Structured Media Center

Well, I would use the Leviton media center equipment, but, you can still use ANY router from ANY manufacturer.....

Leviton is probably the most well known home structured cabling supplier out there....

I do the computer support for someone who works from their home. They just bought a new house. It was almost done when they signed the deal and I was asked to check out the Leviton installation before they signed. Sheetrock was about to go up so they still had time to do things. But not much. We got them to add one outlet but since I had about 1 hour to examine this and suggest I missed a few things. This was in one of those planned communities where everyone has 10' of grass in the front and 20' in the back with 5' or smaller side yards and standard plans. So you get to pick interior paint and such but no major details.

Anyway, the Leviton setup was neatly done but after dealing with this I've come to the conclusion that it can be a real pain for "nerd" situations. I.E. anything but one computer in the house. Inside the box there were two passive coax splitters for 9 outlets. I imagine that the signal at a few TV outlets were a bit on the weak side. And the coax hookups took up much of the "air" in the box. This thing is only about

3.25" deep to fit in a stud cavity. They had 2 power outlets. If you were to use the Leviton router and such they were OK but for most power bricks you'd have trouble plugging things in. Plus there no provision for dealing with a wireless router inside this metal box. And the powered splitter that Time Warner gave her would have also been a bad fit. And regular access isn't easy. 4 Phillips head screws holding a sheet metal plate.

Also this is mounted into a 3 sided closet that's about the size for 2 thin people to fit in. Old phone booths were bigger. :)

What I'm doing here is making a replacement cover out of trim quality wood with 2 slots on the side to bring out cables. We'll then put up a similar board just above the unit. Mounted on this board will be a power strip, the cable modem, and a wireless router with a switch on this board. We'll feed the power cable, coax for the modem, and Ethernet cables back through the cutouts.

In summary, for many situations these media centers need to be planned based on the end use. If we had gotten there early enough we could have had cables run out into the closet via normal jacks and also some extra Cat5e wires run to places where we might want the router to exist if not in the media center. I mean think of asking someone to "check their modem and router lights" if they have to take down a 1' x 2' metal panel in a coat closet.