Slashdot Mirror
Wiring a House While It's Still Being Built?
digitalamish asks: "Back in 2001 Slashdot had this Ask Slashdot about wiring a new house for networking. Some of the comments in that discussion talked about running fiber vs cat5e. It's more than two year later, I'm starting to build a house, and I'd like to update this topic. So, what's the current state of people's thinking. Is good old Cat-5e still good enough, is fiber a better option? What about other options like Cat-6? Or with the state of wireless, is wiring a house even worth it any more?"
1) Put one or two strands of CAT 5 and 1 COAX cable to each room for phones, TV, etc.
2) Run CONDUIT everywhere. I can't stress this enough. DO NOT PUT ANY CABLES IN PLACE WITHOUT CONDUIT!!!
3) Make sure and put conduit (empty is fine) in ceiling locations as well. You never know when you might want to install a multi-room audio system.
4) Use 3" conduit in your entertainment room. You will want high-quality audio cables for a surround sound system, and they can quickly fill up a 1" or 2" conduit.
5) Think about running your empty conduit to locations near power, so you don't have to run a bunch of extension cords.
6) Fiber is an option down the road ('cause the equipment is so damn expensive), so don't do any tight conduit turns. This is pretty easy in a 4" stud wall.
7) Run string in the conduits and tie it off on both ends. Running new cable is *really* easy pulling a new cable and string with an existing string. Repeat after me - "string is cheap".
8) Run all your conduit to a central location (probably in the basement). You'll want a nice (rack even?) open area that you can mount equipment as well as patch panels, etc. Wire ties are your friend.
Hope this helps!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Run wiring for 802.11g to all rooms now!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
normal phone line Can't you just run another Cat5 pair to handle this?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
No great insights, but here's my opinion on a subject close to my heart.
:)
:)
Wireless or wired? wired will always be better for security, bandwidth and robustness than wireless. Any encoding tech that is developed for wireless can be reused for wired in a better environment. The main disadvantage - installation cost - doesn't apply to your situation. Of course you should have wireless as well
Fibre or Cat 6? Cat 6 - still the best price/performance. Notice that fibre didn't take over in the last 2 years, it probably won't in the next 2 either. But put in conduit so that you can pull anything relatively easily in future. Also, since you're at a point in the building process where it's easy to do, put in twice as many potential outlets as you think you'll need. It's so easy to do now and so hard to do later. Believe me - I've done it later
stay frosty and alert
When considering what cabling to run, just remember that it's way cheaper to run it now than to rip the walls open later and pay a carpenter to patch it all up.
Basically, the cables will cost the same, but installation is relatively free right now.
-Uberhund
Just go with Cat5e; it supports gigabit speeds (GigE over Copper is dropping in price very fast), which is more than fast enough until you switch to wireless.
Wireless is advancing at a pace that wired solutions never did; in just a few short years we've gone from 11mbit to 108mbit, with faster speeds and longer ranges in the cards for the future. By the time gigabit ethernet isn't enough for you, I'm certain wireless will be the solution you adopt.
Run all your transports outside the wall interior to the rooms. Blue pipe for outgoing water, red for incoming. Plastic channel surface mounted raceways for communication links. Gray electrical conduit. Black mat painted hvac. Choose your own colors. Run things in parallel. Come together. Fan out. Make a statement.
In -A LOT- of locales it is illegal for the soon-to-be-homeowner to do anything to the structure of the building during the construction phase. Cat5/Coax/Fiber communications cabling of any sort requires a low-voltage contractors license.
TRUST ME, it is worth your time.
There was a famous (ok semi-famous) case here in Phoenix where a guy went through all the work of getting Cat5+Coax run with conduit through several rooms of his custom home over the weekend. He came back the next weekend to finish the job only to find that the drywall was up in most of the rooms and everything he installed had been removed and junked by the General Contractor.
Being just a little upset, he decided to try and sue the General Contractor to have them pay for his time and materials and to have the General Contractor hire a sub-contractor to put in everything after the house was done.
The General Contractor filed a counter-suit for the cost of time and materials to remove all of the cabling the home-owner had installed, AND for the time and materials to replace all of the studs and beams he had drilled through to install all of the conduit.
Not surprisingly the General Contractor won. Why?
Because the home-owner wasn't. The house isn't actually yours until the final papers are signed on your final walk-through of the finished home.
