So I'm moving in to a new town house and I'll have access to it just before the drywall goes up. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to run cat6 wire to every room that will possibly need it in the future. Whats the best way?
The internet will be cable and it basically will come in to the house in the basement corner. Im thinking put my modem and router right there, and string out all the cat6 from that point. But i dont know if this is the most efficient or smartest way. Suppose there are 3 bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from this basement corner. That means I'll be stringing 3 x 100 foot cables basically along the same path until it splits off to each room. Does it make more sense to somehow just string one cable all this way, and only when it gets to the bedrooms, split it into 3 parts? And if that does make sense, how is that done? Another router? Or a switch? Or something else? Im not up to speed on all the networking hardware that might be involved, and I'm open to any kind of suggestions. If anyone here has ever done the networking for an entire office building, I'm sure this would be an extremely simple question for you
You can bundle multiple cables together, but splitting/merging the actual cable will always require a hub or switch. Most of the built-in wiring I've seen usually has each wall port separately wired leading to a single central 'cabinet' location for switching, with one port in the cabinet corresponding to one port somewhere in the house.
This simplifies things somewhat: You only need to worry about that single switch for connecting up your house. You may also want to consider multiple ports per room in case one cable fails for failover/backup, or for extra bandwidth, or to simply avoid the need for more switches in the room itself.
Of course, nothing prevents you from adding switches in the rooms themselves if whatever ports you've wired up end up being insufficient.
If you have a convenient cupboard, you could just put a patch panel in it. You then just run (say) 4 cat6s to each room from it. The patch panel lets you connect anything to anything later on.
Reasons to do this rather than use IP-over-power is that this way you can run things other than IP across the system. As an example, a friend of mine runs non-IP ethernet packets over his network[1], other friends use cat5/6 to connect their phonelines[2] and I use a system which feeds TV signals over cat6. (It even has its own hubs and multiplexes IR remote control signals back through the network. They're developing an HDMI version.)
Don't worry about the cable lengths. The incremental cost of another dozen feet of cable is nothing compared with the costs of having a contractor come and do the cabling :-)
[1] He does work with experimental protocols.
[2] You get simple connectors which do phone <-> cat5/6
Just no! Ethernet over Power is a horrendous technology, it's been invented to solve a problem, that the OP doesn't have if he's able to run the cabling.
I would definitely recommend running at least 2, if not 4 Cat6 cables to each room (even bury a couple behind the mirror in the bathroom as I know people who eventually put a TV in there). Then run it all back to a central location (ie a Cabinet in your basement) which has a Patch panel (they come in 24-port varieties) and a Switch (depending on how many devices you have will depend on the size you purchase). This means you only have a single Switch to purchase, rather than buying a number of smaller ones for each room or whatever. This also means that each device has a Gigabit connection back to the cabinet, rather than 4 devices that all go into a switch in the room, which then only has a Gigabit connection back to the Cabinet, but heh, if you've got the money - have a cabinet on each floor and run Fibre between them all so that you have super high speed, and if you wire it correctly will have redundancy in case a link fails. But the cost goes up considerably with that.
Ethernet cabling in the post-10Mb/s world is a one-cable-per-socket thing. You could technically still run two 100Mbit links over a single Cat6 or Cat7 cable, but that requires luck and forbids gigabit ethernet. Don't use powerline, that stuff is retarded. If you need to hack around a connectivity shortage, use WLAN. If that doesn't work, use a power drill.
IME, most rooms will be fine with two sockets, so you run two cables there. Have 4 or even 6 sockets in rooms used as home office (PC, laptop, network printer(s), …) and where you park your entertainment electronics (networked TV, game consoles, but that stuff will be fine when you run it all over a single switch). If you're using wired phones, reserve a cable for those; the 4- and 6-wire modular plugs on phone cables fit in RJ45 sockets.
On cables: Cat6 is fine and should be completely sufficient too, Cat7 is overkill in home installations that aren't neighbouring an aluminium melter. It's already fairly unwieldy since it has lots of shielding, but since you are building the walls around it, that shouldn't be an issue. You can also run GE over Cat5 links with some luck, and chances with Cat5e are really good. TL;DR: Get Cat6, if you can't fit that into some hole, use Cat5e there.
On sockets: GET LSA SOCKETS! This cannot be stressed enough. I had the joy of installing sockets where the cable contacts were screw terminals. After wiring one or two of those, Cthulhu sounds like a nice guy. Make sure they're Cat6.
On tools: You need an LSA tool with integrated cutter, and an insulation stripper for multi-lead cables. You can theoretically get away without those, but believe me, you want them.
Ok so looks like the concensus is to run multiple 'long distance' wires as necessary, rather than run a single long distance wire and split it once it gets there.
Ive never heard of patch panels but I'll have to look into them. I assume they are different than a regular switch?
Not 100% sure what you mean by SOCKET... and I'm even less sure what an LSA SOCKET is. I gooogled it but wasnt to confident with the results. Can you explain a little bit?
Im kind of familiar with the differences between a router and a switch. But just to be sure: I should have just one router, where the internet comes in to the house. Any other place where I need to split wires, I should use a switch and not a router, is that right?
Thanks for all the responses.
NOTE - this post is basically point form because stupid gamedev just lost my previous post and Im too ticked off to type the full thing out again.
Don't use powerline, that stuff is retarded. If you need to hack around a connectivity shortage, use WLAN. If that doesn't work, use a power drill.
On the contrary, I've had exactly the opposite experience. I've bought three different USB wireless adaptors to attempt to get my desktop PC onto the home network, none of which have worked at all reliably (the first Belkin one would periodically hard-lock Windows, the second unbranded one kept overheating and dropping the connection and the third expensive wireless N one would only see the router if the wind direction and phase of the moon were exactly right). I then bought a couple of HomePlug adaptors for around £45, plugged them in, and have since enjoyed completely reliable network connectivity that is there as soon as I log on to my PC with around 80Mb/s transfer speed. There are a couple of laptops in the household that fare better (as they have integrated Wi-Fi adaptors rather than USB ones) but still drop the connection from time to time and are generally fairly sluggish.
Of course, if you're in the position to lay cables, that's a much better idea, but I'd never wish Wi-Fi on anyone who was in the position to use HomePlug or similar.
[Website] [+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++]
It's basically just a big stack of sockets -- the other end of the sockets in the rooms. You use it as a switchboard to connect things together.
So if you want to connect (say) the bedroom to the house network, you plug a computer into the socket in the bedroom, connect the socket on the patch panel for the bedroom to one for the office with a little short cable, and then in the office connect that end of that socket into your router.
If you want to get TV up there from your PVR, you plug a cat6->video connector in in the bedroom, connect the other end of that link to one of the living room's links with a little jumper cable, then in the living room connect your PVR through a video->cat6 connector into the link.
So the patch panel is capable of carrying incompatible stuff[1]; because you connect it when you need it. It's not a box like a switch/router. It's an electrical level system.
[1] video-over-cat6 for example is NOT a network protocol and you can't connect it through a router/switch.
Not 100% sure what you mean by SOCKET... and I'm even less sure what an LSA SOCKET is. I gooogled it but wasnt to confident with the results. Can you explain a little bit?
A socket in this context is what you plug a cable into. LSA is a type of wire connector that's basically a row of pressure contacts that you put the wires in and push it into position and cut it off with a special tool, so you don't need to strip individual leads. It's standard for that kind of wiring. Works like that:
