, qtr...) project.
I moved into my new house in May and ran cat5e.
First, make sure it's ok with your builder. My builder didn't want me to do it because they were worried about the type of job I might do and the house still needed to be inspected by the city after the electrician came.
Second, two drops per room is not enough! Depending on how big your house is, you should be able to do 4 drops per room with a 1000' spool. My house is 2800 square feet and I still had about 300' feet leftover.
Third, if you're going to put in cat5e, might as well go ahead and put in RG6 as well. I put in two drops per room (one for cable, the other for satellite) and I'm sure glad I did. That way, the installers that work for the cable company don't have to drill a bunch of holes in the outside walls to install cable tv to the room. Besides, you might find other uses for it and the cost for 1000' feet (~$50) is about the same for 1000' of cat5e.
Fourth, it's easier to cable on inside walls than outside walls because it's difficult to find the cable on the outside wall due to the insulation. I had detailed documentation on where everything was but still couldn't find one of my drops because the insulation was hiding it. Do inside walls only if you can.
Fifth, make sure you document everything VERY well. You don't want to think you're in the vicinity of where the cables are and then find out you are off by a few inches. Just in case this happens, leave plenty of wire at the "end" (where it is going to be plug in the wall) so that if you are off, you can move it to the new hole. I took plenty of pictures with my digital camera and also took plenty of measurements.
If I could do it again, there would be few things that I would do differently. Mainly, I would have added more drops of RG6 and chosen only inside walls for the drops because of the difficulty in locating them inside the insulation.
The only thing with STP is that if your installer doesn't know what know what he or she is doing.....it gets messy. All that nice shieiding......think a nice big antenna. MAKE SURE that shielding is grounded. No, make sure its grounded! Screened twisted pair (ScTP) is a little better. STP has shielding around the whoe cable, as well as each two pairs. Screened just has the outer shield, which works just fien from my experience.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
Just build the wall from the cable and some glue. It'll be insulated because of all that rubber, and you won't have a problem with bandwidth.
Massive parallelism has its benefits.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
From my experience, however one cables (or builds a netword etc) everything will need to be redone in n years. Trying to build the perfect system to last 20 years is a waste of time. Just build the best you can afford now, and enjoy planning the next big upgrade.
I just put cat-5 into all the kids bedrooms, along with video coax. The cat-5 runs to a 100M switch, and carefully avoids (or crosses at right angles) any 240 Volt electrical mains cables. (We use 240 V in Australia). Everything is running like a charm, for now (except getting SAMBA talking to mt NT box, grumble grumble), but I know
that one day it'll all be replaced with the next big thing.
I think I'll wait for quantum cabling. You know? The one that simultaneously sends every possible packet from and to every possible IP address. The reality eigenfunction collapses it neatly to the packet that you really did receiver (in this reality) elegantly discarding the others because they never in fact existed.
Trouble is that crosstalk can land you in an ugly alternative reality! Emailing mom one minute, being dissected on planet Zoltar the next!
AAnother option is to use 'access floors' [http://www.scanfloor.dk/uk/index.htm] where you run all the cables under a removable floor.
This enables you to get a network- and a power plug anywhere you want it, and not just along the walls.
So if you want a computer in the middle of the room, you just pull up the connections you need.
This does give a limited selection of floors / carpets, thou.
Many posters say put in extra drops because you can't think of everything.
No-one recommends putting a drop near the ceiling in each room.
Think about it. If you forget something in a room, and you have to string wire from one corner to the other, across a doorway, you don't want wire laying on the floor where you have to tape it down (ugly) or run it under the carpet (hard). Easiest is to run the wire up to the ceiling, over the door, and back down again at the appliance.
Why not reduce the ugliness by *STARTING* the drop at the ceiling, running it around the room, and then down to the appliance?
Just a thought.
fifth sigma, inc.
You only need as many hubs/ports as you have live connections. Leave the rest disconnected.
Or do other things with them:
- intercom
- security system
- bundle pairs (to get enough wire-gauge) and have whole-house audio
- data-collection (e.g. thermostat, weather-station etc.)
Cat-5 provides good, clean signal over a variety of wavelengths - the possibilities are endless.
You can buy cable bundles with 2 coax, 2 fiber, and
2 Cat5e cables in a single package.
They even had it at my local Home Depot for a while,
but they don't have it any more.
Check out the cables on http://www.smarthome.com/comptele.html
You should probably not go with fiber. The only advantage fiber really gives you over copper is range. You can get gigabit copper just as easily and much more cheaply than gigabit fiber, you just can't run it reliably more than maybe 150 meters. Besides, if you run fiber you will have to be careful not to bend it too far; fiber works like reflections in a lake, if you're on the edge of the lake you can see the reflection, but you cannot if you are directly above it. Light bounces off the edges of the straight fiber, but if you bend it the signal will be "looking down at the lake" and it won't bounce off. You probably won't be need to bend fiber enought to make a real difference, but if you don't want to worry about loosing your signal due to a few kinks, just go with copper.
The only thing you need to worry about with running the copper all in one big hunk with the phone line is the possiblity of crosstalk. This is due to the magnetic field generated by one wire inducing current in another wire, creating a false signal. This really isn't a big problem unless you have a load o'wires(r) slapped together, but try to locate your central connection endpoint (hub/switch and router, whatever you have) somewhere in the middle of your home. That way you can spiderweb your copper in the directions of the different rooms and never have more than 4 or so lines bundled together.
`which fortune`
Running two category 5e cables to every room is a good idea. Also, running at least one RG-6 grade coax cable to every room is a good idea, if not two. Fiber is a bit debatable at this point, especially since putting the ends on a fiber cable is a real bitch and the cable is very very fragile.
If cost is not an object at all and you want maximum expandibility for anything then run conduit. If you do that then regardless of what different types of cable may be encountered you can simply pull the cable through the conduit (assuming the conduit is large enough).
Another option would be one of the all-in-one cables that usually have two cat 5, two RG-6 and sometimes one or two fiber lines. Doing a preliminary search brings up smarthome.com which may be able to answer some of your questions and provide you with different types of cabling, including the all-in-one types.
The important thing is to run all the cable to a centralized wiring closet where you can put such things as ethernet switches, cable TV splitters, etc. Be SURE to run your cable TV this way. It's a hell of a lot easier to run cables if every cable going to every room ends in one centralized place. If they need to bring in more cable drops they can just run them into that centralized place and you can do any wiring or rewiring there. The same goes with conduit. If you run conduit just run it all to a central wiring closet and you can do everything from there.
Believe me, you want to be sure that you put high-quality RG-6 coax in. Digital cable/satellite TV requires high-grade coax and RG-6 is the way to go. There is one type which is even more high-grade which is RG-11, but you usually don't need that unless you are running a cable for many many hundreds of meters (very unlikely inside of a house).
Also on the coax front be sure to use good fittings. Brass is the way to go. I suggest something of the snap-n-seal variety, or a compression fitting. Installation of either of these types requires a special tool, but the signal will be much better than with the cheap-ass radio shack fittings crimped on with a pair of pliers.
Also, don't finish your basement. It's a basement, you're SUPPOSED to be able to see the inner-workings of the house. If it's just absolutely not acceptable to be seeing the water pipes or electrical or whatever when you look up at the ceiling in the basement then at least use a drop ceiling of some type. I highly recommend against a dry-wall ceiling in a basement. Usually the only reason a basement is finished is so that it can be included in the square footage of the house's finished areas which is really a cop-out because after all, it's a basement, not a real floor.
Anyway, that is my $0.02
I'm not sure where you got the impression that fiber was flaky, unreliable, or a pain... It is expensive, but relative to the cost of building a house? We have many many miles of fiber infrastructure at work, multi-mode and single-mode, and it is the most reliable and solid part of the network. Literally, in the last two years there have been two fiber related outages - one was a backhoe and a bad map of the fiber plant, and the other was a steam tunnel explosion. The steam tunnel took out everything in that wiring closet, fiber plant, copper plant, hardware, walls... The fiber also doesn't have to be replaced to support a faster connection - in order to swap out an old 10Mbit coax repeater, we need to replace all of the coax runs with 5e runs, but the same fiber plant will be able to feed 10Mbit, 100Mbit, or 1000Mbit just as easily. In addition, you can get any of those over a much higher distance that you can with copper. Copper will only get you 100 meters at 10 or 100, where fiber can get you long hauls.
Of course, fiber in a house does seem a bit overkill with today's tech, but with 10 years of tech, or 20 years... I would say that the relatively small (against the cost of a house) cost of fiber in the house might significantly add to the future value of the house.
itachi
This is true.
I just did my own wiring in the house that I just bought a month ago. I ran Cat5e, because it much more inexpensive and I design and install LAN/WAN equipment, and deal with fiber everyday. I hate fiber. The Transceivers along will run you $900 per end, that's a minimum $1800 per drop. Plus you will need to by the switches.
Why do that when you can buy a four port Gigabit UTP switch for less than $300 and Gigabit nic's for $44.
No matter what you run eventually you will forget exactly how and where you ran it... before the drywall goes up go into each room and take pictures of every wall and the ceilings, these can be a major time saver when trying to find wiring, studs etc. later on.
I'm with the guys that are reccomending running coax... you can never have enough cable TV jacks..put on in every wall. (Honey, can't we put the couch over there and the TV over there???? No, there's no cable TV jack.)
If you live in an area where ceiling fans are commonly used have a box put in the ceiling of every room and the multi-gang switch boxes in the walls... major pain in the ass to try and put these in later.
I believe the limitation is actually 30 meters, which is a pretty good distance. It really depends on the size of the house though, because that is about 3 times less than the maximum distance of 100 Megabit ethernet.
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
I now wish I had run three runs of RG6 to each room from the garage.
One for local cable feed.
One for Dish network.(receiver in garage ((UHF remote))
One for ExpressVu the Canandian satellite service.
This in addition to a run of Cat5 to each room.
Tip on phone line: run a line thru most of the walls and leave slack in the wire . if you need a
new outlet cut a hole and fish the wire to the
box.
It will be a little more expensive, but you might want to think about stringing "STP" CAT5, instead of UTP... that's Shielded Twisted Pair instead of Unshielded.
I'm by no means an expert on the matter, but a few years ago I did a lot of reading about comparisons between different cabling methodologies (UTP, STP, coax, etc).
The interesting thing about STP is that you'd think that the shielding could only help. However, unless you ground it, the long stretches of shielding can actually make interference worse by acting like a giant antenna.
The question is should I run fiber? I really don't know how much the cable costs since I don't know what cable to use. It is much easier to run cable
/type (10Gbps) probably named "Laser optimized multimode fiber" LOMMF or OM3 is still in the works.
before the drywall goes in so I want to make an informed decision now. Ten years from now will I need/want fiber?"
The only reason to run fiber is if the needed cable length, exceed recommended CAT5e length.
Fiber has several disadvantages (I am no cable expert); Connectors; There is a plethora of competing connectors. The most common; SC and ST connectors are rather bulky, and doesn't really work beyond 1Gbps. The new breed of small form connectors for >1Gbps hasn't been certified yet.
If you plan to run fiber "end-to-end", you will have a really limited supply of products to choose from, pay premium prices, and to some extent be tied up with
with whatever connector you choose to begin with.
Changing or making the end-termination on fiber, is much more expensive on fiber, than on copper. (the SMF connector "VF-45" from 3M claims to be the cheapest to use, when doing end-to-end fiber).
The price difference between even a managed 24p 100TX switch and a 24p 100 FX (fiber) switch is significant. The price on 1000 SX fiber equipment is also much higher than 1 GBIC copper equipment.
We just evaluated upgrading our fiber backbone from 10Mbit to either 100FX or 1000SX. (we run a non-profit ISP for 300 apartments), and the price difference between a using a fiber or a copper core switch is very high indeed. If it wasn't for the fact, that our cable length requirements exceed Cat 5e/6, it would probably be cheaper to abandon the fiber and re-wire with copper.
Using fiber-converters (transceivers) also sucks; they cost too much (one needed for every connected device), is yet another source for network problems, and requires yet another power plug.
Actually I believe, that the money saved from investing in fiber and fiber equipment now, could pay for a totally fiber re-wiring if the need for such really should arise into the future.
I really think you will be much better off using copper. People in the know claims, that even though Class D/Cat 6 (200MHz) isn't certified as a standard yet (?), the commercial "Cat 6" cabling systems availably now, should conform to the coming standard. So Cat 6 should be a much better long term investment than fiber. AFAIK Cat 6 should do 10Gbps. Again, people who knows much more than I do, claims that the present standard for multi mode fiber (50 and 62,5 Micron)
doesn't do more than 1,2 Gbps reliably, and is a "dead" standard like Cat 5, and 5e. The coming fiber standards
To summon up;
Cat 5e is the cheap and tried solution. If future needs doesn't go beyond 1Gbps, then why not.
Cat 6 is slightly more expensive, but is much more "future proof" (10Gbps). Perhaps one is still advised to buy a complete system, from the same vendor though.
It allready seems, that Cat 6 rapidly has become the choice when people wire new offices.
Present day fiber standards are not future proof (1,2Gbps), too expensive; not only the fiber cabling systems, but all devices that need to connect with it, and is probably something best left to a professional electrician to install.
Peoples advice about conduit and pull wires, are probably the real key to a long term investment.
A cheap ethernet tester will probably pay for it self too, if you are going to make a lot of cables.
I inquired about the same thing here in Ohio when building my house. The builder would not let me do anything but the stuff on the work equity list. I asked about Cat 5 and running some RG-58 (for Amateur Radio) myself and they said NO extra wiring period. If I did add it, I would not have gotten my FHA approval since I do have a FHA loan.
:)
Personally, even with the security issues with Wi-Fi, I would rather use it. Much more flexible and you can always setup as VPN gateway on the access point. It's much more flexible and if you decide you NEED your laptop when your on the crapper then you can do it (not that I would do it, but hey I know SOMEONE might someday!). Besides, when I get my laptop and Wi-Fi stuff, I can surf the web on a nice day out on my deck. That's just plain cool!
On a side note, all of my phone cabling IS Cat-5. I can steal a pair off of it since I am only using one for voice and it would work. When I decide to excise the phone and ONLY use a mobile phone, then I can just add a hub on the other side of the wall from where the demarc boax is.
Gorkman
What I did was pull eight drops of six cat-5 and one RG-6 to six rooms. (Actually only seven RG-6 drops because I ran out.) I used up most of two 1000 foot boxes.
Don't pull single wires, pull bundles. When I had the holes drilled and the weather was cool enough to stay in the attic all day, I pulled the wire from both boxes through the house, along with the RG-6, then folded the end over and did it again twice. I used cheap box tape to hold the wires together in the interim, then I used cable ties to tie it together into one evil looking snake. It just barely fits in a 1" hole. So far I haven't crimped the ends of the RG-6, but when I do start using it, I'll just stuff the extra cat-5 keystone jack back into the wall.
In two of the drops, I didn't have to drill because there was no drywall over the cabinets (nowadays the ceilings go in first, so I was lucky), and in another, there was already a hole where I wanted it. The last hole was the toughest because it was on an outside wall, the roof about three feet above me. I cut a hole for three-inch pipe in my closet, giving nine times the area of a 1" hole, just right for eight bundles and the outside wiring, then put a pipe and a right angle joint at the top. The hole was cut well enough that the whole thing fits snugly with no glue or plaster.
Assorted bits of advice: Forget about fiber, it's too much of a pain in the arse for home use. The only fiber you want is one strand going out of your house (dream on!). And besides, there are two diameters, and single vs multi-mode, but cat-5 is cat-5. Don't forget about the RG-6, because that means you can have cable/satellite in any and every room in the house. And if you buy wood bits, get 1" bits, and get them made in the USA with lifetime warranty. Wal-Mart sells these for under three bucks each. The crap from China won't last for more than one or two holes. Ultrasonic stud finders kick ass. Wig pins are good for pushing through drywall to find out the exact point of a stud, both on walls and ceilings. Not all horizontal studs in your attic are directly over the wall; if you're not careful, you'll drill out the top of a wall or even worse, paneling. (Yes, I did drill out some paneling. That's how I know.)
Switched 100mbit Ethernet in the kitchen kicks ass. And it means you get to use more AC circuits for those big LAN parties.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Remember to put a couple of drops in ceilings in places that would provide ideal coverage for 802.11 access points. Ceiling mounted access points provide better coverage (fewer furniture and appliances to go through) and you will do wireless sooner or later.
I can't stress the importance of FFFish's comments enough. Make certain to take pictures (digital cameras are great) of *every* cable run in *every* wall before the rock goes up. It's so much easier to be able to have an "x-ray" view of your house when doing additions in the future. Additionally, it's a nice resale point for prospective future buyers ("and, should you ever want to upgrade, here is a look behind the walls").
As for the original question, skip the fiber -- go 2 RG6 and 2 CAT5 to each room, and run flexible conduit for future expansion (don't forget to run a length between the attic and the first floor/basement -- it'll save you)
-D
use the national electrical code standard of 'between plug' distances.
more than this is going to fill your house with
more EM radiation than necessary, make weird
EM interference when you try to add ethernet cable
(parlell with power wiring = weird problems) because
you dont have enough distance. well in theory anyways.
Four years ago I purchased a new home in Alameda (SF Bay Area). A friend of mine recommended that I go with home-run conduit to every room. I eventually did get my conduit, however, I had to fight the builders who did not want to do anything out of the ordinary. They tried to snow-job me by claiming conduit was against residential code, so I called the inspector and he told me it was fine for low voltage wiring. Eventually I wore them down and I got my conduit. I think it cost around $1500 for 8 home runs in a 2700 sq foot house. If you do manage to get conduit it is important that you
1) Get the largest diameter possible. I got 1.5".