The funny part is that the Judge fined the soon-to-be-home-owner several thousand daollars for trespassing on private property and performing electrical work without a license etc. ON TOP OF awarding the General Contractor the damages they requested.
Bottom line? He ended up paying about $24-thousand more for his house. And the General Contractor -refused- to allow a sub-contractor to install new cabling.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand I like being able to hear everything, on the other hand I like it to not sound like crap.
Y'know when you go to a outdoor sports game and there's a lot of reverb to the announcer's loudspeaker-blared voice? That's because there are a lot of speakers and sound comes out of all of them at essentially the same time, but then travels to your ears along longer or shorter paths, causing you to hear fuzzed up sound.
Obviously, it'll be better in a house, which should have more sound absorbers such as rugs and sofas, and unless you're building a mansion, we're not talking about little-leauge-field proportions, however, if I were an audiophile I'd stay far away from this.
Or another though occurs: have motion sensors throughout the house which only turn on the speakers in rooms where people were last detected. That way if you have 8 rooms wired but only 1 person home, you get sound that follows you around, and no reverb.
you can recycle the motion sensors for home security or MrHouse
its a good thought, but PVC has three main problems.
1: it is heavy
2: it likes to give off nasty fumes when burning
3: its expensive
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As a side note, be sure to have enough power (circuits and outlets) in every room, even rooms where you have no plans for power hungry devices. Spare bedrooms can turn into a server room before you know it.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
I say cat6 just because it is the latest. I use to think I would NOT have any phone outlets because I would use a multi handset phone system however I told myself i did NOT want wireless internet. Your big decisions should be wiring everything vs. wiring everything. Dont forget to look at re-sell prices when considering.
As far as facilitating growth use metal studs on non-load bearing interior walls if you can, they have cables channels in them stock. If your past this point in the build conduit is your friend but make sure you talk to your building inspector to find out what the legal % of full limit is on conduit (for ex. %66 full). As someone else mentioned you should pull several strings with each chunk of wire so you can easily run more, just remember to run new string when pulling more cable! When you pull string it's important to bundle your wires together every 8" with the string NOT in this bundle. All to often folks run string but it runs through the middle of the bundle.
For ethernet I recomend a 110 block. Label your ethernet on BOTH ends of the cabling using something like a p touch labeler and be sure to label your wall jacks AND the wall field. Dont be afraid to use the same wall field for phones.
I have never done anything with running large amounts of coax or fiber so best of wishes there.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
While your at it, put in a central vacuming system. I know this is a little off topic, but since we're running tubing all over the house... You can add a vacuming kick panel in the kitchen- sweep dirt right into it.
I dont do meaning of life questions.
I thought a lot about that, but remember two things about houses : a) the house probably already has LOTS of PVC pipe already in it, and b) if my house is on fire I don't plan on sticking around to smell the PVC fumes. I plan on grabbing my case of backup CDs and my laptop and watching that bad boy burn from a nice spot on the street.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Bad idea. PVC fittings are made for liquid, not cable. They don't have a smooth internal surface, so things will snag up as you pull them.
Secondly, the bend radius of small PVC fittings is so tight that pulling any moderately stiff wire will be awkward past just 2 or 3 bends. Conduit can be bent with much gentler sweeps for easier pulling and less cable damage.
The stiff blue flexible plastic conduit is ideal for this, because it automatically sweeps corners as you install it.
Handy installation hint: You can buy "cable lubricant" which makes long pulls go smoothly. Liquid hand soap works just as well.
I once worked for a company who worked exclusively with low-voltage systems like you are describing; essentially, we ignored electrical systems and focused on networking, home theater, automation, etc. My advice would be the following:
/. For these reasons, any suggestion that pushes you towards running conduit with pull string is one that needs to be modded up.
Ignore fiber for now. Consider that CAT-6 has a reliable throughput at 1000Mbps. Cat-5e will allegedly also do 1Gbps, but CAT-6 is now almost as cheap, so I would definitely run with CAT-6. Now consider that unless you're running some sort of ludicrous colo system from your house, the most stressful load you'll put on that infrastructure is probably streaming HDTV. Over-the-air HD is ~27mbps, D-Theater (the stuff recorded on D-VHS tapes) is about 37mbps, so even at that we're talking about well over 20 simultaneous streams moving out of a central file server, assuming you have something that can sustain 1Gbps reliably. Run plenum-coated cabling, even if it isn't required in your area; again, it isn't too terribly much more expensive, but the safety issues aren't worth saving $200 on your project.
