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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Build a Home Network To Fully Utilize Google Fiber?
kstatefan40 writes I am closing on a house next week which is connected to Google Fiber. I am ecstatic to have a gigabit connection, but the previous homeowner had them install the jack in an awful location. I'm going to be in a situation where I am paying for more than I can technically achieve over wireless. I have purchased a couple of 600mbps powerline adapters, but those still won't fully use the gigabit connection. Is there a better way to achieve a truly gigabit internal connection without substantial structural or wiring modifications?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Still introduces unneeded latency. Wire that bitch up.
Just put ethernet everywhere, it's not that much work. I asume the house you're moving into will be empty anyway.
Good luck getting all your devices on a stable connection over 600mb. It is technically possible, but the topology and composition of your home coupled with the quality of your device adapters/antenna may prevent sufficient signal for those speeds. It's hard to beat CAT5e+ when it comes to Gb connectivity. You can get all the parts and tools you need to wire and terminate it all at your local big box hardware store (i.e. Lowes, Home Depot, etc).
Man up and wire the house. It's not that hard, CAT5e cable is cheap. And then you can install handy RJ45 jacks in the walls of each room.
Well you could try something like this? http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-...
First, go plug your laptop in via ethernet in the awful location, and admire the glorious bandwidth.
Second, use your powerline adapters and/or some 802.11ac routers to get internet in the rest of your house. I'm almost certain there is no real need for you to use the full gigabit connection, so for now just don't worry about it. Of course this is not the answer you want, but it's the practical solution.
...first define where your telecom enclosure or closet will be. Then consider how you want to connect your devices; copper Ethernet, wireless, etc. Then you need to investigate pathways for adding horizontal cables ("drops") to those areas, and you need to look into the equipment side (separate firewall, managed switch, etc) and how you want to define the usage policies.
In my case, if I were in your shoes, I'd install a telecom closet where the old flue for the now-gone basement wood-burning-stove pipes through the ground floor. I'd run two copper Cat6a drops to most rooms, and I'd cable to the entertainment centers at least two, possibly three. To my office I'd pull six. I'd put at least one to ceiling locations in the basement, the ground floor, and the detached workshop, probably digging a trench for a 2" conduit, transition from general-purpose indoor cable to OSP cable when I go outside and back in. I might also put in lightning arrestors that are PoE capable to protect the switch from the WAP or cable being struck; wouldn't worry about protecting the WAP, it'll die if struck regardless.
I'd probably look at a Cisco 3560G 8port PoE switch, it technically has ten ports, eight PoE capable, two not (that can accept fiber SFP transceivers) and there should be at least some L3 capability. Then get a vlan-trunk-capable L3 router/firewall device, put the WAPs on a separate VLAN (and go with VLAN-capable WAPs, for trusted/owned and untrusted/visitor devices) and build rules for the various VLANs, ie trusted can get to LAN devices, untrusted can't.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No reason not to have Gigabit Ethernet in the walls. A 1000 foot spool of CAT 5E is under $90 at Home Depot and a decent quality set of terminating tools is under $60. Gigabit switches are cheap now too. You'll also need something to use to fish the wires thru the walls. Make sure you know how to terminate your cables correctly or you'll slow things down due to errors (or they just won't work at all). You can buy pre-terminated cables but they're more expensive (but might be good if you're in a hurry).
I've tried both wireless client bridges (300Mbps N) and powerline Ethernet adapters for an HDHomerun tuner, and my results were: a) only one tuner could stream over the wireless and b) the powerline adapters were an epic fail. The punch line is that the HDHomerun works fine and dandy over 100BaseT. Between the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum and the poor penetration of 5 GHz, wireless just doesn't cut it for anything that needs throughput.
String some Cat5e or Cat6, and leave the wireless for laptops and tablets.
Cat5e will work fine for gigabit. Cat6 will support 10G, but 10G costs a fortune.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
The simple simple answer to your question is "no, that's not yet possible".
Do yourself a favor and run a wire. There is really no substitute. Even if some wireless solutions claim speeds over 1 gbit you are not very likely to actually reach that speed consistently.
I have Google fiber. I wired my house with Cat5E, and I have a nice Extreme Networks gigabit switch tying it all together.
You will never put a DENT in Google Fiber. I've only found two speed test servers that can even come close, and one of them is hosted by Google right on the Fiber plant.
The KC Startup Village (http://www.kcstartupvillage.org/) got some early hype because they leased a home with Fiber and loan out the rooms to various hackers. Even they can't do more than momentarily scratch the surface of a gigabit connection. When they do, it's only by performing ridiculous stunts like playing 63 YouTube videos at once.