2) Ensure that the turn radius is as large as possible i.e. the conduit should take sweeping turns rather than tight turns because the increase in friction will make it very hard to pull cable. Remember that cat5 cable is only certified up to a pulling force of around 15lbs.
After the house was completed my wife and I spent 2 weekends pulling Cat5e (lucent is the best) and RG6. We pulled 5 cat5 runs to each downstairs room and garage and 3 to the upstairs. In each case 1 cat5e supports up to 4 phone lines. Special conduit lubricant is a must, it's designed to make the pulling easier and keeps the wires lubricated after the fact. Of course a good quality fish-tape is a must, don't go cheap. The runs are terminated in my den, obvisouly you should pick a central location. In the den I have a server cabinet and a rackmount switch and a patch panel for the LAN and phone lines. The switch is connected to a firewall/router which is connected to a cable modem. You can plug a machine in anywhere in the house & DHCP will get you an IP and an internet gateway. I also have a couple of Audiotrons to stream music from my server.
I did all the cat5 wiring myself. The trickiest part is terminating the cables, a cat5 circuit tester will save you a lot of time, of course you will also need all the crimping tools, wire strippers etc. I used Pandiut components throughout for the connectors, faceplates etc, their stuff is modular and well designed. A good guide to all this stuff is "Mike's Basic Guide to Cabling Computers & Telephones in Homes & Apartments"
Hi, I've just about finished getting my house built .. and whilst doing the electical side of things i got a mate round and we put cat5e into 3 rooms of the house, two bedrooms & the lounge ... also got A/V put into two bedrooms too .. but personly i dont think you will find the need for Optic Fiber ... with the way Wireless is headed .. id say in the not so distant future you might end up running all wireless and getting if not the same speeds .. probably very close to the same speeds as fiber ... and because it's in a local area not over a long distance or anything i dont think you'd have much toworry about with lag etc ...
id just keeplayin' the cat5e ... it's cheap .. but also get A/V ... as it can be very handy. eg. relaying that new DiVX/DVD to the lounge ... etc.. ;) or .. just think of what your guests will say when you've got music crossfading with Visual's on your big-screen.. with the help of Winamp/XMMS
anyway's .. that's my thoughts .. hope it helps ..
P.S. ... if you can afford Optic Fiber .. and the equipment to go with it ... why not!
Don't run only cable. Run conduit. There are a bunch a variations, but the one I ran is 1" diameter, plenum rated, conduit to every room (actually, more than one to most rooms), home runned back to a "wiring closet" in the basement. I had the contractor run a couple of lengths of string through every run and tied off both ends. That way, no matter what I end up needing, it's a matter of tying off to a string and pulling it through.
PVC is nasty stuff, cancer cancer cancer.
read the web about it. there is a movement to phase it out.
alternative? damned if i know.
someone said 'use steel'. jesus what a pain
in the butt, but it seems it might be better.
physically separate power and data cables.
thus, you will never get electrocuted and die
due to dicking around with your computer.
think about it, all the electrical codes are
about preventing mechanical contact/rubbing/cracking/cutting/scratching
of power-carrying cables. if the cables are
in separate physical spaces, they cannot
come into contact.
Uh, STP is 150 ohm cabling typically used for token ring. It doesn't meet the TIA 568 standards although you can use it with ethernet if you use baluns (ugh). Generally speaking, STP is not for ethernet.
maru
Lots of mis-information about plenum cabling here.
;-). Why? Because if there's a fire in a wood house you have a lot more to worry about than some lame-ass cabling.
Plenum cabling doesn't necesarialy burn less all the time.
Plenum cabling is desgined to burn less in certain directions.
IIRC, plenum means it won't burn sideways as well as upwards. If you want the other cable, I think you need "riser" cable (or something like that). If you plan to do this in an office building, this is a good time to find out. Otherwise they may make another crappy OJ Simpson movie.
Where I live, if your house is made with wood, you can put in any comm. cable you like (as long as it doesn't give off toxic fumes without burning!
The only exception (again, for where I live) is that you have to use special cabling for running cable through air-ducts.
But, once you move into offices, you _really_ need to watch those laws. The fire inspector will bust your ass if you run the wrong FT-rating cable. (IIRC, FT-5 for plenum spaces, FT-4 for anywhere else in offices).
BTW: This may be incorrect for your area, and I refuse to claim responsibility if you use the wrong cable and cause harm to anything with your use of it.
Note: Plenum is availiable for almost any cable. UTP, STP, coax, power, you name it.
Careful grounding your STP -- over very long distances (like many floors in an office building) a ground differential can cause HUGE current loops through your ground. I've heard stories about ground jackets setting on fire in runs from the top floor to the basement in office buildings.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Fiber is pretty pricey per foot but the termination is a killer. You'd have to have a contractor do it to be cost effective. The connectors (something like a Siecor Uni-cam) are around $30 bucks a pop, the termination kit to be able to put them on runs around $600, and it takes about 10 connectors worth of practice to be able to do it properly.
maru
They usually aren't happy about cable in HVAC in houses!
If your house burns down, you want your insurance to be valid.
If the walls are not up yet, run conduit. If done properly it will allow you to pull cat5, fiber, etc thru.
Use PVC.....run it down through the walls, you can always ugrade your cable later....without worry of pulling the other cable out.
Believe me it works, very nifty little trick....and not too expensive.
USE PLENUM
Yes, it costs more, but it meets building code, and isn't nearly so flammable. Please don't be cheap and use the PVC stuff that will help housefires spread wonderfully just to save $100.
Fiber is probably a waste of time, but maybe not.
STP has nothing to do with whether or not the outer jacket is PVC or plenum. UTP plenum is widely available, and widely deployed. Shielded cable makes for a nightmare of floating grounds that most people don't deal with properly.
A link was posted in a previous post to a product called SpeedWrap. That is one of many companys that make a bundled wire.
This is the *right* way to do it. All new houses that are designed with fairly recent tech in Stereos, Televisions, Computers, and telephone use this type of wiring.
You can get it in just about any configuration, an example would be Cat-5, Coax, Fiber, and twisted pair. You can get as many of whatever type of connection you want.
If you are having a contractor do the electrical, he will most likely recommend this or recommend you to a company that specializes in wiring houses for multi-media.
The additional advantage of a combined cable is that you just run everything everywhere. There is no 'well should I run fiber to the wherever', it is all there.
Plus it will be easier to explain to your wife why there is Cat-5 running to the bathroom.
Don't forget to consider your power and air conditioning needs. My office is pushing the limits of both.
I'm planning on surrounding both my phone wires and my cat5e with RF shielding. Figure it'll save me a lot of money in lost modem bandwidth.
What's this Submit thingy do?
.. wireless will have caught up with wired speed.
You are just paying for the next five years. Then your fancy CAT5 or fiber or whatever will be useless.
I would even predict that 10 years from now we would already have seen the emergence of a city-wide wireless internet in most areas. Your wireless connections will hook up directly into the backbone.
Forget the wire run Conduit then in the future you can yank anything into the pipe. I'm a electrician and that's how I'd do my own house. Trust me don't matter what you run you'll wish you had run something else someday. 3/4 inch conduit is cheap.
This house I'm living in now has been wired for various things over the yeas but there is not a inch of pipe in the place so that's always a pain...
Cat 5 can easily handle 100Mbps traffic and phone traffic. Remember when Cat3 was the new thing compared to old Ma Bell twisted pair? That got stuck in alot of homes as phone wiring before 100baseT came out. Those people are now limited to 10Mbps or AnyPoint-like technologies. People who installed Cat5 are happy today. People who install Cat5 today will be happy today, but what about tomorrow?
There may be a day when some broadband provider drops off a >100Mbps cable to your curb for $50/month. There may be a day when home entertainment will take advantage of Gigabit Ethernet or Infiniband over twisted pair or whatever the next technology is. I recommend that you get spools of Avaya Gigabit now. The price difference is only about $50-$60 per spool over Cat5, and you're probably lumping this expense into a mortgage, so you're not likely to see the difference. Also, it assures you that you're putting in quality cabling. You have no idea what brand/quality of Cat5 cable your contractor is going to install.
Find yourself a good contractor. This contractor will have installed many homes before and might even have some active tract home contracts now that Cat5 is catching on. They'd not specialize in just Cat5, but also coax, telco, and security wiring. They would also make sure they install not just the cable, but the right jacks and wall plates at each location. I can't tell you how much time it wastes if you have to install your own jacks.
Have one set of twisted pair go mostly to a phone punch block (110 or 66, doesn't matter) and have the other be terminated (TIA-568A) into a TIA-568A 110-block with ethernet RJ-45 outlets.
Consider also instaling dual RG6 (coax cable) while you install your dual ethernets. Just like your ethernet an phone wiring, you'll want to centralize the place from where you want your lines run. You never know if/when your cable company will require two cables to get more channels. You never know if you or the next owner will become a satellite+cable channel junkie.
As for fiber, well, there aren't many proven applications for it, and it's more expensive, and there are fewer people out on the market who can do it right.
