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?"

Comments

Fiber? What other cables.

[jarodss]

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.

Re:Fiber? What other cables.

[demaria]

I'd be surprised if the Svideo or RCA cable can handle any decent level of quality on a long run. RJ6 (coax) would be a better choice there, it's easy to tap and can go long distances.

There is technology coming down the pike (some available today) that will allow digital video to run over Cat5E cable.

Re:Fiber? What other cables.

[Colin]

What about running Svideo and RCA to everyroom or an extra drop of cat5 to run sound on?

There are various (cheapish - under $100) ways of running video over Cat5. Personally, I've got Cat5 and audio cables into rooms, and run everything over that.

However, 2 per room is not enough. There are a number of reasons for this:

• They're never where you want them. You'll always want to move stuff around, and cables draped across the floor doesn't look good.
• Once you've got the cables in, you'll see more uses. For example, telephone, TV, Audio for hifi, remote control for hifi, remote control for lighting, PC network - all possibly in one room.
• When building, it's cheap. It's much easier to put these cables in before the drywall goes up. Trying to fish them through afterwards is hard work. BTDT

Don't bother with fibre. It's not going to get used. People have been saying "fibre is the next big thing" for 5 years now - and cable just keeps catching up. Video over Cat5 is cheap - so, instead of piping cable round the house, put all the set top boxes in one location, and remote control them. 100Mb Ethernet is very cheap - VHS video quality needs about 3 Mb/sec, so you can stream that across existing networks. Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.

Re:Fiber? What other cables.

[DynamicBits]

Cheap S-Video cables will deliver degraded signal over long distances. But, if you're willing to spend the extra cash, you can get very high quality cables that support long distances without any problems.

Re:Fiber? What other cables.

[isorox]

We have 20m runs of svideo at the uni tv station no problem. If you're more interested in length though we've done 100+m runs of high quality microphone cable (for video, £1.40 a metre), and 5-m+ runs of cheap (15p/metre) common tv cable with a couple of bnc or composite ends stuck on.

We have a 300m rj6 crap quality cable with 2 20db boosters and a high output on the VTR at the start and another booster at the end (before a proper industry booster and splitter with another 200m run from there).

If you need more then a 50m (150 foot) single run in your new house I'm envious.

However its all very well dropping in whatever cables you need, think about how you are going to use them - do you really want them all arriving in your basement? Drop a lot more cable down to your living room, just in case.

Might be worthwhile sticking some cheap speaker wire or 2 core mains flex down there too - if you need a signal.

And finaly, whatever you come up with, double it. A video signal to each room is fine, until you want a tv in there, and a camera.

Re:On the other hand...

[mmaddox]

Ignore these ranting loonies...

Wire what you WANT, and then add an extra run to your office, your wife's office, and behind your televisions. Don't forget the kitchen.

My new house was completed last April, and I've got 5e drops (2 or more per room) with a 100M switch in the "wiring closet" - an extra room in our attic. We considered fiber, too, but realized that fiber connections are just the flakiest things in the world. They're expensive, unreliable, and a downright pain, plus, it seems unlikely that we're going to be seeing anything faster than Gig-E anytime soon, so we're all set.

If, by some weird occurrence, fiber becomes standard sometime in the future, I can pull the rooms by cutting and tying off my 5e from the attic. I will have removed the 5e and added the fiber at the same time. No sweat.

More important than the cabling, make certain to get your primary computer room plugs on a different circuit from the rest of the room's circuit. THAT will come in handy. I have my office computer outlets and my wiring closet outlets on their own, separate circuits, and I don't feel too uncomfortable running what I want, now. Make sure you get extra outlets, too!

Re:Yes.

[somethinghollow]

He speaks the truth. New wireless standards are super fast, and easily replaceable later on, and minus one pesky wire from the lot.

Re:Don't do either yet.

[John Jorsett]

Don't forget to put a nylon cord in the conduit when you install it. When you go to run a new cable, it's a lot easier to pull it through than to try to push it or get a fishtape through the conduit. And when you run the new cable, pull a new section of cord through with it for the next time.