That said, it's still a great service. The upload alone is worth it vs the other cable and DSL choices. The TV service is pretty good too. Wire out your house if you're willing and able, but don't obsess over "fully utilizing" the connection. Many businesses can't even come close to saturating a gigabit internet link.
The rest of the internet just isn't fast enough yet. There are no apps or services that exist or will exist in the next several years that could fully utilize this. Even Google has said they didn't build this network for today. They built it for 10 years from now.
Order cable, or satellite TV.
Watch how the installers run lines around the outside of your domicile and then punch a hole through the wall to get into the specific room.
Do the same thing yourself with ethernet (use the right rating of cable, and add conduit if necessary).
** Bonus points: Do your research and check out a neighbor or friend's place instead of ordering services.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Houses built in the last 5 years or so usually have cat5 wiring to the phone jacks. And they are probably pulled to a convenient location for a switch. My last home was like that and I rewired the phone for gigabit, got a switch that supported PoE and installed HP intellijack switches on the walls where I needed multiple ports. Worked great. The new owners should be thanking me!
What you need to do is get one of these wireless backhaul things and put one at one end of your house, and one on the other.
http://www.microwave-eetimes.c...
Then you've got a 4Gbps backhaul from your fiber point to the rest of your house. Stock up on a bunch of those, and you should be able to exercise your fiber like crazy.
As a bonus, you can cook your dinner by just putting your food in the beam pathway.
You have yet to move into your house. Stop making excuses and run Ethernet. Even if it isn't an in-wall installation (though I absolutely highly recommend it, it *will* add value to your house), since you have no furniture to move, run cords along baseboards and do it the right way so any future home owners won't think you did a crappy job. Man/woman up and get it done.
it sounds nice but in the real world netflix won't break 10mbps on google fiber. their CDN boxes will have 100gbps connections for tens of thousands of users to share.
and every other edge provider can't support all their users at 1gbps. either they don't pay for enough bandwidth on their end or they don't have enough capacity to support all their users at speeds like that.
i've had dropbox uploads go 1mbps on a 50mbps connection for this very reason
save your money. the internet is more than just your ISP. only place you see those speeds are on the speedtest sites which are scams anyway
I hope you do not call me for tech support, I work it and I do not like these type of call.
"YOUR device "X" does not see my wireless network but everythings else works, you have a shit product and you have to help me fix it."
You want the easy fix and sometimes its not there. ...
I was going to write some technical stuff on a pro/cons basis but then I said that its not worth the time to write it out.
You already know what the solution is, get over it and just do it.
Sorry (not really), I do networking support for making our device work on your crappy networks.
Depends on how many people are living there and what they're doing. The way to think of it is that the 1 GB connection is a great big ol' pipe that'll never be a choke point, no matter how many people are streaming Netflix or torrenting Fedora 20.
That said, my main workstation goes to a 1 GB switch attached to Cat 6 I had punched through the upstairs into the attic, threaded down the folding ladder frame, tacked across the garage ceiling to where the fiber modem is located in the far corner of the garage. So I have a direct full speed connection should I ever need it for anything. But for wifi, it's the cumulative throughput that's important.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Almost all of the wireless technologies quote transfer rates which are VERY optimistic (as in; "We achieved this maximum speed in a lab, in completely controlled conditions which will be nothing like you'll ever have where you intend to use it!"). Same with the power over ethernet adapters out there. (You'll find quite a few of them that only provide 10/100 ethernet ports despite claims of doing 500mbit speeds. Why? Because they know in real world usage, you'll never get close enough to saturate the 100mbit port's top speed anyway. The underlying technology may have a 500mbit top theoretical speed, but it's irrelevant in regular usage.)
On the other hand? I would recommend you consider calling local contractors who do structured cabling and get bids for wiring up your place. I understand that the whole "Do it yourself!" thing isn't always really feasible (or worth your time and effort). It can be a real trick fishing cable through some of the walls you want to run them through, etc. But you might be surprised at what you can have professionally done at a price that's really not so terrible? Remember, you are essentially putting this cabling in your home permanently (plates going on walls and the whole bit). Your home was a big investment. Isn't it worth a little fraction of its price to cable it properly and cleanly?