I think someone else mentioned using metal conduits around your wiring. I agree, though it might be pricey.
If your wiring is very important to you, and if you plan to spend more than 5 years in this house, the extra money you pay in your mortgage to get the job done right is well worth it. If you plan to flip the house after two years, just install two cat5 and one coax to each bedroom and each work/play area to be done with it.
Also, don't forget elsectrical outlets! It sucks to have all your ethernet bundles available in a space where you have no electrical outlets for your network gear and computers. Doh! The outlet near the central point of your wiring be better off with it's own 15-amp fuse.
-ez
PS: As an alternative, there's always wireless. Consider how/where you'd want to install wireless bridges. Consider the security implications, too.
I haven't seen much posted regarding homes already built. Any tips you could pass along? I want data feeds (Cat5) mostly, with a few audio streams, too. How difficult is it to run conduit on a two story home? I suspect I can drop down good feeds from the attic, but when were trying to run to the main floor things might get ugly. Any sites that cover such issues? TIA
It's a mini-switch, not a mini-hub.
Running 1/2" EMT conduit is pretty easy, and gives you absolute future-proofing. You'll probably own your home for 20 or 30 years. Would you have predicted the need for cat5e in 1971, let alone been able to get it?
There is a team that went into an old house and turned it into any geeks dream-home.
Here is the link.
-nuclearsnake
See the forbiden post Here
You don't have to run all the cables right away.
You'll be much better off by laying
the strategic conduits. For example run a conduit
from the basement to the attic (in 2-store house).
The best solution I have come up with is to put in a channel all throughout the house that goes 1-inch in the wall and is covered with a plastic lining so the wall looks flush, put right at the base boards. It is damn hard to do, but it is so simple to add, replace, echange cable from, and it is a simple way to run any kind of cable (stereo, tv, ethernet, etc.) to anywhere in the house, and still be able to change wireing and cable. works well if you live in a place with a steel structure, or concrete walls w floating partitions.
I am thinking of the base of the house where the "firewalls" don't seal and any of mother nature's buck-toothed critters would climb up the wall and use the extra holes and spaces for your cat5 as a free beginning for their "infiltrate and defecate" missions held above your master bedroom, guest room, and little johny's room. The best solution I have implemented in my own installation was to actually modify your house's floors to have 2" x 2" x 2" channels of open space running through the entire house and every 50 feet or so you make meeting place where 3 or more channels meet to a packet mixin' device. It is best you install this before you decide on using Linolium, Hardwood, or tile floor. If you already installed the floor, then you should actually design these channels inside your wall and foot level and they should be covered by a wooded or plastic trim that covers where the floor and the drywall meet. In this case, the drywall shouldn't meet the floor, but be placed off the floor maybe 1.5 inches; you don't want the trim covering too much an area to mak it seem obvious. The channel at floor level should be most precaughtiously made to have no access into the wall because, as you will discover, nature's damndest insects, arachnids, beavers, and gerbils all find a way to chew through something to gain access to your well-insulated abode. At least with your cat5 outside your wall, and most easily accessible, you can have an easy upgrade path and maintenance path. It is a better idea then drilling a simple hole through your walls and stapling the cable on the wall like the modern idiot home-owners(like the fannie-maye boogies), the rode-runner ISP house-call techies, and your everyday "Bob's cheap computer upgrade service" that your idiot brother-in-law calls to your house 'cause his trumpet icon won't work in the Control Panel". You'll just regret it in the long run; hope you die of cancer quickly eh?
without prejudice
I have all of machines networked wirelessly, with a WinXP/Linux machine serving as a gateway to my cable connection. Simple, no fuss, and no matter where you go inside (and outside) the house, you can always have a connection.
Just thought I'd point this out, since a lot of people would find it amusing. But, of course, a lot of people would probably think I'm trolling, and a lot of people would think I'm offtopic.
/.
Of course, by saying that, I'm going to be modded "Redundant." Welcome to
We just finished building my house (modular), and I'm moving straight into the basement (being the oldest son doesn't have too many priviledges.)...
I get to build my own room, so I can do whatever the heck I want with cabling and wiring. It's going to be a large room (about 450 sq ft), so I'm going to use half of it as my lab, where I do my evil experiments. (Well, evil in terms of quality...most of my stuff is just a bad collection of hacks.)
I'm going to put 6-conductor RJ45 jacks, one live 100base-TX jack, and two 110V sockets, evenly spaced, every 6 ft.
I'm going to do both the phone and Ethernet over shielded cat5, and I'm pondering what the electrical inspector would say if I put RF shielding around the power cables.
My computer desk will be in the room, complete with a 100Mb/s switch serving the wall ports.
The walls are going to be a light pastel green, with tongue-and-groove fake hardwood floor, and I'm going to use indirect flourescant lighting.
I'm looking at exercise equipment, since the typical geek is no longer overweight
Oh, and my computer's going to be about four feet away from my bed. If my parents want me outside that room, they'll have to drag me.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Glad you mentioned this, because it reminded me how difficult it is to find good documentation about wiring Ethernet.
As a wise Slashdot reader once said, "You can't have too much overkill", so here is the wiring scheme shown 3 different ways. I hope it saves you the time of gathering it together yourself.
Slashdot doesn't allow the HTML PRE tag. Slashdot removes leading spaces, so I've used dots below. Another problem is that the lameness filter is lame. That lameness filter is definitely named correctly.
Use only Standard EIA/TIA T568B. This is also called the AT&T specification. T568A is NOT USED.
T568B:
When the hook of the RJ-45 Ethernet connector is underneath, pin 1 is on the left.
Pair 1 is pins 4 and 5, Blue and White/Blue.
Pair 2 is pins 1 and 2, White/Orange and Orange (Transmit Data + and -)
Pair 3 is pins 3 and 6, White/Green and Green (Receive Data + and -).
Pair 4 is pins 7 and 8, White/Brown and Brown.
Pair2 \--R22 Orange
/--------- -T33 White/Green
/
Pair3 \ Pair1 \-T15 White/Blue
\--------- -R36 Green
Pair4 \--R48 Brown
Pin ColorPairName
1 wh/or 2 TxData +
2 or2 TxData -
3 wh/grn3 RecvData+
4 blu 1
5 wh/blu1
6 grn 3 RecvData-
7 wh/brn4
8 brn 4
I know this sounds crazy, but standard Ethernet uses ONLY pairs 2 and 3, for both half and full duplex. The other wires just sit there, unused. (It is possible to buy external adapters to use the other two pairs as a second 10- or 100 Megabit 100Base-T connection.)
The R1, T1, R2, T2 designations are for telephones. R1 is Ring 1 (the red wire at the telephone box). T1 is Tip 1 (the green wire at the telephone box). Ring and Tip are old names for the telephone wires, but if you talk to a telephone company installer, he or she will use those names.
Quite obviously, someone messed this up majorly, as in "How can we make this confusing?"
If you are new to wiring Ethernet start with the simple explanation at Johns Closet (as in wiring closet): Wiring: Color Codes, Terms, and Tools.
See the Leviton Do and Don't Guides
See the Wiring Guides at the Leviton Learning Center . See the Residential And Light Commercial Installation Practices (Tia-570 Compliance) [PDF file] guide.
Also see the wiring specs at FAQS.org: 9.0 Standard EIA/TIA 568 (Use ONLY T568B)
More information about wiring: Data Communications Cabling FAQ
Your local store will probably try to charge too much. Shop around for Ethernet cable and connectors. You need the real thing, cable marked "Category 5". Other cable won't work.
One last thought to those who are new to Ethernet networking. A Hub broadcasts all data to all computers. An Ethernet Switch sends the data only to the computer that where the data will be used. Therefore, switches are faster in cases where the network is sending data between more than one pair of computers at the same time.
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Have you considered running flexible conduit? A friend of mine did that when he built his house and it was a god send. At the time, 10base2 was the standard, but by the time he wanted to install networking, 100baseT was it. Instead of having to rip out the old wiring, he just ran cat5 through the conduit and Vola! BTW, he also installed some wire pulls (nylon wire on pullies) to make it easier/possible to run the wire at a later date. Have fun!
The dogcow says "Moof!"
Until I use optical interconnects between my AV components, as traces on my computer, and for the wiring to my lights, I see no reason to include fibre in my house.
CAT 5E/6 is a REALLY great conductor. As some people don't know, you don't need a media converter to pipe non-ethernet stuff down it. Just solder a connector to both ends and use red tape on both ends of the cable (or green tape depending on the warning colour where you live) , to remind you not to plug them into a computer. You can pipe a stereo pair and a video pipe across one line. Or multichannel audio. Or all the phone lines you could ever want.
If you do this, use plenum. You may overheat the cables, and PVC would burst into flames. Be careful, and nothing above 12VDC.
Until I have the need to pipe photons from here to there, I'll stick with a really good wire.
