Networking question

[Brannigans Law]

Hey need to ask this so I can understand fully, and there seems to be very smart people for tech here. I'm building a house and one of the options im going to do is have a cat6 or cat5e outlet for every room in my house. Telus is giving us 1 year free service thru the builder. Their boxes run on cat 5 cable or coaxial...so here is my confusion:

how does the network map look?

The house is fibre fed so there will be a modem somewhere in the basement. The modem then goes to one single jack that is split thru out the house? Or does each jack I have in each room have a
corresponding jack in my electrical area? Will I need a switch?

Thx in advance

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

Hey need to ask this so I can understand fully, and there seems to be very smart people for tech here. I'm building a house and one of the options im going to do is have a cat6 or cat5e outlet for every room in my house. Telus is giving us 1 year free service thru the builder. Their boxes run on cat 5 cable or coaxial...so here is my confusion:

how does the network map look?

The house is fibre fed so there will be a modem somewhere in the basement. The modem then goes to one single jack that is split thru out the house? Or does each jack I have in each room have a
corresponding jack in my electrical area? Will I need a switch?

Thx in advance

The service will terminate in your basement for sure, and it will most assuredly (unless you get the worst installer ever) end up right next to the patch panel that the builder will install for you. Regardless of whether you end up with CAT5e or CAT6 etc it will all terminate to a patch panel which you will need to connect via a switch. The switch may be built directly into your TELUS modem/router, however you may want to consider purchasing a larger Gig switch so that you can have each and every RJ-45 plug in the house patched into the switch. Then you simply run one uplink from the switch to the TELUS gear and you should be off to the races.

[TheGrimm]

Btw, what I was talking about as a switch is something like this:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16833122139

It's an un-managed (meaning you can't login to it to configure anything) switch which will give you pretty decent port density (you can also get more ports if you like). If you are not tech savvy I would recommend un-managed however if you want to do things like having VLANs you can spring a bit more for a managed device. If you don't know what a VLAN is you probably won't need a managed switch ;D

I can't stress enough how nice it is to have a switch large enough to have every port in the house connected.

[GoinAllTheWay]

With my limited experience with those Telus router/modem combo jobs, they have piss poor wireless range. I'm with Shaw but I'm sure you can do the same, have them set the modem to be a modem only and not a wireless router too. So basically you would do the same thing as TheGrimm suggests above but you would want to put a quality wireless router in between the modem and panel.

My setup would be modem--->wireless router ---->24 port switch---->panel.

If needed, additional 4 or 8 port switches can be put in each room for additional wired connections.

I avoid wireless whenever possible. Only laptops, tablets and cell phones operate on wireless, everything else is wired.

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

With my limited experience with those Telus router/modem combo jobs, they have piss poor wireless range. I'm with Shaw but I'm sure you can do the same, have them set the modem to be a modem only and not a wireless router too. So basically you would do the same thing as TheGrimm suggests above but you would want to put a quality wireless router in between the modem and panel.

My setup would be modem--->wireless router ---->24 port switch---->panel.

If needed, additional 4 or 8 port switches can be put in each room for additional wired connections.

I avoid wireless whenever possible. Only laptops, tablets and cell phones operate on wireless, everything else is wired.

Yep you can certainly do this, though I would consider buying a wireless router which is capable of not running as a router, but as a layer 2 AP. It can then be plugged into the house through any of the RJ-45 jacks and deployed where it makes the most sense as opposed to being stuck in your basement which is often the worst place.

[Buff]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

With my limited experience with those Telus router/modem combo jobs, they have piss poor wireless range. I'm with Shaw but I'm sure you can do the same, have them set the modem to be a modem only and not a wireless router too. So basically you would do the same thing as TheGrimm suggests above but you would want to put a quality wireless router in between the modem and panel.

My setup would be modem--->wireless router ---->24 port switch---->panel.

If needed, additional 4 or 8 port switches can be put in each room for additional wired connections.

I avoid wireless whenever possible. Only laptops, tablets and cell phones operate on wireless, everything else is wired.

How many connections would a person need in one room? Planning on having a lot of LAN parties? Do people still do that? Genuinely curious, not trying to poke fun.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by Buff

How many connections would a person need in one room? Planning on having a lot of LAN parties? Do people still do that? Genuinely curious, not trying to poke fun.

I've had 5 in one room before.

1) Desktop Computer
2) Laptop
3) Printer
4) External Harddrive Server
5) DVD/Blueray/Netflix player

I now have 2, 3, and 5 wireless and spread out

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by TheGrimm

Yep you can certainly do this, though I would consider buying a wireless router which is capable of not running as a router, but as a layer 2 AP. It can then be plugged into the house through any of the RJ-45 jacks and deployed where it makes the most sense as opposed to being stuck in your basement which is often the worst place.

Sound advice - 5Ghz 802.11n is fantastic when the AP is on the same floor, or centrally located, to your computers and gadgets. It doesn't penetrate as well as 2.4 Ghz, so relying on a wireless router tucked away behind two or more floors worth of wood, heating ducts, pipes, and drywall is less than ideal.

Another upshot to having the AP on the ground floor or upstairs is that you'll get decent coverage out into the garage and front/back yards.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Originally Posted by TheGrimm

Yep you can certainly do this, though I would consider buying a wireless router which is capable of not running as a router, but as a layer 2 AP. It can then be plugged into the house through any of the RJ-45 jacks and deployed where it makes the most sense as opposed to being stuck in your basement which is often the worst place.

Very interesting. I've yet to try setting up a network in a new house that has RJ45 in every room and hadn't though of this. Very good idea. Unfortunately in my current place, the only place I can have hardwired is the basement.