(At my old house, all I really wanted was a gigabit connection between a jack in the basement and one on the second floor, on the opposite side of the house. I found a handyman who also did a lot of electrical work, plus had some proficiency in I.T. who got it done for me for a total of only $75 or so. He ran the line across my roof, slipping it under the shingles somehow.) I had an entire office wired up with CAT6 cable (2 jacks in each outlet of each office), that went back to a labeled patch panel in a closet, mounted to a 2 post rack secured to the floor. Including testing and verification of all connections - I think the total cost on that was around $4,500. So you have to really figure out where you want cable run and how many jacks, plus where everything should terminate. The price will vary wildly depending on how much labor and cabling all of that requires.
Depending on how ridiculous you feel like getting you could just run a really long Cat6 cable... I mean, as a temporary solution until I finish wiring my house I have that right now (I absolutely hate it, but its motivation to finish the new network faster I guess?).
The equipment and supplies required to fish cable through attics, walls, ceilings, basements and even running it around the house isn't expensive, novel or hard to use. It's more time consuming and frustrating than anything else. It's fall so temperatures in the attic aren't bad, and it's not freezing cold outside. Call a buddy/spouse/family member and get it done.
Short answer: No with a "but".
Long answer: Yes with an "if".
Real advice: Just wire it. If you've got a basement or crawlspace come up from below. If you've got an attic, come down from above. Or hire someone to do it. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. You're spending six figures on a home (I assume) and balking at three figures of improvements. How much are you thinking of spending on wireless and powerline stuff knowing it's a half-assed patch that won't maximize performance? Do the job right, do it once, and be happy.
Constantly amazed at this pursuit. Maybe I'm old school or something (LOL, just turned 30.) My life is my computers, my work and my hobbies, but I have a 50mb/s connection, and a family which consumes multiple netflix/hulu/youtube streams for the entire 4 hours that we're at home in the evening and not asleep. It all works fine for us. Not saying it would for others, and I'm all about the technical aspects of it, but come on. What in the world are you trying to do? The only possible use case I could see for this is piracy.
Connect your TOR forwarder and Torrent node directly to the GBIC.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Just put ethernet everywhere, it's not that much work. I asume the house you're moving into will be empty anyway.
He asked, "Is there a better way to achieve a truly gigabit internal connection without substantial structural or wiring modifications?" So the optimal solution here seems to be to put ethernet wherever it's feasible without altering the wiring, and go wireless for other places. Maybe have a few APs in the hard to reach places
Dragging CAT6 is no worse than dragging a phone line. Get off your lazy arse and do it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seriously it is super easy to run cat5e in a house; even if you rent you can do it in a way that does not damage anything.
What the hell has happened to Slashdot when people can't be arsed to run a bit of cable?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I can already fill a gigabit connection pushing stuff around the house. Having a local gigabit ISP would just allow me to expand this to friends and family.
A cloud backup without the cloud would be a good start.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In which case, he should probably go w/ PCIe SSDs, as opposed to SATA ones
Don't forget a snake to chase the cables through the walls. Getting the cable from the attic to the right level at the wall is usually the hardest part. Depending on the home construction, it can be almost impossible.
I ran the surround sound speakers for a friend. The TV, receiver, etc, were in a corner of two outside walls. The standard local construction was concrete blocks, a 1x2 or 1x3 strip vertically, some very thin fiberglass and vapor barrier, and finally the drywall for the interior. Outside walls also have a double layer of 2x4 for the header.
Since you're working where the roof meets the wall, you usually barely have room to get a drill in, and definitely can't get close enough to see down the hole.
Inside walls are a lot easier, if you can use them. They don't usually have a header, nor insulation.
It helps to have a friend (but not to be the friend) who has done it before. It takes some pretty serious bribes to get me to even think about doing it. :)
I always suggest wired over wireless. It will always be a better connection.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Is your router on the first floor, and does your house have an unfinished basement (no finished ceiling)? If so, you can easily run Ethernet cable through the basement. Just drill one hole in the floor near the fiber device, and another hole where you need your computer. Run the cable into the basement. This is easy to hide if you have carpet -- if you have hardwood, drill it near an existing opening (like the heating duct).
My relatively new Linksys cannot even handle my 110 Mb/s connection. There are home routers out there from the tests that seem to handle upwards of 800 Mb/s, so be sure to buy one of those since they are actually pretty close to the real-world throughput of 1 GB/s copper ethernet.
As for how to take advantage? No question that you have to go with 1000 Mb/s ethernet, if not for the sake of your inetnet, then just for local sharing. You might also want to upgrade your wireless to take advantage, but really you should be concerned mostly with the speed of your desktops and home servers.
Use all Gigabit switches and hardwire as much as possible. Buy your cables from http://www.bluejeanscable.com read this article http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/is-your-cat6-a-dog.htm and you'll find out that almost any cable that you buy will fail to met Gigabit ethernet specs unless you buy from bluejeans cable.
