Cat6 or Wireless

[Unix]

Not between machines within your house.



It's only amazing if you don't have a wired network to compare it to. Wireless has it's place as it's convenient but it's just not competitive on performance with a wired network. Even in it's latest incarnation it's about half the speed of gigabit in practice and the 5 GHz band also offers less range (this is due to the laws of physics so ain't gonna change) meaning you need more repeaters to cover a whole house, and while at the moment the spectrum is clear interference will become more common as more people switch to 5GHz band. For maximum speed you need 160MHz channels which means you only have about 5 to choose from. You'll also need USB 3.0 on anything that doesn't have an integrated AC adapter.

Ethernet also offers options like adapter teaming and so on that can give you > 1Gbit/s if you need it and it's going to be future proof as and when copper 10Gbit/s comes down in price and starts appearing as standard. I'd guess that will happen before we see true gigabit wireless TBH.

How does that help your iPad? How many people now sit at a desk copying Gb/s over their LAN? I'm not saying Wifi is ever going to be faster, but I prefer to be able to sit on the couch/bed etc without being tethered to a CAT 5 cable. That is might not be super MAX speed that is likely to be limited by your broadband anyway is the sensible trade off.

[doodab]

How does that help your iPad? How many people now sit at a desk copying Gb/s over their LAN? I'm not saying Wifi is ever going to be faster, but I prefer to be able to sit on the couch/bed etc without being tethered to a CAT 5 cable. That is might not be super MAX speed that is likely to be limited by your broadband anyway is the sensible trade off.

That's fine and dandy if it's a a sensible trade off for you. Some people do more than surf the net on their iPad. Lots of people work from home, use a NAS or server, backup multiple machines over the network and so on. For them wired networking makes sense both from a performance and price/performance perspective.

[administrator]

Aye, that's what I need it for. When the house is sorted I not only want to be able to sensibly back up the media server and my main work desktop over the network but also want to be able to back up some live site data. I have a 55 Mbps down and 16 Mbps up and this can only go up so makes sense to be able to have the ability to have an out of datacentre back up at my home. Ultimate peace of mind IMO.

Cheers for all the other suggestions too everyone, found some really good guides on Cable Monkey last night, will see how it compares with the ones you listed vetran - thanks!

[d000hg]

That's fine and dandy if it's a a sensible trade off for you. Some people do more than surf the net on their iPad. Lots of people work from home, use a NAS or server, backup multiple machines over the network and so on. For them wired networking makes sense both from a performance and price/performance perspective.

I work from home but that doesn't mean I need anything fancy - of the minority of people who work from home only a minority are doing the kind of things you describe. And of those, only a minority need wired networking in every room - you need wired access for the PCs doing heavy lifting which would tend to be in one or two rooms.

So wiring your house as described is something to do only because you personally have requirements for it IMO.

[eek]

I work from home but that doesn't mean I need anything fancy - of the minority of people who work from home only a minority are doing the kind of things you describe. And of those, only a minority need wired networking in every room - you need wired access for the PCs doing heavy lifting which would tend to be in one or two rooms.

So wiring your house as described is something to do only because you personally have requirements for it IMO.

I think the argument is that its not worth doing the work if it is any hassle at all but if work is being done anyway its the little bit of extra work is worth while...

[doodab]

So wiring your house as described is something to do only because you personally have requirements for it IMO.

Yes and no. The trouble I've had is that wireless doesn't actually work that well in a larger house. Wireless performance degrades quite quickly with distance, and the 5GHz band is even worse for this, so you need to look beyond the headline speeds and actually try it to see if it's going to work out. I have both 2.4 GHz & 5 GHz (300 mbit) wireless networks. The 5GHz wireless is actually slower in the upstairs office than both the 2.4GHz band and my FTTC broadband connection, and the office is the room directly above the router so we're talking about a distance of maybe 20 feet with a floor in between. It doesn't work at all in the loft conversion part of the house. That's with my network being the only game in town, as it catches on the spectrum will crowd up and things will get even worse, especially in urban areas. To put it in a nutshell a simple 5GHz wireless router simply cannot live up to the marketing claims made for it except under certain conditions that you're unlikely to get in the real world. You need a mesh of access points or a wired network with lots of access points like you'll see in a business premises to get decent speed out of it. The upshot of this is that I simply don't use the 5GHz network at all, I may as well switch it off.

You also need to consider the future. Cat6 cable gives a gigabit now and will support 10 gigabit as it gets cheaper and more common. With wireless you can get a theoretical 800 mbit or so now, you'll be upgrading every two years to keep pace and you won't see anything like the promised speeds outside of the room with the router / access point in. With broadband speeds getting faster all the time wireless is going to struggle to keep up IMO.