The second problem with fiber is that you won't really know what type to run or how to terminate it. Unless we're talking about doing 1000 base-FX connections for existing equipment, do you run glass or plastic fiber? Multi-mode? Perhaps 1394b? What sort of connection should you terminate it with? Without any sort of consumer equipment to even build towards, your guess about any of those questions is as good as mine or anyone else on
One other recommendation about the CAT-6 or CAT-5e : Run way more than you think you'll need. In addition to serving as POTS pairs, lots of cool, esoteric devices out there can use CAT-5 for things you might want further down the road. I've seen KVM over Cat-5 systems, video distribution over CAT-5 (essentially, feeding a single video output from, say, a DVD carousel to a crapload of non HTPC-equipped TVs), and audio distribution systems (same idea as the video, but for whole-house audio). Using CAT-5 for some of that isn't the best solution by any stretch, but if you decide 5 years down the road that you really, really want whole-house audio and decide not to go conduit-pulling, it may make your life easy. Additionally, if you decide to do a PBX-style system (they have a lot of nice benefits, and there are some cool OSS implementations), most PBXes will need to use star topology systems like an ethernet setup, rather than daisy-chained systems like most POTS will be run.
Pull some RS-232 to video source locations (ie. where you might put all your home theatre equipment), lightswitch boxes, and computer locations. X10 is some bootleg home automation equipment, but some of the serial controlled stuff isn't actually all that expensive, and setting up a home automation system is a really fun geek project.
I would also recommend that you not neglect good quality Coax layout and runs in your eagerness for CAT-5 and Fiber fun. Satellite and OTA HDTV will both be easier to setup and rearrange if coax is home-run to the same point as everything else. Use RG-6, preferably Tri- or Quad-shielded cabling. Consider devoting a large-ish closet or basement area (if your region has basements). If the HVAC guys haven't come through yet, try to get them to put an AC and return air to a closet if that's where you want to put some stuff; that nice linux firewall box, mythTV server, networking equipment, and Home theater gear (if you decide to hide it) will thank you later.
Someone else mentioned the issue of doing it yourself, and that's definitely one to be aware of. If you are buying your house from a large production builder (Pulte, David Weekley, etc.) they will not let you do any of this. You don't own that house until you close on it, and they can't risk your stuff not being up to code, or you suing further down the road. They WILL tear your work out. If you're usi
All the advice above is okay, but you can easily ad $30,000 in extras by following it, and you will never get it back when you sell.
Figure out what you want and put it in. I'd go cable TV to each room, and a two runs of cat-5/6, one for phone, one for network. Wireless works great for a lot of purposes, use it!
Put surround sound jacks in the rooms where you will use it - family room, and perhaps living room.
Run two cable runs to the attic for future satellite and antennas. Hook them up if you want latter.
Forget about conduit, it sounds nice, but will you ever use it? Even if you will, will it help? For a single story house it is easy to come up from the basement/crawlspace where you need wires. Even for a two story, do you really think you will ever want more wires in the bedrooms? For that matter I've been in houses that have been completely re-wired a couple times, and you can't tell from the inside. Wall spaces are empty, meaning they serve double duty as conduit.
BUT WATCH THE MONEY. All these add ons cost money, a little planning will reveal that not much is likely to change, so why spend extra money planning for a change that won't happen? Instead plan for todays needs, and the obvious needs of the future, and counts on the far future taking care of itself.
That hit the nail on the head. If you do the conduit right, with nice big
junction boxes at *all* corners, conduit running to multiple locations in
every room, and so on, then you can run whatever kind of cable you want at
any time in the future very easily. Audio cable, video cable, fibre, Cat12b,
you name it, you'll be able to run it. What kind of network cable will you
(or whoever lives there) want in fifteen years? Fifty years? You have no
clue, right now. But you know it'll be easy to run it; take a screwdriver,
take the faceplates off, pull the cable through, and you know who Bob is.
One more thing:
> Run all your conduit to a central location (probably in the basement).
> You'll want a nice (rack even?) open area that you can mount equipment
> as well as patch panels, etc. Wire ties are your friend.