-twb
First off, I build networks (fiber optic, copper). Chances of you using fiber before you move out is slim. Most people live in there homes no more than 20 years before moving. With the cost of fiber, I think you will be content with copper. A home network will run fine on 10Mb, great on a 100 Mb and kind of a waste running 1000Mb. I have several servers, run wierd math calculations and toy around with different OSes. I just built a house and wired it myself. 2-3 Cat5e for network to each room, 2 Cat5e phones, and 1 RG-6 Cable TV coax. With two exceptions -- family room was also wired for surround sound and additional phone/network and CATV and my office has 6 cat5e network and 3 cat5e phones. I even used Cat5e for my security system. I put up a 3 foot wiring rack in my crawlspace in the basement. Ran 3 two inch PVC risers to the attic and then ran 1 inch PVC conduit in the walls. Fiber optic comes in handy with some audio applications and of course data networks. But with risers and conduit, you cauld always add it later (hopefully when the price goes down). Al
I used to do cabling for a few years around Michigan. I mostly did faily large schools and businesses.
:)?
When you are pulling the wire, pull as much as possible. If youre going upstairs or something past two rooms taht need wire pull it for them. Get a bundle taped together and when you reach one roomcut one wire and continue to pull the rest.
Conduit is not necesary. The only thing we ever used conduit for was for fiber or if a Cat5 would be exposed somewhere. We never used it anywhere that had a drop celing, there are special things you can get to hang the wire on.
When you pull put some pull string in there. If you ever wanna add some more you simply have to tape a cable to the end of the string, go upstairs and pull.
Always pull more cable than you will need. Even put one in the bathroom. Who hasnt wanted to surf the net while on the john
Wire/coax are cheap if you value your time at all. Don't bother with phone wire, use cat5e for phone lines you get more options this way. Run 2 coax and 3 cat5e to way more places than you ever think you'll want to, but you don't have to actually hook them up right away or ever. Use Panduit Mini-com jacks that can be removed from the cover without unwiring them and just terminate what seems reasonable at the present time. Put blank covers on those places that you're sure you'll never need anything and roll the wires up in the box... you will need to connect something to at least one of those ridiculous wires sometime. I put a cat5 jack out on my front porch last summer so I could sit on the porch swing with my laptop. Will run one out by the pool next summer.
I like to buy different color cat5s and hook up the blues to ethernet, the reds to phone but leave the yellows dark. Everything should be a star (including security/smoke alarms) and should terminate in a nice large closet that has a big piece of plywood on the wall.
Use cat5 e for security wiring too. Even though a lot of security systems require their circuit to be wired in series this can still be accomplished at the head and you may want change our your security system at some point. You waste a lot of wire this way but you've got more options. Run 3 cat5e and 2 coax to the detached garage, but if it's very far away run a 4 "conductor" fiber out there too and don't forget to run a string or two in that conduit. Even if it's not so far, the fiber won't pass the electrical potential difference that can occur when lighting strikes close to your garage and you'll save your hubs/switches.
I've done a lot of this and even by being anal as hell there's always some place I miss. It's not at all unreasonable to put a mile of cat5 in a small house. Also buy as many boxes of wire as your biggest run (most conductors). That way you can run all the wires simultaneously and they'll look better when you're done. Don't pull on the cat5 very hard at all.... if it's stuck get off the ladder or off the floor and gently massage it into place.
If you stub a conduit up into the attic make damn sure you insulate and seal the top of it. In a factory I wired, the electricians had graciously ran conduit from the attic down all the walls to metal boxes. They left the conduit sticking up through the insulation in the attic so I could stuff/fish my wires down them. They didn't cut them to length up in the attic some were just through the top plate and others were 18" above the insulation. The metal conduit acted like a chimney in the winter, warm air rose up the conduit, hit the cold attic, water condensed, ran back down the conduit and shorted/corroded about 150 jacks (Panuit mini-coms BTW). Ports on the on the phone system began to blow and I couldn't figure out what the hell was happening. Fortunately one of the metal boxes got crushed by a fork truck and I discovered the corroded jack. Upon replacing most of the jacks in the building water actually ran out of some of the boxes when I pulled the covers off.
In a home where romex electrical wiring is allowed, non-plenum wire should be just fine. Romex is the 12-2 14-3 etc wire that is inside a flatish molded plastic covering. if your building codes won't allow romex and you're house has conduit you better buy the plenum.
A big UPS in the head is always nice... maybe you should have your electrician run a few "home" runs of 110V to some color coded electrical jacks to get that UPS power up to some of the more deleicate and expensive electronics equipment in your house. Have your electrician put 110V recepticals and light sockets on many of the junction boxes in the attic and crawl/basement... when you have to add a phone line that you forgot you'll be grateful for the handy power and light and it's so inexpensive to do before-hand.
Run a couple of power home runs to the entertainment center area.... you won't need the amperage but you'll get cleaner power for the tivo.
That is all.
No Really that's it.
I really think a fiber backbone would be sweet but just run cat5e with a gig switch and you will be fine. If for some reason you need more throughput you can always drop a few more runs and channel bond. Have fun ;-)
use PVC piping. Just like a central Vacuum system, but leading to you wiring closet instead of a vacuum. Now, you can add any cables you want, whenever you want. just make sure you run a string through each of them. Should be cheaper then conduit.
Keep in mind that merely using Cat 5e cable does not mean that you will have a Cat 5e system. In order to be 5e, the terminations must be done very carefully to minimize untwisting of pairs, and the whole run (including the patch cable) must be checked with a spectrum analyzer.
Unless you shell out for a specialized data cabling/telecom contractor with a certified Cat5e installer on staff, you're really getting a Cat 5 installation. Not that there's anything wrong with Cat 5 -- you just need to know what you're getting.
You need to check SmartHome.com
Wires, Cables, Jacks
Guide to Cable Types
I'm bout to do a new house, CAT5E is dirt cheap, but if you do ever want fibre drop some blow-lite to the locations and fibre can be blow'n to the drop.
Go to your local hardware store and buy a hundred metres of twine or string or something. Run that parallel to your phone lines, and tie it off at each end (and LABEL!!).
That way, if you ever want to add something in the future, you just go to one end, untie the string from the wall, tie it to the new cable (and another piece of string), and pull it through.
This way you don't have to decide what to run until you need it, and you don't need to open your walls when you add the new wires. Just make sure that you don't have any sharp bends or corners along the path of the string.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
I did a really light wireing job. I just ran the wires in the supports in the ceiling in the basement (where most of my family's computers are) in the same holes that were drilled to string phone cable, which is in turn hiden by suspended ceiling. I then went to Menard's and bought some resonably priced surface mount panduit and surface mount electrical boxs. I then put then outlet covers on the boxes and put in the snap-in RJ45 jacks. It was rather inexspensive, easy to put up, cosmetically appealing, and it would be easy to upgrade my wiring in need. Unfortunately, I just used some Cat3 I had lying around the house, but still not terrible for a cheap 10BT network.
I ran cat 5e everywhere - 2 jacks per room - 4 by my desk :)
The patch panel is in the basement.
The phone terminates on the patch panel as does my adsl.
I've got a 4-way splitter cable made up to put the phones (over the cat5) to any of the rooms I want and a 10Mb Hub for the rest of the connections.
I wasn't worried about sound/tv/whatever.
If I was I'd go for a 4-way jack per room.
Next step is a 10/100 switch and wireless for the laptops.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
What do you think this is, RS-232? Asynchronous serial communications frames each byte with a start and a stop bit, but other protocols - like V.42 in modems, and ethernet - only put headers and trailers around much larger chinks of data. 1500 bytes in the case of ethernet.
Now, the ethernet header and trailer are larger (26 bytes total, I think), but that's 2% overhead instead of 25%.
I don't want to escalate the flames by insulting you back, but using multiple exclamation marks when "correcting" someone erroneously is... a good way to attract ridicule.
Having pulled a bunch of Cat5 through my house, I think the most important thing that you can do before the walls go up is to make sure that there's a fairly large plastic conduit/wire run that gets you from floor to floor. If your place is multi-level, that's by far the hardest part to do after the sheetrock is up. In addition to pulling the conduit, normally there would also be a number of nylon pull strings put in so you can pull that fat RG-6 coax later.
A lot of home construction codes are put in place to prevent your house from burning up. A pipe like this is the perfect way to spread fire from floor to floor if it's not done properly, so you want to make sure that that's the case. If you electrician has done data wiring before, you'll probably find that the cat5 that runs between floors is supposed to be "plenum" cabling which has a different sheath (more fire resistant and doesn't let off toxic smoke if it does burn). Yes, of course, plenum cabling costs a lot more. If you put a wire run in like this, I believe that the wires in the pipe are plenum and terminate in punch down blocks at the top and bottom of the tube. You can switch to regular cat5 there.
A big pipe like this running laterally to the demarc point (your telephone box) may be useful too. These days, the cable TV box is in the same area, so it's useful for TV drops too.
If you go to Home Depot, they now sell a big fat orange multi-conductor cable (it's about 1" in diameter) for new construction. There's a couple of cat5 sets in there, a couple of rg6 coax and plastic fiber optic as well. I think it's about $0.80/ft.