I'd not argue that spending £3k to cable your house is worthwhile unless you really need it, but for a small marginal cost while having other work done putting cables in while you have the chance makes a lot of sense even if you only plan to use them as the backbone of a wireless network.

FWIW I don't have a cable downstairs, I have a 2.4GHz access point running purely as a bridge between two wired segments and that gives ~200mbps which is enough to allow me full speed broadband (for now) and reasonable transfer speeds to and from the HTPC for recorded TV shows. I tried some theoretically faster homeplugs but they were a) tulipe and b) stopped working after a few months. I was not impressed with them at all, cheaply made oversold tulipe.

[administrator]

Yup, that's what I was thinking with the wired connections. Especially good it I can get a wired connection up in the bedroom at the back of the house as I can then put a wireless extender up there and I should then be able to get a decent signal right down to the bottom of the garden.

As doodab said, wireless for us is rubbish upstairs unless you are pretty much stood on top of the router so it just makes sense to me to try and stick a cat6 connection in every room while we have the opportunity to do it. I reckon it will only cost a few hundred quid in materials and my time to set it all up. Once we know where the electricity distribution unit is going to go then it should be easy enough to stick a cabinet and patch panel in there. I can then start to piss about with asterisk and some home telephony stuff as well. Like everyone else has said, just seems sensible to do it while the opportunity is there but certainly wouldn't be looking to do it if the whole house wasn't going to be rewired everyday - and even then it only makes sense as I have a lot of data to fling about

[d000hg]

Doing from scratch I can see the appeal but even the cost of the cable would work out costing more than the £200 you'd need for homeplug set up in, say, 3 rooms. For instance I have plugs with 2 ethernet sockets AND each can also act as a wireless router. So I have the main wireless router downstairs, a wireless network in my office (which reaches the top-floor bedroom) and another in the garage.

Needing proper network infrastructure seems pretty niche even for nerds - many on this site will have genuine uses for it of course but the person buying your house will probably have no idea what all the weird sockets are

[doodab]

Doing from scratch I can see the appeal but even the cost of the cable would work out costing more than the £200 you'd need for homeplug set up in, say, 3 rooms. For instance I have plugs with 2 ethernet sockets AND each can also act as a wireless router. So I have the main wireless router downstairs, a wireless network in my office (which reaches the top-floor bedroom) and another in the garage.

After spending £140 on a new router and £40 on a 5GHz wireless adapter for my desktop which turned out to be slower than my broadband I spent £50 on some wired 500gbit/s powerline adapters which also turned out to be slower than my broadband (in both cases the reported link speed was higher but they only gave about 35-40mbit/s throughput in practice) The homeplugs also stopped working at all after only three months. After all that I still had to spend another £50 on a 2.4Ghz wireless range extender to get a link that gave me full speed access to my broadband connection from the office.

I had a similar situation in my old flat where I tried several routers before giving in and setting up a mesh of wireless G access points to provide decent 54mbit wireless coverage that would actually let me use my ADSL at full pelt. That cost about £300.

The basic pattern here is that none of those technologies lived up to their claims, despite their headline speeds they couldn't even support 60 mbit/s broadband access. As I said you need to try it and see if it works and you risk wasting money. Cabling is a safer bet than ANY consumer grade home networking tech in that regard.

Needing proper network infrastructure seems pretty niche even for nerds - many on this site will have genuine uses for it of course but the person buying your house will probably have no idea what all the weird sockets are

That's only a consideration if you're moving, and if you're moving why would you go to the hassle of wiring up your house?

[Sysman]

But given the network is only as fast as the slowest link then your broadband connection is likely to be the slowest point. AC wireless gives amazing speed (around 1.7Gbps) if you are doing LAN stuff, but for me most of my time is on internet.

Once you get into streaming music and videos around the place, backing up to a central server and all that kind of stuff, the broadband connection does not constitute most of your traffic.

The other flaw in your statement is that IEEE 802.11ac to give it its proper name is that any legacy kit a lot of current kit won't have it.
From the same Wiki:

• "Quantenna released the first 802.11ac chipset for retail Wi-Fi routers and consumer electronics on November 15, 2011". Others didn't come until 2012.
• On June 7, 2012, it was reported that ASUS had unveiled its ROG G75VX gaming notebook, which will be the first consumer-oriented notebook to be fully compliant with 802.11ac[17] (albeit in its "draft 2.0" version).
  
  Hewlett-Packard as of December 2013 incorporates 802.11ac compliance in laptop computers.[18]
  
  Apple announced in June 2013 that the new MacBook Air features 802.11ac wireless networking capabilities,[19][20] later announcing in October 2013 that the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro also featured 802.11ac.

If admin says 3K is too much for the wiring, the boat load of new kit necessary to get everything speaking 802.11ac isn't a viable option.