Cat6 or Wireless

[doodab]

+1 for wiring up. You can always stick a wireless access point in where you want wireless as well but for speed and reliability you can't beat cable. Except with fibreoptics but that gets expensive.

[vetran]

Cheers all - I thought cat65 might be the way to go... £3k is way out of my league though!! I know cable isn't cheap but am hoping I can do a lot of it myself while the electrician is doing his thing. Never done anything like that before - is it daft of me to attempt this myself? As far as I can see I would need a wall plate for each connection, a reel of cable (100m for £50), a wall plate or two for each room and all the cables leading back to the location where I intend to have the master socket...

Feck me - some 10m cables here cheaper than the cost per metre for cable:
Xenta Cat6 Snagless UTP Patch Cable (Red) 10m | Ebuyer.com

Might grab 10 of those as should be able to do all the downstairs and half of up with those ones...

too expensive

Toolstation > Electrical > Data & Telecoms

Computer Network Cables - CAT5E Cut-to-Length and Made up Patch Leads

(+ vat.)

hints & tips worth a read:

Wiring Guide | Automated Home

[stek]

Cheers all - I thought cat65 might be the way to go... £3k is way out of my league though!! I know cable isn't cheap but am hoping I can do a lot of it myself while the electrician is doing his thing. Never done anything like that before - is it daft of me to attempt this myself? As far as I can see I would need a wall plate for each connection, a reel of cable (100m for £50), a wall plate or two for each room and all the cables leading back to the location where I intend to have the master socket...

Feck me - some 10m cables here cheaper than the cost per metre for cable:
Xenta Cat6 Snagless UTP Patch Cable (Red) 10m | Ebuyer.com

Might grab 10 of those as should be able to do all the downstairs and half of up with those ones...

Also need a switch and possibly a patch panel

[craig1]

If you're having someone else do your cabling then it's worth either asking to see the cable or supplying it yourself. It's amazing how many electricians have a sort of dyslexia that makes them misread Cat5 or Cat5E for Cat6 before sealing it away behind walls or under floorboards.

If you're doing it yourself, the easiest plan is to try to follow the electric wiring back to where your electricity consumer unit is. Many of your floor and wall areas will already have the relevant holes in them for cables to go through.

Make sure you tag every cable at both ends to allow you to patch it properly, might seem a bit redundant if you're planning to plug them all in and never remove them but you never know what you might want to do in future that requires, say, extra QOS on a specific port.

[Unix]

AC Wireless is very fast if you have all the right kit. I think cat 5/6 is overkill for a house with a handful of devices (most of which probably don't have ethernet ports). I have this router and its awesome

Networking - RT-N66U

[Unix]

+1 for wiring up. You can always stick a wireless access point in where you want wireless as well but for speed and reliability you can't beat cable. Except with fibreoptics but that gets expensive.

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.

[craig1]

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 if you are doing LAN stuff, but for me most of my time is on internet.

I do full backups of my media storage once a month and the incrementals are big enough as well that having a gigabit LAN is worth the effort for that alone. Also, plan for the future. It was only a decade ago that I was marvelling that my 512kbps ADSL was upgraded to 1mbps, now it's 78mpbs. Wired internet is narrowing the gap every year between its maximum in the UK and the maximum you can realistically get from even the premium wireless specifications and kit.

If the rest of the house is being rewired then it's a case of "why wouldn't I?" rather than "should I?" as half the work is already being done in re-running cables.

[DaveB]

Cheers all - I thought cat65 might be the way to go... £3k is way out of my league though!! I know cable isn't cheap but am hoping I can do a lot of it myself while the electrician is doing his thing. Never done anything like that before - is it daft of me to attempt this myself? As far as I can see I would need a wall plate for each connection, a reel of cable (100m for £50), a wall plate or two for each room and all the cables leading back to the location where I intend to have the master socket...

Feck me - some 10m cables here cheaper than the cost per metre for cable:
Xenta Cat6 Snagless UTP Patch Cable (Red) 10m | Ebuyer.com

Might grab 10 of those as should be able to do all the downstairs and half of up with those ones...

If the holes have already been made it's a straight forwward job to run the cables alongside the mains wiring. Make sure you use decent quality shielded cables and where possible leave a gap of a couple of inches between the data and mains cables to minimise any interferance.

Actually wiring up the faceplates is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Make sure you have the right punch tool to do it and make a crib sheet for the wiring layout so you dont forget. Remember to leave a bit of slack in the cable behind the faceplate so that you have some spare if it goes wrong as well!

Finally, try not to push the maximum cable length if you can. It's not so much of an issue in commercial installs where the data cables have their own tray away from anything that could cause interfearance but in a domestic setup thats not easy to do. Keeping well under the maximum length (120m) per cable will help avoid any issues in the future.

[garethevans1986]

Cat6, two sockets in each room....just in case you need seperate networks for testing etc.

GE

[doodab]

But given the network is only as fast as the slowest link then your broadband connection is likely to be the slowest point.

Not between machines within your house.

AC wireless gives amazing speed if you are doing LAN stuff, but for me most of my time is on internet.

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.