If it were me, I'd put nice boxes (kinda like a breaker box, but without the
breakers) every fifty feet or so around the outside wall of the basement, with
a nice fat conduit running straight up from each one to a junction box,
accessible at the top by removing a faceplate (like a lightswitch cover).
In any part of the basement that's going to be "finished", I'd also run
horizontal conduit between these boxes. I'd put an electrical outlet near
each of these boxes, so that a hub or switch can easily be put there.
Then, N years from now, when you want to run your new Terabit Ethernet cable
or whatever from the sewing room to the kitchen, you pick one of the empty
faceplates in the sewing room, run the cable from there to the nearest
junction box and down to the box in the basement, where you put a hub. In
the kitchen you do the same thing; then you run a cable around the horizontal
conduit to connect your hubs, and you're done; with a hub at each of the
basement boxes, you never need more than one horizontal cable of any given
type, no matter how many things you run in the room above.
So, you want more faceplates than you need right now in every single room
(yes, the bathroom; yes, the garage, too; I'd put one in each closet also),
and a system of conduit connecting them all. You do NOT want to have to
tear up your drywall later because there's not conduit going to such-and-such
a location.
This isn't cheap; conduit costs more than cable. It costs less than redoing
your drywall later, though. Run the conduit. You'll be glad you did.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I much prefer Cat5/e for Phone systems because if ever a critter nibbles on a cat5 they got a ways further to chew through, and you've got 4 pair instead of just 2-3. The Coaxial idea many have mentioned seems sound, I would also make sure they all terminate wherever you have room for a coax-amp/head end. I guess Ideally just create an environment just like a professional cabler would. Label everything on any endpoint, and keep everything standard, if you are trying to decide on the fiber/copper debacle I would say Fibre is much too expensive to screw around with, and probably not necessary (unless your head end isn't going to be the area you're running your server room from, and in that case a single strand to your server room *might* make sense.) I'm not sure what the cheapest gear you could get for fibre would be, I'm sure 3com sells something resonably affordable (1200-2400 dollar range for a decent 10/100/1000)
Still unless there were some extenuating circumstances I wouldn't see any need for much more than a gig in the near future, but then again as long as the conduit is there, you can always retrofit.
Wiring is cheap at this point in the building process. Pull some Cat5e and fiber and be done with it.
Or do you want to make it easier for your neighbors to spy on that nasty little pr0n habit you have? While those signals will have trouble getting from one corner of the house to the next (especially between floors) you can bet someone will be able to eavesdrop easily. Wireless security isn't very secure. Parabolic antenna not included. Quiet Ashcroft, I'm typing here...
Sorry, anyway. Wired is more secure, faster, and you can always add a wireless node or two for the laptop when doing non-sensitive browsing. I would firewall that connection from my LAN.
Don't want that cheezy windows laptop being a vector for attacks, eh?
Here come da fudge!
- Three RG-6 to every bedroom. You can use these to run Dish, DirecTV, or Cable. You want two in case you want a dual-tuner DVR. You can put HDTV (antenna) signals on the same wire as the satellite signals with an inexpensive diplexor. Digital cable doesn't play nice, so run a 3rd line just in case.
- Four RG-6 for the main TV room. Two for a DVR, one if you want to add HDTV, one if you want digital cable.
- Four Cat5e to every bedroom. Three for networking (gigabit), one for phone
- Five Cat5e for the main TV room. Four for devices (XBox, DVR, Media Viewer, HTPC, etc.), one for phone (you can split it for multiple devices).
- Terminate all lines at an MDF (wiring closet). If you have cable installed, have the line run here - you can use that line for your cable modem and/or conenct it to the RG6 lines for (digital) cable. Have your phone wiring run here - you can run it all over the house through your extra cat5e lines; you can also use it if you want DSL. Run lines from your satellite dish here; you can put your multiswitch here (it is indoors, climate controlled, has power, and every RG6 line terminates here - what more do you want) Make sure you have power here two; a 15A grounded outlet should suffice. If you have the room, you may want to put a file server here as well - make sure you have shelving that will support your gear. This wiring closet should have ventilation and heat like any other room.
- Run all of your wires through 2" or 3" conduit. Avoid tight bends. Run string through for pulling future wires. You may want to upgrade later.
