telephone and internet cables at home - cat 5 - anyone know how ?

[throckenholt]

we are in the process of rennovating our house and building an extension. We will want to have computers and phones in a number of rooms (not sure which yet - and that is likely to change over time too). We currently have an wireless router - but it won't go through all the walls of the house. Could have a wireless phone as well I suppose.

At work we have telephone and internet coming out of the same socket on the wall - the telephone has an adapter on it (so the opposite to the broadband over telephone we have at home) - usign cat 5 cables.

How do we cable our house so that we will not have to change it all in 5 years time ? Can we set up cat 5 cabling for both ? Do we need a master switch or something ? Can't find anything about it on the internet. I could ask at work but don't want to show my ignorance (I work in the computer support bit and would probably be expected to know this stuff ).

Anyone done this recently ?

There is a Dummies Book on this - Smart Homes for Dummies

Buy that

bump - anyone else done this or had it done recently ?

I think I still have the book kicking around somewhere - CAT me your address and you can have it.

I know a lot about this. You want to run CAT5E cable from a single location in your house/garage to each room in the house. The CAT5E will take both your phone and dsl. One cable can take both, but I like to separate them at the source and run at least two cables to each location. That way you will also be able to add a second phone line in the future if you need it. You can even leave them curled up inthe wall, or in a box with a blank plate. You will then want a telephone junction box thing (I forget what it's called exactly, but it looks like a smaller version of what you will have in your central phone box/room at your work) at the central place where all the wires have been "home run" to. This location should really be where the telephone line enters your house. You should put a main filter for the dsl there, so you don't have those little bitty things at every phone in your house. You can buy boxes that have both dsl and bt sockets online. \link{http://www.solwise.co.uk/adsl_splitters.htm\Here} is a site that sells them. Also shop around for the reels of CAT5E. I found a huge variation in price...just make sure you are comparing apples with apples (that they're not trying to palm off regular phone wire).

You will probably find that your electrician doesn't have a clue about phone/internet wiring. I befriended a BT repair man just before we were ready to do this work and paid him cash to do the work for me. They wire phone/internet systems it all the time, so know what they are doing. It's very very expensive if you do it through BT. . Other thing you shoudl think about is running satellite wires throughout at the same time. They shoudl also be home run to a central location. Don't forget to locate phone sockets next to every satellite point as most sat and cable boxes will need to be hooked up to a phone line.
If you do a search online for uk telephone wiring, you shoudl be able to find lots of information. Feel free to ask me more questions.

ps I will look up the name of the junction box thingy and where you can buy it. (our BT guy just supplied it for us for free)

Asked DH about this, and he suggested also looking at networking via the mains cable as another option. Did a quick search, and came up with \link{http://www.lanshop.co.uk/productslist.aspx?CategoryID=53011&onspecialoffer=False\these options} and plenty more if you google something along the lines of 'networking over the mains'.

thanks guys - this is doing me head in !

morningpaper - I don't have CAT set up at the moment - my email is

julie at highfields1 dot plus dot com

thanks

I would go for wireless. Just get a single ADSL point coming into the house, plug a wireless router in and bobs your uncle. Internet anywhere! You'll have to put wireless lan cards into your PCs but that's all.

we have wireless (tried that first) - but it won't go through all the walls - so we will probably end up with a combination of cat5 and wireless.

So how do you connect the cat5 to the incoming broadband ? We currently have it going into the wireless router/modem - you can then connect 4 ethernet cat5 cables to that. Do you connect the cat5 patch pannel to one of those ports ?

Yes is the simple answer. We had set up (in our garage) a panel and then next to it, 8 ethernet boxes. Each box corresponded to a room in the house. We could then put an ethernet cable from the router/modem to whichever box corresponded to the room we wanted dsl in. We could do that with up to 4 boxes/rooms. An ethernet cable is just a cat5e cable with rj45 connectors on the end. Your set up would be pretty much the same.

i will try to draw a diagram for you, scan it in at work and email it to you tomorrow.

thanks.

I actually work in the computer support department - and am trying to get up enough courage to ask the networking team - but want to have some idea what I am talking about first - don't want to appear too ignorant

In my experience, computer networking types at a big company, don't really know what to do for an individual house and often over design a solution. (I am an architect, so have to figure this type of stuff out for clients all the time). The biggest problem is that the technology has moved beyond what an average electrician knows and no one has really filled in the gap. There are people who just do networking for homes and small businesses but it's not terribly cheap. I could recommend someone, if you think you would be interested in paying someone to do it.

thanks SofiaAmes. We are quite technically minded so guess we will have no problems doing it ourselves - once we figure out what bit we actually need. I am guessing the cost will be something less than £500. DH is going to be doing the wiring for the rest of the house - so this is my job to spec up (me supposed to be the computer savvy one in the family !).

I am just struggling to get an idea of how it all fits together - so a diagram would be great - thanks.

see I was aware of the word cat6 - but ignoring it .

I am naively assuming the same setup would work for both and it would just be a case up substituting the newer cables.

So what does cat6 do that cat5 (or cat5E) not do ?

Don't think you will need cat6.