I have some rack mount servers and network gear. A lot of this stuff can be incredibly loud (strangely, the loudest thing I have is a Cisco 2924 switch - much louder than a Sun Netra and Compaq Proliant DL380). So you may want to think about identifying a server room. That room will need power, access to the big pipe, and may require additional climate control. You might not want or need it, but again, it's easier to do this now than later.
Finally, building codes may make it challenging or expensive in a home, but you may want to consider having him pull a separate AC circuit into your server room. If you have a lot of computers in there, then a separate feed (perhaps as big as 30A) will be really nice for a large UPS.
Other than bragging rights, fiber in the home is pointless. Your CAT5 can be used with gigbit ethernet NICs and switches to give you performance that is just as good. Your other alternative is to go with 802.11a (high speed wireless). It's faster than the 11 Megs per second (Approx 54 Mbps) that 802.11b gives you and performs better over longer distances. The money you'd spend on fiber should give you more bang for your buck if you use both of the above mentioned approaches in combination. I wired everything up for CAT5 in my house (14 nodes) and I'm a happy camper.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Hello all,
I want to thank you for
A: Correcting me about the number of pairs, and
B: Pointing me towards the documentation that I've been looking for.
Other posts to this topic have suggested that POTS shouldn't be run too close to ethernet
Nope
or no problem
yup 1
yup 2
yup 3
With the new 2.4 GHz phones, I have given up on telephone wiring to anything but the base
unit of a multiple remote phone. I am using the Siemens 2420, which works well, but it is
designed for security in the business. It is impossible to set the unit to allow multiple parties
to conference w/o the 1st pick up specifically paging the other units. Great for work, but sucks
for home. I also have tried the power-line remote phone jacks, and they work. Unfortunately where
I live the radio transmissions are so strong that the signal is quite noisy (OK for a fax machine though).
I read in a book somewhere that in the specs for NIC design safety the line voltage from POTS will *only*
fry the NIC, and not the rest of the computer as well. As is usually the case, I can't recall the name.
Thanks again!!!!!
Warren
could firewire be a viable solution?
The whole point is that you don't know what you want in 10 years time - just plan for change,make it easy on yourself.
That being said, only you can decide what you want out of it. Ease of change? No unsightly cables?
What you know you want:
Power sockets The cost isn't in the cable, it's the sockets and the work, but two minimum guidelines.
At least one on each wall/each side of a door.
At least one every 15ft or so.
Comms Cable is cheap
Pull as many cables as you think you need,and then some
Use CAT5 for everything including your phone.
Have a wiring closet
Bottom line is that it's easier to have just one cable/capability type and create your 4-point phone network through the closet than to go "Great, I need another phone in the kitchen, let's see... oh, only Ethernet socket available". Buy some RJ-11/RJ45 converters instead.
And as for how you want the above things, plus for the things you haven't thought about yet
Conduits (more expensive than just drilled hole but easy to use)
Predrilled holes to go through beams without conduits, behind wall, pull-strings to use when the time comes. But it snags, and man.. it aint fun.
Access panels, fillers - everywhere. Ties in with the earlier minimum requirements; you don't need to populate everything, just make space for it.
Point is, if you need cable-TV, run a cable. If you suddenly need RCA, run RCA. If you want a doorbell wire to the bathroom, run it there!
As for fibre, putting it in now is probably a waste of time and money.
If you have no current need, it really is a waste
If/when you need it, it's naturally going to be the other standard. Murphy has been right before.
:) It's your house, have fun, and good luck!
Whatever you do - do not, I repeat not put cables outside walls and paint over etc. It's ugly, it's inconvenient. the cost saved on making cables invisible get eaten up pretty quickly if you have to redecoreate every 3 months. And if you're married... unsightly cables everywhere carries a less than trivial additional cost.
There are a zillion ideas for cable management, like hollow floor trim panels which can hide cables, full-blown office-type 4x3" wall-mountable panel/conduits, wireless etc. I doub't you'll want your living room to look like an office though
I read through most of the comments to date. Hmm... I am going throuth the same steps you are right now with my house. Having built the IT systems for three banks and been involved in two other setups, I suggest you not mess arround with two different types of comms cabling (phone/data).
Cat5e, whether shielded or not will support phone and data service. Wherever you run cable, run four. In larger rooms make sure you have cable outlets in at least two places so that you do not have to run long extensions.
What I have not seen anyone mention is that if four ports are not enough, you can double up. One cable has 8 pairs, enough for 4 telephone lines or two ethernet lines. Adapters are on the market to allow you to do this without requiring adding new jacks/panels. Therefore, with 4 cables per location, you will not have a capacity problem.
If you use shielded cat5e, you do not really need to be concerned about electrical cable proximity.
Fiber is a bitch. Although with fiber, you have a higher theoretical data rate, and no ground loop problems, you have to have very expensive jacks and highly paid specialists to install the stuff. Oh, yes, the adapter cards for the equipment will also be frightfully expensive. Let's not discuss the cost of the switch. Current limit for cat5 is 1Gbit/sec. Cat5e has a 3x higher rating than cat5, but currently it is not utilised. Use copper.
Run all of the lines to your garage, or someplace that will !NEVER! be used as a living space. A garage is good because noise and beauty are not issues. If you need to rip out the sheetrock, no big deal. Also even the best maintained cable closet is ugly.
The garage is also good as an endpoint for your telco lines. If the telco runs their lines into your garage next to your cable nest, you can reduce the length of your patch cords. If in the future you decide to install your own small scale pbx, everything is already there.
As long as we are talking about the telco, make sure you have them install at least 8 pairs between your cable nest and their street box. Buy the cable if the phone guy resists. Even though you may only want two lines today, do you even know what you will need in 5 years? (Fax, kids line, T1 for net access..., Business at home?)
With the pbx, take a good hard think on this whether you might not want to do this now. A pbx will allow you to make calls between any two phones in your house. It can be set up so that if you have multiple lines, one answering machine can handle all lines. If you have two lines, if line A is busy, all phones can also use line B, etc. A small PBX kit can be had for less than $200.
Finally, don't waste any more time diddlin'. Buy the cable now and put it in the walls now. If you decide to run 3 or four cables to each location, buy at least that many boxes of cable. You will save enourmous installation costs by pulling the whole bundle at once.
Cheers
Elmars Ositis
And where there is a door, you could go around it by having removable moulding (or whatever it's called) or go under it by having that piece of the floor directly under the door (which has a name too I bet) pop off.
Obviously, I don't know squat about building (or wiring), but it sounds logical to me.
Anyone know why it isn't (or can't be) done?
>cat6 hasn't been ratified yet, but will allow gigabit and beyond
AFAIK, there is no beyond.
Gigabit-ethernet was the last standard for copper.
The 802.3 will not work on faster copper standards.
The next standard 802.3ad (10 Gb/s) is fibre-only.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
This entire thread is a laugh to anyone in the trades ...I got down this far and could bite my tongue no longer ...which goes to show...never let a fucking geek touch a hammer.
...then stick with it.
..and stick with them.
Fact: Run whatever you want, wherever you want, but run it before the sheetrock goes up...and most important...have a fucking plan beforehand.
To think that you can easily just run conduit anywhere, then pull wire at your leisure is a fucking joke! Get a clue. Hire a professional to come up with a total wiring
plan, making the best decisions you can based on cost vs. practicality
The most expensive part of building is whats referred to as 'change orders', so make knowledgeable decisions beforehand
And IMHO, who in their fucking right mind would install fiber in a fucking residential installation?
If you're gonna have a Beowolf Cluster in your home, and want it to run at a decent speed, I'd suggest you go with fibre. We have it at work, and damn it's fast.
Why not just use cat-5 for EVERYTHING, including phones, like many companies do in their offices? It's much more flexible.
You can either use jacks with both types of connectors or standardize on RJ45 and use RJ11/RJ45 cables to connect your phones. In this case it helps to keep certain conventions like 'top jack is phone, bottom jack is ethernet' but it's also good to be able to break this rule.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
$1800 per drop! Are you insane? Your company will go broke with you making purchasing decisions.
We just installed 53 drops of 3M Volition Fiber. This stuff is amazing. You can tie the fibre in knots. The connectors (VF-45) can be yanked out (literally) and replugged hundreds of times without failures. This is in stark contrast to some of the problems experienced with the old-school fibre connections. And to top it off, it's only a bit more than Cat5 per drop.
Check out the 3M Volition web site for technical details.
Also, check out Gemflex for some inexpensive 100Mbit network cards and 8-port switches. 3M also sells a line of high-performance Gigabit switches, but they are still out of range for a normal home network.
To give you an idea, Gemflex pricing is around:
- $ 90 VF-45 NICs
- $400 8-port switches
- $100 RJ-45 to VF-45 converter
It will be more expensive to build a fiber network, and for a home it may not be worth it. For a small/medium-sized office, however, I think it's a great future-proof option.
Many replies have criticized fiber as being "expensive" and "a pain in the ass". While this may be true of many of the traditional fiber types, 3M has a much better solution.