- Label everything. Every plate should be numbered, every jack should be lettered. Use a letter to differentiate between coax/fiber/UTP. For example, plate 5, UTP Cat5e, jack 1 could be labeled 5UA. Plate 5, RG6 Coax, jack 1 could be labled 5CA. Punchdowns should be labeled accordingly at the MDF.
- If you have a computer room or den, run extra cat5e. Perhaps up to five. Beyond five, it makes sense to put a switch in your den.
- If you have notebooks, get an 802.11b (or 802.11g, if you want the bandwidth) access point. You can put it in your MDF.
Because we wired our house like this, it was easy to switch the entire house from cable to DSL. No rewiring required. We could even switch from DirecTV to Dish or cable without much hassle.
I just moved into my new house just over a month ago.
The builder allowed me to run network cable, after I signed a waiver (if I hurt/kill myself it's my fault).
Anyway, the catch was that the builder, while nice enough to let me run network, specified that I was *not* to run conduit, nor any coax, nor any 'telephone cable' (yes, I know).
In any case, what I did:
-each of the 3 upstairs bedrooms got 2 boxes with 2 wires each; one cat5e, the other cat6.
-family room also got 2 boxes with the same pair of drops each, PLUS speaker wire running from where the TV is to the place behind where the couch is going (note kitchen and family room are essentially the same room, and can share one of those boxes)
-one box in the dining room with the same pair
-one box in the living room with the same pair
-all of the above came out of two 1000' spools. It was more than enough for my ~1700 sq.ft. home.
The catch?
-builder cut my speaker wire on both sides in the basement (bastards). Claimed it got in the way when they were installing the air-return duct. I have no recourse (since it was on their property at the time, right?)
-network cable all went to the basement. ALL of it got unravelled and thrown in tangled heaps everywhere. ALL of it got unlabelled. No joke, I still have 5 wires that I need to identify. Again, no recourse.
Moral of the story? Get an agreement from the builder to allow you to put stuff in... but don't expect that they won't mess with your stuff.
On the other hand, while it is tedious to have to identify all the cable (and irritating that I have to splice my speaker cable), having the wires in the wall was the best thing I could have done. I'm reasonably happy with the outcome, and though I wish I could have gotten conduit in, I don't think I'll really need it - I'll probably move before I need upgraded cable. And yes, I DO plan on using my spare wire to run telephone (although the builder doesn't know that that's possible, don't tell them).
Thus far I've only bothered to wire all of the upstairs cat5e drops. I presently don't have the need (nor the equipment) to run anything faster. I'll get around to the cat6 drops eventually. I keep the cable modem and the Linksys router in the basement.
As for the lack of coax? No problem - I don't have TV service right now (nor a TV... yet). Don't have it, don't really miss it. However, once I do, I plan on having a nice MythTV setup, and since the server will be in the basement, having coax in the rest of the house should be unnecessary (though by default I *did* get coax installed by the builder in the family room and master bedroom).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I have really come to hate being in the kitchen like this. At least one parent is always doing something to piss me off. I need to be away from them.
You're 18. Move out. Simple, eh?
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
It's far easier to push the fish through, entirely by itself, then use it to pull the wire back from the other side.
I have misplaced my pants.
Live in MI and just getting finished building my father's new house. My cousin, a licensed electrician, did all the electrical and I did the data. Low voltage in MI, at least, requires no permit, no inspection and no license.
What this story is about is a guy who didn't bother to get along with the GC and was probably buying a spec house, not a custom build.
I always liked this story:
TRAINED RAT USED TO STRING COMPUTER CABLES
Rattie, Judy Reavis's trained rat, is being used to string computer cables
in hard-to-reach places in California school buildings. The rat clenches
string in its teeth, and then follows the path of least resistance inside
the walls, along ceiling panels and under floors. The rat goes to an exit
point identified by tapping sounds and is rewarded with cat food. Computer
cable is attached to the string and pulled through the path used by the
rat. Dr. Reavis, a biophysicist and physician, was volunteering for NetDay
2000, the school computer project, when a co-worker mentioned a failed
effort to train a rat in wiring. Dr. Reavis thought of her adopted
laboratory rat and built a maze of plastic pipe in her Benecia, California,
home to train the rat. It took about 20 minutes a day for three months to
train Rattie to negotiate the maze, avoid dead ends, and travel toward
tapping sounds.