Make sure you get the most out of your fiber with Denon AKDL1 cables
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A single modern 7.2k HD can sustain 100MB/s *linear* no problem. ;)
It's the random r/w caused by torrent downloads, assembling usenet articles and the like that kills disk throughput and really, really wants to be on a SSD.
And even a "old" 128GB Samsung 830 is plenty fast enough for that
Harbor freight has wall fishes for $10. Can't beat that for something you'll use one time!
Break the bread and get the rare earth magnets made for the job. Or hack up a similar solution. Spherical magnets for the end of the wire. Big Strong honking Magnet for your hand.
Unless the house is lath and plaster. Then you're just fucked. Take key walls down to studs and upgrade everything, day 1.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> what would I do differently? Most rooms are fine. I find I could use more in one of the entertainment areas, but some of those devices are both wired and wireless (and if push came to shove, I would simply move a device to WiFi).
You could also put a 5 port switch at the entertainment center. Then decide which devices can share a gigabit connection - you're not using them all at once anyway.
At my house, the office has several devices, and two jacks on opposite walls. Three or four devices connect to a little 5 port switch in the office. The lines from each room connect to a centrally located 8 port switch at the top of a closet. One if those rooms has the big switch, where we plug in the file server, the pbx, the printer, the modem, etc. So I figure one or two ports per room, no matter which room. If one side of a room needs 8 ports it gets an 8 port switch right there.
And don't forget, even if you get every device in the house at 600 Mbps wireless, that's still essentially a single collision domain, half-duplex. You'd be lucky to get 400 Mbps total throughput with 10 devices connected at 600 Mbps and 9 of them sending trivial traffic and one trying to use it all (unless you have some on 2.4 and some on 5 GHz, where you'll have two separate collision domains). And even that 400 Mbps is up and down combined, so 300 Mbps down on a 600 Mbps connection is a more realistic number with all devices connected at that 600 Mbps.
When some are slower connections, you'll get much worse. A 1 Mbps 802.11b connection moving 500 kbps will flood the air for 50% of the time, cutting the speeds for everyone else, even if that slow one is connected to an N or AC AP. When you upgrade, you have to upgrade all, starting with the slowest.
Learn to love Alaska
No it doesn't introduce latency (at least, not any appreciable amount, even for really sensitive applications) rather it's just too unreliable and such a waste of a gigabit broadband connection (remember AC requires channel bonding to get gigabit, and you aren't going to channel bond too well with multiple devices trying to fight for spectrum.) See my reply here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/commen...
Real use: get the best 802.11ac router and count your blessings. It's very unlikely that any of internet services you actually use is able to saturate 433 mbps or whatever you get our of WiFi in practical use.
Hobby: Get contractor recommendations from friends and compare prices. They don't have to be electricians let alone network specialists, just people who know how to tinker with walls a bit. You'll probably be able to get a couple of outlets for under $1K, especially if you are Ok with wires running around floor/walls. I guess if you were interested in doing such things yourself, you wouldn't ask the question?
Avoid: Powerline anything. Very flaky and dependent on wiring layout and noise from other electrical stuff. You will never get anything like 802.11ac.
All MoCA speeds are theoretical and based on ridiculous conditions never found in the field. MoCA sucks. The best use for coax is pulling cat6 or cat 5e cable.
You are paying for a service which you haven't stated an use for, and yet you are worried that you're being ripped off unless you make up some stupid reason to "fully utilize" it (whatever that means; I guess you can always stream /dev/urandom to make sure you get your money's worth). But you can't even come up with a "utilization", so you're fretting about wiring instead.
Again, who gives a shit? Just pay some monkey to wire up cat5. If you and your house are still around when you actually come up with a reason to do something better, pay another monkey to wire up (whatever the fuck).
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I've done some tests with my home setup, 2 stories, upstairs 2.4ghz 3 antenna AC -> downstairs router 3 antenna AC -> upstairs 3 antenna 5ghz AC. I get about 10mbps via SSH easily, and I suspect it would get significantly better 5ghz -> 5ghz. No channel bonding, full compatibility with N/G.
Its certainly not gigabit, but its way faster than anything you'd need on devices in arbitrary locations.
If I had gigabit then I'd have a NAS or spare computer right next to the router to suck stuff down at max speed, and AC for everything else.
Its plenty reliable. Not sure why you'd think it is unreliable.
100mbit on powerline... not a chance.. I tried the 300Mbps ones, and couldn't get over 1-2 Mbps...