Check out 3M Volition Fiber. This stuff is amazing (we just installed 53 drops). You can tie the fiber in knots. The connectors (VF-45) can be yanked out (literally) and replugged hundreds of times without failures. This is in stark contrast to some of the problems experienced with the old-school fiber connections. And to top it off, it's only a bit more than Cat5 per drop.
Also, check out Gemflex for some inexpensive 100Mbit network cards and 8-port switches. 3M also sells a line of high-performance Gigabit switches, but they are still out of range for a normal home network.
To give you an idea, Gemflex pricing is around:
- $ 90 VF-45 NICs
- $400 VF-45 8-port switches
- $100 RJ-45 to VF-45 converter
It will be more expensive to build a fiber network (mainly due to NIC and switch cost), and for a home it may not be worth it. For a small/medium-sized office, however, I think it's a great option.
My five cents: Stick to Cat5(e) in the house, but leave separate conduits with nothing but a wire in them (very hard to pull additional cables when other cables are present).
The UplinkWhere I live, we have 100 Mbps connections to the entire city, and also to the Internet.
It was posted on /. a few weeks ago, but feel free to see how a real network is made on 100 Mbps@home (50 000+ visitors already!).
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
I think the other poster meant wiring duct, such as this Panduit product which is actually a raceway. Your comments, of course, apply to ventilation ducts.
So how much will your life suck if you button up all of that CAT5 in a wall only to find a few years down the road that the rules/protocols/latest gadgets have changed. Think about houses with intercoms and blenders built into the counter tops.
If instead you run conduit (PVC will do nicely, EMT if you think you really need it) and leave pull strings behind, you can place/replace whatever turns you on in the future. Conduit also has the nice advantage that you can terminate it most anywhere. For that pipe coming out of the outside wall, way back in where the attic gets tight, just glue on an elbow and bring it out to where you can work on it. And while I'm on my soapbox, if you choose to leave blanked junction boxes in the wall (as suggested elsewhere) leave them at both standard heights: 14" OC for outlets, 48" OC for wall switches. The ones higher up let you come back and put in switches, IR repeaters, whatever.
(for those of you who don't have j-boxes where you need 'em, ask your local electrical supply store for, and how to use, "madison straps" to cut in extra boxes. Nice neat job, no drywall to patch)
(always check your local building/NFPA codes)
I'd pull innerduct or plastic flexible conduit or whatever you want to call it. (If I ask at the electrical supply place for innerduct they know what I am talking about.)
Essentially, this is a flexible tube, probably about 1" in diameter for your application, which is DESIGNED To have data cable ran in it. I've seen this stuff at home depot but I think they call it something else there. Generally it has ridges or "ripples" circularly around the tube. I have pulled many a wire through metal conduit and have also had my fair share of problems. Recently, people have been using the innderduct instead, and the cables are much easier to pull through, etc.
Installation is also a breeze. It's a lot more like running a slightly-stiff garden hose than say pipe. You might need to staple/strap it in key spots, and check code requirements. Since it's data, generally you can get away with almost anything.
Get a spool of Innerduct, a big juction box to connect everything into, and put at least one dual-gang box on each wall, if not more. I've also seen one Innerduct ran to the first one and a second one "jumpering" to a second (or third) box on the wall, so you can actually terminate the wires anywhere you want.
Once you have the innerduct in, it doesn't matter what you put in it.... Fiber, Coax, CAT5, CAT6, etc. etc. etc.
I think you will quickly run into the problem of lack of space in the wire path. Have you ever tried to run an extra cable in those tubes they put in your wall? You should not be too optimistic about what you will be able to do. Two cat5 + a phone line sounds like a limit to me.
Have you considered to run cat5 to rooms where that do not have phone connection?Definately run CAT5 now. Optionally, put dark fibre in next to it. You don't have to use it now, and the cable itself is probably cheap - it's the termination and the net cards that will cost.
;-)
But probably it makes more sense to just run trunking and string so you can pull more stuff later. Who knows, in 5 years we may have wireless at fibre speeds, or sub-ethanet, or be able to run terrabit over CAT-7 copper, or whatever.
Remember, when running the CAT-5, the first rule of cabling:
"Put more cable in than you need, because the customer cannot be trusted when she says "I will only ever need x wires to that point". Even if the customer is you!"
I've just had a day of crimp-tool fun making doublers to run two phone lines down a single CAT-5, largely because the customer did something that was guaranteed as "unthinkable" when we wired the damn site. Should have followed the rule
REmember as well that CAT_5 is well established, and so you will be able to get all sorts of interesting baluns to run all sorts of nifty stuff down it.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Cat5e will do well for now. Thinking 10 years into the future, I see no Cat5, little fiber, if any and 99+% wireless. I'm in the process of replacing the "rats nest" with wireless as we speak.
2 years ago, before I knew the difference myself, we had an inexperienced electrician run 'ethernet' cables into our new house as it was being constructed, only to find out later that he'd used BNC cabling.
To make matters worse, when I tried to pull out the old cable to replace it with better stuff, I realised that he'd used the old electrician's trick of wrapping the cable around nails in the drywall so that it wouldn't pull through any further.
So the moral is: no matter what you decide on now, make sure your electrician runs the cables straight through so that you can leave yourself open for upgrading at a later date.
-Nano.
Not cheap but fast :-)
It will get u there.
I just finished building a new home and I got the electrician to install conduit from the electrical box to the unfinished basement. It's relatively cheap to do, and it saves you from having to fish wire through wall studs. It's also easier to replace cable when you have to change it later (fiber anyone :) )
I strongly suggest you do not install fiber. For many reasons. First, fiber is expensive. Second, terminating fiber is expensive. Third, the toold are expensive. Fourth, the NICs and hubs/switches are expensive. Fifth, you can't just "run" fiber. It takes special conduit, or armored fiber. Feel free to contact me with more information.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
As most connected home owners know, you can get cables about anywhere you need them, one way or another. And if you can't, most good electricians can. I've helped my dad, a licensed electrician, do some crazy stuff to get wires where they need to go.
If you're building a house, put in a wiring closet. Wire all your phone, cableTV, network, and home-theater connections into that location. You can get some fine management stations at most home centers. Make it in a central position in the lower level, and make sure there's a way to get wiring to second floors if necessary. One good way to do that is to put a 3" conduit next to a heat duct or air return or something similar. If you can, put a junction box somewhere on the second floor as well. Whatever the case, extend the conduit through to a junction box in the ceiling. Put several pull strings in alongside the existing cables.
Also, make sure you have a cable raceway on the ceiling in the basement (if you have one) so that if you finish the lower level you have a way to get cables through the ceiling.
Most home setups don't use the 10Mb/s to capacity, much less 100Mb/s. Can't see a good reason to even think about fiber yet.
- Sig this!
Hey,
I would just go with cat5e for right now (I did when I built my house in june), but run it through a conduit, so you can upgrade it later, it's really easy to do and DEFINATELY worth the flexibility.
i am doing some structured cabling for a campus environment and i would like to share to you some tips that i have learned.
1. use the highest grade of cable available. use cat6 (even though the standard has not yet been established.) we did a testing and the best cable came from nordx/cdt using their cat6 4800lx cables.
2. do not put any telephone wire (cat3) cables. cat 5 is backward compatible to cat 4,3,2,1 and of course cat 6 will be for 5,4,3,2,1. but the cat3 cable is not forward compatible to cat6. you can crimp the rj45 on a pair of cat3.
3. treat the outlet to each room as more of utility. therefore, you should place it as much as you can across the room just like electrical outlets. besides, this is what structured cabling is all about.
4. i do not suggest that you use stp, this is because you will need to ground each end of the cable or else it will absorb all the interference. stp is used for industrial applications where there are motors, and other interference causing devices. what you do is get a good grade of shielding in the conduit instead.
5. assign a small room or cabinet in your house that you can centrally terminate the cables with connections to your switches, telco company, cable company, etc.
6. with regard to safety, use a fire proof coating in the cables but not necessarily plenum. plenum emits toxic substances when burned although it will take extra effort to burn it.
7. use patch cables. buy the factory made patch cables to terminate to a device at both ends instead of crimping it. it provides the lowest in terms of signal loss.
8. remember get a certification (these are offered by good manufacturers.) at least you can avail of warranty of parts and labor if anything goes wrong.
below is just my thoughts in helping you decide in using fiber or copper.
with regards to fiber, imho, in 10 years time, copper will be obsolete. fiber to the desktop will be as common as cat 5 installations. copper is reaching its limits. the proposed cat7 cable requires shielding in each copper pair and a shielding for the entire cable. the head will no longer be rj45. it will definitely be more expensive than buying fiber optic cables.
when using fiber optic, since your installation is in a house, you can use the multimode fiber optic cable. you can get the 62.5/125 or 50/125 core. distance is more of the decision what type to get. it depends on the equipment you get (see the specs.) remember that fiber optic should come in pairs. for connection heads, the most common is sc. almost all gigabit uses that with exception to some who use mt-rj.
imho, i think that nowadays, it is actually cheaper to create fiber optic cables than copper cables because fiber optic is made up of glass and is then made up of sand whereas copper is made from copper and you can actually melt the wires and sell the copper from it than fiber optic. manufacturers are just selling fiber optic for a higher price since it is in high demand in commercial applications (more $$$$.)
i should say that you may not need all of those information since you are not doing any commercial installation but i believe that when you do something, you must do it good! (besides it should last for 25 years or more.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Or just a closet you can turn into a wiring closet?