Frederick Rose, "Need an Electrician? Here's One Who Works Both
Fast and Cheap" The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1997, B1
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
Run 6 RG-6 quad shield cables to where the satellite dish would.should go. Think about when you want the cables to come out of the house in order to avoid eaves, etc... HDTV over satellite I hear needs 4 cables alone and running these cables after the fact is horribly ugly.
In the house run Cat 5E for phone and data. In fact use RJ-45 female plugs for both phone and data. If you do things right in the wiring closet you can switch any jack from data to telephone (and vice-versa) without needing to punch stuff down. Running non-terminated fiber would be nice but when you need it 10 years from now who knows if the cable will be useful. I've seen houses wired with old Thick Ethernet ahead of time only to find out that its useless in a Cat 5 world.
Locate your wiring closet somewhere in the center of the house and on the second floor if you have one. Put your WAP here for ideal coverage. In your wiring closet plan for some ventilation in case you are planning on putting a house server in it. A cheap bathroom fan on a timer to such the hot air out into the attic is usually enough. Avoid carpet for wiring closet as well due to static electricity. Doing a build-your-own rack is not expensive and looks nice. Just buy the rack-rails and have the framer build your opening.
If you are going high-speed via DSL have the folks wire in the DSL filter in the home run. This keeps you from putting additional DSL filters on the line which can hurt performance. Leviton makes one for about $20.
Wireless is great and should be considered during construction but it won't ever replace a physical line. Think about telephones. The cheapest hard-wired phone sounds better and clearer than the most expensive cordless phone.
And finally, try and leave it to the pro's...at least the running of the cables. What you can and cannot drill is not obvious and the builder is likely going to jack the price a bit if you want to get in there and do it yourself. Cable jockies can run it faster and cheaper than you ever could and they pay much less for cables, jacks, and tools than we do. $3,000 to $4,000 built into the price of the home gives you a stunning amount of jacks and capabilities.
Whatever you do cablewise, take pictures of all walls after the cabling has gone and and before the drywall goes up. With the pictures (properly labelled and identified), you'll be able to tell what is behind/in every wall in case you need it. I took pictures before my house's drywall went up, and I've found the pictures very helpful several times.
gigabit currently requires all 4 pairs.
Current non-extreme 802.11g (54mbit) solutions are capable of about 20mbit actual throughput. Therefore I'd assume that future 108mbit standards (I recall reading about one that's rating was planned to be 108mbit, and I'm not talking about an "extreme" mode) would increase that to ~40mbit. While wireless networks are indeed a shared medium, the primary use of any home network is to share an internet connection, which rarely go over 10mbit in speed. For sending files accross a network, 40mbit is currently sufficient for most people.
However, as I noted in my original post, wireless technology is advancing at a much more rapid pace than wired ethernet. By the time 1000baseT is not fast enough (I'm certain it will be MANY years before this is the case), I'm sure there will be a wireless standard that can replace it; perhaps some medium-range ultra-wideband solution.
What I'm trying to say is, there is no need for anything better than Cat5e or Cat6 cabling; they both support gigabit speeds, which is more than sufficient for even the most demanding power useres, and will remain so for a great deal of time to come; most people would not notice if their network were suddenly switched to 10mbit half duplex, as their internet connection would still be shared at full speed.
Also, please note that half-duplex does not mean that a network will max out at 25% of capacity. In fact, it will max out at 100% of capacity; a 10mbit half-duplex network shared among several machines will still allow 10mbit (or something more like 7-8mbit due to other concerns) of aggregate traffic to pass over the network. Keep in mind that full-duplex means that a network can transfer 200% of it's rated speed (100mbit networks can do 200mbit if you combine outgoing and incomming data).
I had my house pre-wired in 1980 (back then, everyone, including the builder and electricians, thought I was nuts).
My advice? Don't do it.
For the cost of installation (in 2004 dollars), I could have upgraded my wireless infrastructure about a half-dozen times. Not to mention all the time wasted on the terminations, debugging dead lines, protection gear (all that wire is one big antenna), and interface equipment.
With Ultra-Wide-Band offering gigabit speeds in a few years, it won't matter anymore. The components (video, speakers, stereo, etc.) can all be wireless. There's more than enough bandwidth with today's technology, and it's cheap.