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Either your going to have to hire a couple of contractors to do the drops, go buy your own kit, or do it on the cheap. Not sure how much per drop it is, but when I did it it was around $75 a drop. Depending on were the connection is (you never actually said) really depends on what options you have. Did he put it under the basement stairs, inside a haunted crypt, outside on top of a flagpole...
Honestly, I don't know what kind of end equipment Google provides. Flat CAT6 cable isn't very expensive, a 100 foot pre-made cable is around $30 and it's really easy to hide. Run a cable up the wall, around the edge of the ceiling, from the endpoint to your computer room into the actual router, and run more flat cat6 from there. Personally, I have a Cisco RV180 as a router, a bunch of equipment in a rack, and then some flat cat6 running to a switch in the living room, the switch connects about 4 other computers plus a 1420AG AP.
Even then I doubt you'll get full gig speeds. Even internally on my network, I top out around 800MB/s because of overhead, and my file server is teamed with dual intel server nics.
Homeplug AV2 offers a 1200mbps symbol rate. Real speed will be lower, of course, but it'll get you closer. Here's a product that should be out soonish: http://www.trendnet.com/press/...
If you're lazy like me, just buy pre-terminated 30m cables and run them from a switch in the roof or basement, (or a cupboard if you're really fancy) to wall plates scattered throughout the house. You can go up to 100M in length and it saves on crimping. Anything less than Ethernet is a joke and will be flaky as hell. You could also drop a ton of money on some Xirrus wireless but really for same cost, Cat-5/6 Ethernet is much better.
Appreciate this response. I've grown very tired of my apartment complex's saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5) because everyone is right on top of each other and every apartment has one of three routers from the different ISP options. Even when I wire up, the connections still suck because the lines going out are saturated. It is a terrible experience.
Google Fiber availability in the new house (pre-installed) was a big plus. I just wish things were wired a little differently to make it more accessible.
Definitely understand this. I was mainly interested in seeing if there were any innovative ways to distribute gig internally that I hadn't thought of. I'd be interested in having someone wire Cat 6 if they could do it without tearing up the walls. I used to be an IT contractor/consultant for public schools, and I had more than one nightmare with inside wiring.
In short, I don't expect to need it right away. It is just an interesting technical challenge where the wireless is a bottleneck. The most I see myself using at the current point in time is about 100mbps when I am downloading backups from my VPS, which has a 100mbps pipe.
Thanks for the input. I'm a former networking guy, still working in development/IT related business. I posted the question to generate some discussion about alternatives or innovations that I may not be aware of. Slashdot is the best resource for expert discussion, and I can appreciate a little shit talk from the crowd while that discussion happens.
I am mainly curious, if I did have a need to use the full gig pipe (which I don't in the immediate future) how I could achieve it. It is more of a curiosity than a necessity. I plan to tinker with it quite a bit to see what I can get it to do. Obviously, there is no practical use for a gig symmetrical right now, but the fact that I have it gives me an opportunity to experiment a bit.
Thanks for the input.
You are correct about utilization - it isn't practical right now to use the full connection. It is mainly a curiosity - if I wanted to use the full connection, are there any innovations or alternatives available which I hadn't thought of?
I'll be sure to report back once we're in and everything is set up. It should be a great opportunity to experiment.
Here in Norway all electrical cables are installed inside plastic tubing, so you can pull out/replace them if you need to, with no need to tear down any walls. (BTW, we also do the same for water pipes: They are always installed as pipes-in-pipes, with a central drain point for the external pipes: This way any leak will be contained and you can fix it by pulling out the broken (usually due to freezing in winter) pipe and replace it.)
When we built a new home a few years ago I specified that the electricians should put in spare conduits between the main breaker room and every other room in the house, except bathrooms, this way I could pull whatever cable I would need.
Terje :-(
PS. The sad part of the story is that the installation company had never done anything like this in a residential building before and they messed up badly, omitting the spare conduits to important locations like the living room/entertainment center. They ended up giving me a substantial rebate but I'm still a bit pissed off.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
The OP should have said "more than I can realistically achieve over wireless".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've grown very tired of my apartment complex's saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5) because everyone is right on top of each other and every apartment has one of three routers from the different ISP options.
Interesting. I didn't know that it was really possible to saturate the 5Ghz spectrum. 2.4 is easy with only having 3 non-overlapping channels, but 5Ghz has over twenty, and by default none of the channels overlap.
Last time I was in a dormitory I found over 20 networks within scanning range of the guy's room, but there was only ONE other network on the 5Ghz spectrum.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm a bit amazed (well, then again, not at all) that no one asked what you actually want to DO with Google fiber. Who cares if you can't use its full speed over wireless when all you're doing on your PC is the usual /./FB/email-stuff.
