What do you think? I am buying a house and bit by bit the whole house will be gutted by me and all the electrical wiring will be replaced and while the walls are open I am thinking about putting CAT6 to the kitchen (peninsula), Living room, office and all bedrooms, do you think it is reasonable, or do you think it is a bit overkill by not taking advantage of wireless N to keep speeds good. I will occasionally use some heavy data transfer and want the speeds to be adequate. the living room is a must as I stream HD to the TV from my server computer through a 360 occasionally. What do you think? Any better ideas?
If your going to run pre-wire through the whole house I suggest the bundles... Depending on the kits some come with coax RG6, cat5 and/or cat6, cat 3 (phone lines - ya never know) speaker wires in some kits etc... They are all surrounded in a protective covering like electrical wiring is and I think most come shielded. If your going to do it, do it right! Also run each room back to a central point and not from one room to another. Far too many times have I seen stupid wire runs from one room to another and so on rather than back to a central junction box or location.
Very good idea, And yes I go right to the source with everything, especially when I rewire the house electrically, every room will be on its own circuit breaker. so the coax will have a central junction point when it enters the house, the ethernet will all go back to a router....and so on.
Correct me if I'm wrong but dont most inexpensive routers have 10/100? If so, then surely having Cat6 would be a huge waste of time and money as Cat5 will more than happily suit your bandwidth requirements. I have only really seen Cat6 implemented in industrial size networks which also incorporate fibre. Universities and Colleges come to mind. I honestly dont think your network requirements will require the use of Cat6 and even then you will need the hardware to prevent bottlenecking... Just my 2 cents...
Most inexpensive routers i've seen in the last few years seem to support 1Gbit without much of a problem (CAT5e). Wire up the telephones with CAT5/6 as well whilst your at it
The price difference for 1000' rolls of cat5 vs cat6 isn't very big. And if you're going to wire your house with ethernet, why would you use a $20 router? Most motherboards now days come with 10/100/1000, and gigabit routers only cost $10-20 more than non gigabit routers. Cat5 generally works fine for gigabit though if it's shielded. But it's better to spend a little extra now and future proof, than rewire it 5 years from now because your wiring is simply to outdated. Remember, in 5-10 years, internet is going to be that much faster, and so will routers, going cheap to save $50 now, will only cost you later on.
Yeah you raise a very good point...I suppose if your spending the money for a long term solution you might as well "future proof" yourself as much as possible.
By inexpensive, do you mean sub- $50 (US)? Otherwise, nearly all of the mid-level and higher consumer grade routers are now coming in the 10/100/1000 range. Not speaking for the OP, but I would imagine that if he is taking the time, money and effort to re-wire his house I would think that he plans on using higher end equipment (Not business grade or anything, but at least upper end consumer stuff.) Besides, if you are buying in bulk the cost difference will not be that great. If it were me, I would go with the cat6 and I'd be sure to use a high quality network setup (Switches, routers, etc.) that were capable of running 10/100/1000. Even if you don't need that speed right now, you'll be ready for when you do and you can be sure that time will come. Edit: Chouji beat me to it.
N band is relatively fast at 300Mb/s. Generally fast enough for current applications. I think he's trying to decide between just using N-band or wiring with cat6. That one might actually be a bit overkill. Fiber optic cables are expensive for personal use, and currently the speeds aren't much better than cat6 The house should be wired for Fiber for an incoming internet connection line later on, but cat6 is more than enough for the actual home networking. IE the router use cat6, but in the future the modem will probably be fiber. But that's not hard to wire in at all, 1-2 cables coming in from outside.
Yeah see going with a kit that holds everything will allow you to put in nice large wall plates that have everything on them. Looks professional and everything is easy to get to. Once you run one hookup to a room just jump off it to the other side of the room in case you wish to move furniture.
No unless you've got the money because CAT6 is markedly more expensive than CAT5e cables. Originally I wanted to run CAT6 cables through the house until the contractor said it's about twice the price. deltatux
I plan on only ripping my walls down once..lol In bold is the problem right there, contractors over charge for everything.
if your going to be doing it in sections, then you won't need to outlay a huge amount of money in one hit anyway. although, if you buy enough for the whole job at bulk pricing then you will also save there. i'd go with the cat6, the last thing you want is to finish the job then realise it's not good enough.
Cable, the best you can afford. There is a proposed new video connection standard, HDbaseT, that uses RJ45 connected cables, replacing HDMI. You could run a second wire for housewide video distribution just in case. It will no doubt need some kind of demux/splitter but they will be sure to arrive if HDbaseT becomes a standard. Something you might want to look at. http://www.trustedreviews.com/home-...er-Threat-From-New-Ethernet-Video-Standard/p1 I doubt it would, but if it used TCP/IP for data transport, it would fit straight into an existing network. Its probably a bit too early to consider but hey.
When planning a network infrastructure it is a standard rule to plan ahead for 1000% increase in throughput or bandwidth requirements. With that said, if you could afford it, I would just wire the place with fiber and here is why. Often times you can have issues with signaling if you use UTP rather than STP, using fiber completely eliminates that, and should your place exist for 20 years, having fiber may mean you would not need to rewire your house in the future, it also could slightly add to the value of your home. Then there is the possibility that Intel's Light whatever it is called, replacing all cables with fiber type cables would mean that you could have just 1 output/cable for all the things you may want to do. Then again, they are talking of using CAT cable for video connections now instead of HDMI, Display Port, DVI, or whatever.
That sux cause from my suppliers CAT6 Voltage Shielded Cables are cheaper then Cat 5 odd And other Places in town here sell cat6 and 5 at same price so ur contractor was gonna rip u unless that was a few years ago