Get your price quotes for conduit and Cat5E/6 and all the rest, then compare it to what it will cost for a really good wireless implementation. You'll find that you can save quite a bit -- and use it to upgrade when the technology improves.
This wasn't an option when I did my network, burglar alarm, media cabling and termination. Rather than go through the cost of upgrading that outdated cable, I moved most everything to wireless. I'll never go back.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Skimmed the discussion so far and didn't see this:
Especially with long long cable runs, leave service loops - extra wire at each end - of maybe 2-10 extra feet of wire, depending upon how much you tend to use up when repairing a busted jack/plug/punchdown.
There is nothing worse than having to run a new 50' line because the person who did it first ran *exactly* the amount needed, and then someone tripped over a patch cable and ripped the cable out of the jack and the jack out of the wall and there's no spare cable to fix the punchdowns on the jack...
(Now, mind you, what I did *that* time was to put a new plug onto the in-wall wire, then attach a short length of spare cable to the jack, put a jack on the other end of *that*, and plug that into the in-wall. Kludge city.)
sgfc, CCNA
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
When I build my own home (in a couple of years, I hope), I'll install this to all rooms. Instead of pulling a bunch of different cable, why not do 2XCat5, 2X Coax, and a fiber pair? This stuff is kind of expensive, ($1/foot at Home Depot) but when you consider what's contained in a single jacket, it makes sense. I would probably run extra service to the living room to accommodate the extra AV and computer gear, but a single run of this cable to each room is probably enough for most people.
Honestly, I'm surprised nobody else has suggested this yet. I get a woody every time I see this stuff.
If you are planning on supporting your company network from home, you will need to get your company approval before you can put their data on your home wireless network. Just because you have the technology at home doesn't mean that you have the right to broadcast company data all over. This is especially true if you work in a medical environment with HIPAA. JHMO.
While you're pulling your network cable, also consider installing wiring for a security system, 4x24 works just fine, and you'll probably want solid core, easier to work with later. You don't really have to worry about putting it in conduit, but make sure you put nail-guards anywhere that it's going THROUGH a stud.
this article is a day or two old at this point so no one is probably going to read it, but trust me, it is worth it.
Cabling isn't our core business, but is a service we offer and that I have been trained to perform. So, here are some points you may want to consider:
1) Conduit, conduit, conduit
It's been said before, and I'll say it again: install conduit, and lots of it. At least 1" to each single-gang box. If you have an unfinished basement or drop ceiling, it's always easier when you can run the conduit straight down, and put a box at the bottom to act as a pull point. Pull string. String is cheap, save your money.
2) Don't overwire.
Once the conduit and string are in, installing extra cables is a trivial task. People here are saying to run 3 or 4 cables to a room even if you don't foresee using them. That's wasting money. Why drive up your capital costs unnecessarily? What if the cable specs change before you need the cable? What if you never use it? What if you want to pull in a different media, but the conduit is full of Cat5e you'll never use? String is cheap, save your money.
3) Don't clump.
Unless you are planning to have the Mother Of All Multimedia Systems, or otherwise know for a fact that you will need a dozen connectors running to one piece of furniture, resist the urge to use a two-gang box. If you do this, you will more likely than not end up running patch cables halfway around the room. Instead, put two single-gang boxes on different walls. With a good modular termination system, you should be able to fit 6 modules on a single-gang faceplate.
4) Don't use Cat5e for phones.
Cat 3 is cheaper, and more than sufficient for telephones. A 1000' box of 4-pair Cat5e costs $150 CAD. A 1000' box of Cat3 costs $50 CAD. If you haven't already decided the purpose for a cable, don't pull it. String is cheap, save your money.
5) Invest in a good modular termination system
We use Panduit, but go with what works for you. Avoid IBDN, they're bloated and expensive.
6) Avoid combo cable
It's a waste of money.
You may want to have the cables and conduit professionally installed, or just the conduit, or do it all yourself. I would personally recommend at least having the electrician install the conduit, but whatever you choose, make sure you specify exactly what you want, where you want it, and inspect the work before the walls go up. Particularly if you have the electrician pull the cables, some of the less reputable contractors tend to "forget" to install conduit, since they assume you won't look in the walls until it's too late. (No offence to any electricians reading, I'm sure 95% of you are good honest workers, but there are enough bad apples that it's important to see the work for yourself.)
- Adam