Put a small server (probabkly those NAS based things that run full-blown linux) next to your fiber jack. Have it handle all those big downloads that actually profit from the external fiber speed. Run a network cable to your TV and if you're using a desktop machine, to that machine.
For everything else, use wireless. Your tablets cpu will be slower than even the wifi anyway already.
bickerdyke
It always makes me feel depressed when reading posts like this. I live in South Africa. The quality of service we get from our fixed line provider means that I rarely get more than 384 Kbps on a 2 Mbps DSL connection. The fact that you need a way to make your home network about 3000 times faster instead of just 1800 times faster than my connection makes me want to cry. What makes it worse is that I pay about $50 USD a month for the "service".
Don't be an ass, just run the network cable already for your main items. Use the wireless for all the junk items that can't take advantage of it anyway.
All my phone lines are cat5e. You just need to find where your POTS is wired into your internal lines and put in a switch and rewire the cables/jacks you want as ethernet instead of phone. If you don't have cat5e or better you either need to wire your house depending on the level of difficulty or just use 802.11ac.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
It does not add measurable value to your home to be fully wired. It does help a house stay on the market a shorter amount of time.
I'm not convinced enough people care about a wired house for it to make a measurable difference on anything at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people don't understand why they might want wired rather than wireless (and an increasing proportion of the population are using computing devices that can't even be connected to a wired network these days too).
As a techy, whether or not a house is wired is probably something that I would care about, but there are an awful lot of other far more important things I would be interested in too, to the point that I doubt that the wiring is likely to make much of a dent in my decision making process.
More likely, I suspect, is someone non-technical looking at my house and concluding that the neatly installed comms cabinet containing the patch panel, VDSL modem, etc. is an unsightly waste of space and that they need to do work to remove it.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Even in an old house, an electrician who is experienced with the local construction can run CAT6 cable. At the same time, the electrician can put in power outlets where you really want them and add any (electrical) switches that are inconveniently placed. Maybe you'd like a couple of outside outlets and to upgrade some of the lighting at the same time
Figure about 2 days of an electrician + a helper at most; maybe $1,500 or $2,000. Consider it part of the purchase price of the house.
Wiring is really a well-solved science, and there are professionals (or trades people) who know how to do it.
If you can afford the house, hire some.
One computer, the fileserver, goes at the "awful location." This is the one that runs all the bandwidth-intense stuff (deluged, sabnzbdplus, etc) so you get to slurp up data at high speeds.
The others, you connect to that as well as you can. They're mostly just going to be running video players or web browsers anyway. It wifi or powerline networking is the best you can do, fine.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have a traditional 2-story colonial home. There are four bedrooms, all on the second floor. I got a small spool of cat-6 "Siamese" cable; it's got coax and cat-6 separately jacketed, but heat-glued together. I recommend that even if Google Fiber doesn't use coax (does it?). You never know what the future may hold, and you're only going to want to do this once.
I went into the attic and liberally measured off cable for each bedroom. I think I did something like 15' for the drop down the wall to the outlet (9' ceilings), plus the length to the sewage stack, plus another 12' per floor (12 for the first floor and 12 for the basement), then tacked on another 10' to run from the sewage stack to the networking wall. So each run ended up something like 60-65 feet. I had to use a hole-saw to drill a 3" hole next to the sewage stack on the second floor. It was behind a section of wall that had an air vent in it. I had to take the vent off and push the duct work out of the way. That was a little scary, and I wasn't able to get it back together perfectly, but it was worth it in the end. Once I was able to drop a weighted string to from attic to the basement, I taped up all the BR cables at one end, tied that to the string, and lowered them down along the sewage stack. I then did the runs down to the bedroom wallplates and terminated those. Then did the same for the basement. I used an 8-post coax line conditioner to terminate all the coax lines in the basement. All the cat-6 went into a wireless router and a switch: http://imgur.com/MeqFKrT
I did separate runs for the family room on the first floor and three runs in the basement. In the end, I'm very happy with how it all turned out, and I would definitely do it again should I ever move.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Since when is running a few Cat5e/Cat6 drops "substantial structural or wiring modifications" ? You could have a drop in every room in the house for a couple hundred bucks. Or do it yourself on a Saturday. This is really, REALLY easy.
The problem is usually routers. Build up one on a PC and use PFSense or another software router package.
Here's what I can tell you.
