wiring home network

[DirectCedar]

Hi all

I'm a noob at networking so set me straight.

I am finishing the basement and want to pull a serviceable network for TV and data before the walls go up.

I currently have a bit of a goofy situation as data enters the house in the upstairs office on an ethernet cable from a satellite receiver and TV enters the house in the upstairs living room on coax from another satellite receiver. Until now both of these serviced just the one computer or TV where they directly connected right next to where they entered the house.

Here is what I am considering:

For data, install the modem and router in the office where the service enters the house. The office computer will plug directly to the router right there. From the office, pull five Cat5E leads to the other rooms in the house where I want data connections. Then I will have a wall plate with 5 connections in the office to which I can connect any or all to the router to provide service to any of those locations.

For TV, do basically the same thing except I will probably move the current entry point of the coax to a room closer to where TV is likely to be used. Connect the TV signal to a 3-in-1 splitter and then pull three coax cables from there to the three rooms where there might ever be a TV. Once again the room where the coax is split will have three jacks in the wall which each connect to another room, and I can connect the signal from the splitter to whichever or all the rooms that I want to provide TV service to.

Is this smart or stupid? Of course I'm open to other ways to do it.

[crokett™]

Well for the networking, there's this thing called wireles.....

[Estrogen Hostage]

I have at least one Ethernet jack in each room and one coax cable as well. I still wish I had put in more. Wireless works OK, but I've found it gets bogged down with all the devices we have now. Ethernet is nearly 100% reliable

[jgrogan]

research structured wiring and you will get lots of answers

While your two data streams come in different locations, you might want to have the two connections come together in a central location and then wire from their.

A few tips, a lot of TV now connect to the internet so have coax and Ethernet on the same box. Also put it near a power plug since everything gets plugged in.

[Robert Adams]

Sounds like a plan. Course the wall plate with the 5 cat5 is the fancy way. The network guys just cut a hole in the wall run the wires through and call it good. It's ugly and leaks air but that's how they do it.

Make sure you get a good ethernet switch. Also running everything wired is the best way to go. Wireless is the second line of Internet and best used with tablets and other portable devices. If you run everything wireless you end up with a bottleneck and wireless is much slower than wired as well as a reliability nihhtmare.

For your wireless access point don't use anything you buy at a retail store. Get a ubiquity brand unit. They are light years better than consumer grade ones as they have way better range and you can adjust everything in its software.
There are some under $100 units they sell that work well for houses. One is a nice access point that you can mount anywhere and all it needs is a cat5. It gets its power via POE.

Oh and for your cat5 wall jacks amazon has some at around 1$each. They are quite expensive in local stores ie up to $5 each.


TV is pretty simple. Course we dropped tv years ago and just have internet. When I'm in a hotel with cable I realize that I don't miss cable at all.

[Woodenfish]

Cat5E is so yesterday. Cat6A, Cat7 are available and now Cat8 is coming. I don't see the point in running copper in residential. WiFi has changes coming too and it's a much easier upgrade when the time comes.

[Estrogen Hostage]

You say that like us bitter clingers don't have wifi at all. I prefer to have options.

[TDKPE]

Does it matter? Not being snarky - it's just that I can stream video from Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon through my Cat5 or Cat5e cabling, and even wirelessly through the router sitting under the big TV (but I wired it since it was right there, to save wireless bandwidth for portable stuff). I don't know how close to full the pipeline is, but the cabling and 10/100 router don't seem to have a problem keeping up.

I don't even recall having issues when both boys are home, playing Warcraft in the next room on their two laptops, with all the smart phones on the network, and me reading WN posts on this old Dell laptop while streaming a movie on the big Panny Plasma.

Just asking, is all.

[EricU]

my office is the furthest room away from either of the wireless routers, and reception is bad. I finally gave up and I'm pulling cable. I'm considering putting a switch in the attic so I can run an access point for the upstairs bedrooms. I am tired of crappy consumer-grade wireless, and the commercial stuff is not so expensive. Might even be cheaper than regular purchases of crappy routers. No denying the convenience of wireless, but it's still blown away by a wire.

My setup right now is the cable modem is in the dining room with a router. I run a wire into the basement closet to a switch, and then there is another router down there being used as poor man's access point. I'm planning on moving the cable modem to the basement closet and running everything off of a small linux box running firewall software. There are a number of very small pc's that have dual ethernet. In fact, I'm typing on one. Performance is a lot better than just about any router you can buy for the same price. Then I'm going to get some ubiquiti access points and put them on all three floors.

I'm redoing the basement, I am planning on running a batch of cable down there. I will probably run a few cables for the upstairs.

[Estrogen Hostage]

I have had problems at my house on wifi. I'm sure they could be fixed with a nicer router, but lots of devices and large file transfers tend to slow it way down. 8 people living in my house, we have something like 30 IP addresses being used. I stream from my NAS device and send large files when I am working from home, and that combination is problematic.