I will soon be wiring a home network in my home, pulling a bunch of cat5e cables through the walls to a patch panel in the basement. My question is, before I start pulling the cables, are there any rules of thumb to be wary of? Like don't run them next to electric wires or coax or speaker wires, etc. Any thoughts appreciated.
You may also want to consider Cat6 cables. Gigabit is becoming popular and cat5 doesn't handle gigabit too well over longer runs. It also sheilds better as the twists are tighter.
Not sure about the price difference. I believe when I saw it it was about
30% more.
OTOH: I have a run of cat5 in my new home about 40-50 feet long to the switch / router. My new media computer does a cable length test on the LAN system and determines the length. It then authorizes the LAN card to use Gigabit. It appears to work just fine, so far.
You may want to run cheaper cable on shorter runs. Who knows what will come in the next few years though? 10Gbit Ethernet?
The Gbit is nice as it actually runs my 100Mbit machine at 93Gbits/sec when crossloading to the 1Gbit machine. With two 100Mbit machines crossloading movies would only run at about 40Mbits/sec.
In agreement with Steve, TV signals may not be broadcast on coax in the future. I am already using a LAN storage HDD and a media PC to display on my bigscreen TV/monitor over ethernet. A bedroom unit will be installed sometime to access the movies/music/ books etc. Perhaps one in the kitchen. Wife likes to download recipes and email while cooking. (yumm)
Multimedia boxes are getting popular and cheap as are "slingboxes" to distribute your media storage database, as well as Internet around the house over Ethernet. Spend a few extra bucks. You may regret not doing it. I ran most of mine cat5 a few years ago and alrady I can see it was a "cheap out" mistake.
Dual coax to some spots is a good idea, also. Dish in / RG-59 (sp?) out to the "watch the rest in bed" TV from the PVR.
I actually ran 4x coax (RG-6 quad-shield and one RG-59) from the rack to most rooms, as my runs are no longer accessible--entombed in the walls with no ceiling or basement access possible--so I was hesitant to rely on HDMI. I've had too many HDMI cables go bad. So I am using a mix of component video (fine up to 1080p) for across-the-house and HDMI for in-room, and slowly moving to IP-based.
Always put in two of each type of cable to each location. For example, coax, Ethernet, fiber optic) Second run is for loopback testing and for when you find your phone company and cable company each need separate Ethernet, etc.
If you do fiber optic, use single mode fiber optic. Single mode cables will work with multi-mode hardware for the short distances you are likely to have in a home. * **Someone should say what type of connectors to use ** *There were 4 main choices in 2004 when I wired my house - two sizes and separate/combined for the two directions - I don't know which of the 4 if preferable. Fiber connections should be factory made or made by REAL expert, even if the cables are 2 or 3 times longer that why. (Fiber is good for kilometers rather than meters like Ethernet, so better to have good connections. For cost and neatness reasons you probably want less than 50% extra length.)
Use "best" coax consistent with cable company requirements. Often this is outdoors rated cable.
If you run coax, use coax with (low voltage DC) power line included, but use "best" signal rated if can't get both best signal rated and low voltage DC in same cable. If don't have (low voltage DC) power with coax, run separate power cable.
When we did out house in 2004 it looked like fiber optic 10GHz "Ethernet" cards were going to be available for a reasonable cost in a couple of years (i.e., by 2006) and would be useful for Ethernet based storage as well as video.
I need to update my computers to support 10Gb network speeds, so I haven't looked at 10Gb "Ethernet" cards in a long time and don't know if fiber is yet the best option for 10Gb. However, the single-mode fiber optics cables will still be available for use if in 20 years 100Gb or higher is appropriate; twisted pair or coax that was available in 2004 is unlikely to work at those speeds, so I may still use the fiber even though I stopped using it after testing the installation in 2004.
Inside a building, for runs under 50m, fibre optics make no sense. If copper can't do it, converting to fibre won't either.
Are you running striped drive storage? What electronics can even support that speed?
Backbones of small multi-city fibre optic companies, I worked with, only ran
155Mbit (OC3) backbones to feed most of the ISPs in a 750K people area. My you, that was Internet that isn't that fast to each customer anyway.
I need to update my computers to support 10Gb network speeds, so I haven't looked at 10Gb "Ethernet" cards in a long time and don't know if fiber is yet the best option for 10Gb. However, the single-mode fiber optics cables will still be available for use if in 20 years 100Gb or higher is appropriate; twisted pair or coax that was available in 2004 is unlikely to work at those speeds, so I may still use the fiber even though I stopped using it after testing the installation in 2004.
I was building in 2004 and wanted the in-wall stuff to support 2034 technology. Single-mode fiber would work with multi-mode 1gb cards that I could afford in 2004.
I expected 10gb copper would be affordable by 2009, but I also expected 10gb fiber to be affordable by 2009. (As it turns out, Intel's 10gb Light Peak Technology should be able to run over the cables that I have in the walls, although the ends probably have to be cut, etc.)
I didn't expect 1tb copper using 2004's "Cat6E" to be available even by 2020, but I expected 1tb and higher single-mode fiber stuff to work with the 2004 single-mode fiber.
There was no coax or tri-axial "radio" type cable that seemed like THE way to go for higher frequency RF stuff, so I just made the best guess that I could for what my local existing cable company would support and went with it. I turned out to make the wrong choice of cable type because Optimum wouldn't give me a straight answer, only saying "type X will work", not "type Y is what we use when we don't want to have to keep replacing the cable every couple of years." (F.Y.I. in about 2000 the cable company serving Santa Clara, California was very helpful. The actually were setup to sell good cable for short runs and great cable for long runs and even used their non-portable super-duper cable-connector-installer machine to put the connections on the cables that I bought from them in San Jose near the Fairgrounds. Optimum in Westchester in 2004 was only willing to say "oh, you should have used type Z", where even type Z isn't the actual best choice.
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