1. Outside of torrents, you're not going to get the full benefit of that gig for most applications.
2. Netflix is awesome with it. Load times of a few seconds for high def.
3. Hard wire anything that doesn't move often (TV/Blu Ray/PS3/Desktop/etc) and have plenty of ports around the house you can plug your laptop in just in case you feel you need more speed.
4. Use wireless the rest of the time. You seriously just won't notice that big of a difference web browsing unless you have serious interference issues although if you're gaming, you'll want to use the hard wire.
Honestly with current web applications, a gig is just about overkill. Sure that might change in the future once gig becomes more prevalent, but it's seriously overpowered for pretty much everything currently. Short of having multiple people streaming HD video and downloading/uploading via torrents, your pipe is going to be bored most of the time.
In my experience each stream of 802.11ac in the real world has the same bandwidth of a 100Mb network link. If you go triple stream, you'll be getting about 300Mbps (despite the 1.2Gbps "rating"). There really is no substitute for wired. I just bought a house a few months ago and one of the first things I did was drop CAT6A in as many rooms as I could. It's a pain in the ass since it's an existing 2 story home, but again, there is no substitute for wired.
I have fiber in my house as well; not Google, but got an opportunity and took it. It's a new house and we ran cat 5e everywhere. Maybe some day I'll regret not running cat 6, but I doubt it. I just recently put the ends on the cables, and stopped using wireless for everything. It's made a huge difference, and well worth it. It's not uncommon for 5 people to be streaming something different at the same time, and the wireless just couldn't handle it. Depending, you might be able to replace all of you phone lines with ethernet. You can always use an RJ11 in an RJ45 jack and just decide at the patch panel what it's going to be, phone or ethernet. If this isn't a new house, chances are you have a bunch of unused phone jacks just taking up wall space. And depending, you might just be able to pull the ethernet using the old phone line.
good luck
I've found two rules to be very helpful when dealing with this sort of problem;
1. Don't buy it until you need it.
Electronics in general are going to be cheaper, faster, and smaller in the future, so put off all buying of stuff as long as it's reasonable to do so.
2. When you need it, buy it without hesitation.
If the current best solution is X, then pay for X and don't worry about it. Yes, there's a better way, and yes, there's going to be an even better way in the future, and yes X is going to suck in 10 years. But there's no way to avoid that so don't sweat it.
You have Google fiber. You have a 600Mbps solution to connect to that fiber. Do you need more than that, right now?
If not then apply rule 1, and do nothing. If so, then apply rule 2 and wire your house with Cat6 (or pay someone else to do it.)
For best performance they need to be on the same breaker switch and not share the breaker with any electric motors or fluorescent lights. If they have noisy devices on their circuit, or are on a different breaker they'll run slower. If they have noisy devices and are on a different phase they may not work at all.
For $200 you can get an electrician moonlighting from craigslist to run ethernet drops. One drop from that spot to a closet or convenient central place and drops to key locations around the house. I know, I did it myself not long ago. A decent wifi or powerline setup will cost just as much. And in the case of the wifi you are talking dramatically slower, the speeds you are looking at are ideal max speeds for one link. Wired provides full duplex speeds on a per connection basis. A 100mbps wifi link connecting 8 clients has a total combined bandwidth possibility of 100mbps. A 100mbps ethernet switch with 8 clients plugged in has a total combined bandwidth of 800mbps (it's 8up and 8down but since every 100 up is someone elses 100 down it's still just 800).
I mean sure, you only have one 1 gbps link to google, but you could be streaming a movie from your NAS to your plex client while downloading the latest american horror story without either slowing the other down if you are wired.
Cloud backups?
But why bother with the CAT6? It adds to the price tag, is less flexible, and 10gbe doesn't look to be heading anywhere near consumer price range anytime soon.
"It adds to the price tag"
A whole $20 more per 1000 feet.
Because CAT6 will last longer. If I am going to put something in that is not easily replaceable I am going to put in the best, longest lasting stuff I can.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If you spent more money, buy way more expensive gear, buy a real rack, throw in a patch panel, do the crossover thing on it, patch it all in you can get 91MBps! The fools!
I wouldn't do more than this for a house - why would you?
I've grown very tired of my apartment complex's saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5) because everyone is right on top of each other and every apartment has one of three routers from the different ISP options.
Interesting. I didn't know that it was really possible to saturate the 5Ghz spectrum. 2.4 is easy with only having 3 non-overlapping channels, but 5Ghz has over twenty, and by default none of the channels overlap.
Last time I was in a dormitory I found over 20 networks within scanning range of the guy's room, but there was only ONE other network on the 5Ghz spectrum.