My suggestion is this: there is no way to know what is going to be standard cabling 10-15 years from now... so plan to be able to change out all of your wiring.
Instead of running cables, buy smallish (1" or thereabouts) PVC pipes, and instead of running a wire, run pipes (and a string!) to the wiring closet. Although you can't do this with electrical wiring for code reasons, it should work for phone/ ethernet/ cable/ etc. Voila! instant modular wiring. (YMMV.)
------
Do you like Japanese imports?
With Cat 5e you can hook up Gigabit over Twisted Pair. IMHO, in 10 years, most homes still won't be wired with FastEthernet(100Mbps), let alone Gigabit, so you'll definitely be set. Plus fiber is still way to expensive(cable and hardware-wise) to be worth it. It would be a better idea to spend the money on access tubes to easily replace the Cat 5e when it becomes necessary. Good houses last a lot longer than 10 years.
If you do use the same path that the phone lines use, be careful not to burn holes in the insulation with the friction of pulling the CAT5 over the phone lines.
Pulling one wire over another will make the stationary insulation very hot very fast. Pull slowly. Take breaks to allow the wire to cool down.
If you really want to future-proof (yes, that's an icky marketing term, but accurate!) your house's construction, in addition to running cat-5 (which can be used for POTS as well - RJ-11 plugs are mechanically and electrically compatible with RJ-45 sockets) run conduit through the walls. That allows you to easily run whatever cables you might require years down the road, much easier and cheaper than trying to fish wire through stud bays. Also, install a junction station in the basement, so you can easily connect and/or switch wall panels with signal sources.
If you're stringing wires now, run coax (cable tv) and speaker wires through the walls now, in addition to cat-5 and electrical service. A company whose name escapes me (but they have been featured on PBS's "This Old House" a couple of times) sells a cable bundle called "future-proof wiring" that includes a pair each of cat-3, cat-5, coax, fiber, and speaker wire, all bundled neatly together. It costs a lot, but the labor savings will probably make up the difference.
Actually Cat5 is the requirement. Cat5e "has improved signal carrying capabilities" over Cat5 but aren't required for GigE. 1000Base-T (802.3ab) standards have a complex signal encoding scheme that is very similar to 100Base-T2. It also uses all 4 pairs. My source (besides my own knowledge) is O'Reilly's Ethernet: The Definitive Guide". An excellent read BTW.
In a new house I woul go for cat7 wire. It has several advantages. First it's certified for gigabit ethernet, secondly the wires are individually shielded. It has 8 wires in each cable and you can easily run two 100Mbps/FDX in one cable.
//TheToon
I've wrapped plenum-rated cable around a soldering iron that was hot enough to fry the copper off a board if I wasn't careful (normally ran it through a diode for PC board work). No effect. PVC-insulated cable, on the other hand, roasts and stinks rather quickly.
Incidentally, "plenum" is not the name of the cable; it's the name of the air space. Literally, it is an air space at higher pressure than the surrounding air space (e.g. for ventilation). However, it has come to mean just about any air space, especially the air space above the ceiling and in walls.
I'm literally putting the conduit in this weekend. In the future, I can pull whatever cables I want.
In my living/dining room, which I'm currently rennovating, I'm adding four outlets with conduit to the basement. Each outlet has space for six connectors. Leviton plug-in style. I can run voice, ethernet, cable, speaker, etc.
I'm just putting a box plate onto the stud and drywall, no actual device box. The wall plate goes on the finished side. Behide is a vapour barrier box, with 1" conduit going out the bottom through the floor.
Plan for change.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
I'm putting conduit in my house this weekend while the drywall is removed.
I'll be pulling wires by Christmas.
Definitely the way to go.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
When I built my house, I wired 2 Cat5, 2 audio, and 2 coax cables from each of 11 workstations to a wiring drop in the basement. Though I never used it all, I knew any hookup I ever wanted to do was possible.
If I had it to do over again, I would have added even more drops (like one under the kitchen cabinets, and one to the front and back doors). It's cheap and easy when you're building. Just do it. But not fiber.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
And yes, leave a piece of string in each run.
...but it seems to me you'd be in good shape for the future if you used some good wide PVC for your existing cables, and ran some good strong string (fishing line maybe), so you can pull whatever you need in the future. Then you don't have to worry about something replacing fiber, or your connectors becoming outdated, or whatever.
When it comes time to string your fiber or whatever, you pull two things - the fiber, and a replacement string for the next time you need to upgrade. Just tie'em both to the fishing line that's already in there, and pull.
BUT, it was too much work for them to pull it all out, so i still have the runs to each room, its just that they terminate to the cut ends hidden in the attic. I will have to wire extensions to those cables and run it the rest of the way to my server room, but at least its in the walls, which i could not go back and add.
on another note, you may be able to bribe the onsite contractor to let you do it. give it a shot, all they can say is no.
If you're gonna run phone lines through the cat5 your basement, or wherever your lines aggregate, is gonna be one chaos of wires.
If you're gonna use conduits, label the conduits too. Not gonna use conduits? That'd be a big mistake as it helps in reducing fire hazard and interference. Just pick 'em up at the local home depot. They're cheap and gives you infinite peace of mind.
About fibers, I'd stay away from them, not only because of the cost and the hassle, but mostly because they're dangerous. If the glass cracks and you get splinters on you, you may very well end up dead, because the tiny splinters will easily enter the skin and into your bloodstream and finally into your heart. It may be the most painful way to die, second only to having a bullet shot up your ass.
Thats what UWB is for... (UltraWideBand).
Have a UWB antenna mounted on the ceiling of each room or something, in some sort of p-p fashion or something...
I would suggesting just using VPN...
Either use nothing, or use VPN.... Don't bother with WEP, it won't do anything for you, other than give you a fake sense of security...
My whole house is actually wired through the vents. We have 6 computers on the top floor and I run all the cables down through one vent which drops out into the basement which then connects to a router. Works very well - and the vent does not have any super-cold/hot air running through it.
Running fiber now would allow you to just terminate the ends when you are ready to use it. The question is do you really need fiber. The distance you are going to be working with in the host are well within Gb Copper's range. I can see you needing to go much past 1000 Mb within the next 10 years.
This won't really apply to you, but I remember seeing baseboard conduits that looked pretty stylish in the case of someone needing to retro-fit an existing house.
I've done a quick search but haven't been able to find something like that, so if anyone has links to a product like that I, and I'm sure others would appreciate it.
brightloudnoise.com
No, really. Imagine the potential impact on resale value, especially if organized crime ever moves into your area.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Plenum cable can cost twice as much and really only has one purpose relative to building codes. ..these items are pvc. Forget the Plenum rated (teflon) coated stuff. It's a waste of money, and has nothing to do with "spreading fires" . It's about the gasses they produce when burning.
Plenum cable is required when run in air plenums.
Commercial buildings will use the space above ceilings are "return air" plenums for heating venilation and air conditioning. Under these circumstances you should run Plenum grade cable for health/saftey purposes. In the normal home your cat 5 and other cabling runs behind walls so this is not an issue. Consider the romex cable that's used for the electrical wiring in your home, and your central vac system (another good idea to install while the walls are open)
When I ran cat-5 through my house I took part of the siding off the outside, bored a hole through the wall, strung the wire, caulked the hole and put the siding back on. The cat-5 is literally running along the outside of the house tucked into the siding. Just another idea.
i believe the webbie u meant was http://www.3m.com/volition/
I've been pondering this for years. I've wired some buildings for ethernet and it seems like the damn physical layer keeps changing... fat coax with vampire taps replaced by thin coax replaced by a variety of twisted pair standards that have settled out into cat5. Fiber is the new, best thing but you know that just down the road will be some new hot multimodal fiber or some genius will figure out how to pump 64 colors of laser light into a fiber and you'll be stuck because it will require a different variety of fiber.
When I was a system admin at a company with a really cool Facilities & Operations manager, he would bring me blueprints for every structural change and ask me to mark where I wanted conduit. That made both of our lives *much* easier. He said he could drop galvanized steel conduit from the ceiling to a box with a blank faceplate for $10 (some years ago) and he'd rather put in extra conduit than to have to cut holes into a finished wall.
Smart guy.
My suggestion is that you see where you can run conduit. It's more work now but your cat5 will be incredibly well shielded. Then, if you decide later that you want to replace it with fiber, no problem.
Don't forget to leave a strong cord snaked through your conduit... particularly any unused conduit so you can more easily pull stuff later.
remember, ethernet cables can be a maximum of 300 feet