Read what the parent wrote- " the poor penetration of 5 GHz". Meaning it does not go through walls or other obstacles very well. Which is true. And a problem with deploying 5Ghz networks.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You probably have telephone lines running through the house. One way to easily wire cat5e or cat6 cables is to run them the same way as the telephone wires. You open up the wall outlet for the telephone wire. Take it apart and tie the wire to a piece of string that is sufficiently long. Pull on the telephone wire in the basement until you see the string. Tie the cat cable to the string as well. Go back up stairs and pull on the string until both the telephone and the cat cable are up stairs. You can get a jack with both telephone and cat outlet from a electonrics hardware store and you can have ethernet cables running to all the telephone ports as well. Just repeat for the other jacks and you'll be wired in no time. Just remember to pick either 568a or 568b beforehand and stick to it. I recommend 568a because it's easy to wire into the punch block of the patch panel. As long as you stick to 568a the entire way through, everything should work out of the box.
10mbps is two orders of magnitude smaller than gigabit. Going the extra distance is the cutting edge of technology right now, while getting 10mbps over wireless was solved years ago and is now easy. And "reliable" refers to "reliably getting gigabit speeds", which is not something you are apparently qualified to judge.
Practically speaking, sure, 10mbps is plenty of speed for today's internet. Most of the time. Well, actually we're just used to so much slower that it seems blazing fast, but then it's about as hard to imagine needing more than 100mbps as it is to imagine needing more than a 2TB hard drive. It's not like we've ever had to make do with less and found ways to use up the extra bandwidth/space. So why exactly does Google even want people to have gigabit to their homes?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I'm at work so I don't have time to wade through all the comments, but you might look at http://www.pulselink.com/ They do ethernet over coax, which if I recall goes well over gigabit speeds in some cases.
Seriously, it is a lot easier to run cat 6 around a house.
First off, you have to be living in KC. That means that you have a basement. That means that you can run cat 6 into the first floor trivially. The hard part is dealing with the upstairs.
Depending on the builder, you likely have a tunnel that goes from the basement to the attic, or you might have 1-2 2 or 3" conduits going from the basement up to the attic. You can simply run a single line up there and then put in place a switch, while you splay out to the various runs from the attic.
If you do not have the easy access, then hire somebody to run a cat 6 inside of a conduit from the basement to the attic on the outside of the house. Do it in a corner, next to a downspout, etc. Then paint the conduit.
Also do yourself a favor and run a line to the outside. Ideally, it will be trivial to disconnect (or more likely connect). I ran line up from the basement up to the dining area which the deck is outside of. Inside, I put this in a single gang box, with 2 quickports RJ-45s. The bottom one goes to the basement/network switch. The upper jack goes to an outside jack. When I want the outside, I simply plug in a small 4" connector. Otherwise, it leaves me an inside connection (useful for winter).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You got it MOSTLY right.
The one thing that I will add to this, is with the massive amounts of security break-ins, wired will take on a preference over wireless.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You don't have to go nuts wiring the whole house, (although that would be ideal). You could have one or two rooms wired, and use slower wireless elsewhere in the house. It's not like you always need gigabit. I have two desks in two different rooms where I can plug into the ethernet, Elsewhere, I just use the wifi. Not that I even have gigabit internet - I'm a Time/Warner Monopoly slave.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Get a small fish tape from your local hardware store and run Cat6. I did it over the period of a few nights climbing around in my attic. It was way too hot in Florida to do it in the day. Other options include running it up the wall and out the cap by your roof edges. You could just drill through the wall to the outside like the cable companies do. I wish more houses came wired with the stuff but even the newest ones don't.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
10 megabytes/s. One order of magnitude not two, over two different frequencies (non-ideal).
Run cat5e under the baseboards. Done carefully it's invisible. Or along the roof and paint the cables to match.
Do any of the servers you connect to actually provide 1 Gbps if you try to DL a file?
I have 15Mbps via TWC and rarely max it out unless the server I am DLing from is geographically close to me.
Read what the parent wrote- " the poor penetration of 5 GHz". Meaning it does not go through walls or other obstacles very well. Which is true. And a problem with deploying 5Ghz networks.
You know, I've read his post 3 times and all I get is "saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5)"? even CTRL-F doesn't find 'poor penetration' within it. I think you meant the GP.
Personally, I haven't had any problems with 5Ghz, it's a lifesaver in areas like apartments/dorms where congestion is a bigger problem than range.
I don't read AC A human right
Usenet? Didn't it die like... decades ago?
I was taught to do it with a snake. Rare earth magnets weren't all that common in the consumer market at the time, and there was no Internet to order them on. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.