Man am I looking forward to having a place with modern wiring one day.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Very interesting. I've yet to try setting up a network in a new house that has RJ45 in every room and hadn't though of this. Very good idea. Unfortunately in my current place, the only place I can have hardwired is the basement.

Man am I looking forward to having a place with modern wiring one day.

This is my problem right now too, and I use WDS to overcome it and provide a strong wifi signal throughout the house. I use Apple Airport Expresses, which are great at this - they extend each other automagically (other routers can do this too, but the Airports at $99 each are relatively cheap, easy to configure, and rock solid stable, plus they give me airport audio outs at each location).

The only downside to WDS is that you lose bandwidth on each additional hop, since they are relaying your wireless packets between themselves. The upshot though, is that you are still easily able to hit 50 megabits a second two hops out (ie. hit a WDS repeater, then the base station, then out to the internet), which is plenty fast for anything you want to do, and likely as fast or faster than you'd get with a weaker signal if you were only contacting the base station in the basement. It's particularly a big improvement for ipads and iphones and whatnot, that have weaker antennas to begin with, and are more likely to be used in the far flung reaches of the house (eg. the bedroom, backyard, etc)

[nfotiu]

Do the Calgary providers use MOCA to distribute VOD to the set boxes? If so, I have found that a very nice way to utilize existing coax cables to distribute your network. Just put a MOCA adapter on any coax outlet in your house, and you have ethernet in that room.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by Buff

How many connections would a person need in one room? Planning on having a lot of LAN parties? Do people still do that? Genuinely curious, not trying to poke fun.

If you know for sure where your main entertainment centre area will be, it wouldn't hurt to load up there. Some TV receivers use ethernet now, and throw in devices like a game console, an Apple TV (or similar), a Slingbox, a connected TV and/or DVD player for Netflix, etc. It is unlikely that you'll have all of those in use at once, but more and more devices are connecting to your network. And although wifi is constantly improving, nothing beats a hardwired connection if you've got one available.

Another option is to buy a small switch that you can put in your entertainment unit that can expand one jack into as many as you'd like. And bandwidth shouldn't be a concern because it is unlikely that you'll be running all of your devices at once anyway.

And I absolutely agree with putting your wireless AP somewhere central by utilizing one of your ethernet jacks. The basement is a waste for your wireless access point.

[TheGrimm]

At a minimum I would run two cables to each location, just in-case one ends up failing at some point. On the other hand I also wouldn't go nuts with cabling either, as mentioned you can always add a switch to the far end to add port density where needed.

However, ethernet cabling can be pretty versatile, it can carry audio or video signal such as HDMI. I ended up running some from my main AV cabinet in my theatre to our living room TV area and installing HDMI over CAT6 which allowed me to push and split video signal from my media server to other TVs.

[Jimmy Stang]

^ Does HDMI over ethernet with Cat6 require one or two cables? I know that when I looked into it for my Cat5e cables, I required two to carry the signal.

But you're quite right - ethernet is pretty versatile. My house came wired in every room (built in 2002, so it was pretty new), and my phone lines were also wired with Cat5. I turned a phone jack into a network jack quite easily because the location was better for a network device than a phone.

[Brannigans Law]

I'm thinking that a 2 port jack in each room shouldn't be that big a deal. I think I'll put 4 ports where ever my large TV in the living room would be (smart TV, telus box, ps4, apple tv).

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

^ Does HDMI over ethernet with Cat6 require one or two cables? I know that when I looked into it for my Cat5e cables, I required two to carry the signal.

But you're quite right - ethernet is pretty versatile. My house came wired in every room (built in 2002, so it was pretty new), and my phone lines were also wired with Cat5. I turned a phone jack into a network jack quite easily because the location was better for a network device than a phone.

2 cables, so definitely keep that in mind if planning to use it for HDMI!

Edit: I should add, for most purposes CAT5/CAT5e/CAT6/CAT6a are really the same cable, 4 pairs of wires (8 total wires) that use the exact same pinout. The differences between each of them amount to construction techniques mostly trying to reduce signal attenuation and cross-talk. The net effect is that CAT6a is a better constructed cable then CAT5e but really performs the same functions. For instance as 10Gbps starts to gain traction the effect of cabling will most likely be to limit distances. Either way, if you can afford to put in CAT6a, might as well but for shorter runs it may end up being overkill.

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

I'm thinking that a 2 port jack in each room shouldn't be that big a deal. I think I'll put 4 ports where ever my large TV in the living room would be (smart TV, telus box, ps4, apple tv).

Sounds like a solid plan. My wife and I put a NAS in our basement connected to the switch and it's pretty cool being able to access the files on a mapped drive from any device in the house. I can stream music off the NAS from my receiver, can open photos on the iPad, can play movies or tv shows off our blu-ray player etc etc. The NAS is always running so even if I want to put some different music onto my Android phone while I am sitting in bed to prep for a trip I can simply do it wirelessly off the NAS.

[oilyfan]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

^ Does HDMI over ethernet with Cat6 require one or two cables? I know that when I looked into it for my Cat5e cables, I required two to carry the signal.

But you're quite right - ethernet is pretty versatile. My house came wired in every room (built in 2002, so it was pretty new), and my phone lines were also wired with Cat5. I turned a phone jack into a network jack quite easily because the location was better for a network device than a phone.

The new generation of HDMI over cat 5 (HDBaseT) only needs one cat 5/6 cable . In fact it will carry 1080p and IR AND will provide a network hub at the outlet.

I have 5 of these in my home and they work like magic: http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

[Buff]

In that case, I would put 2 network ports along side every power outlet in each room. If you can afford it, go for it. Having that kind of flexibility can come in really handy.

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by Buff

In that case, I would put 2 network ports along side every power outlet in each room. If you can afford it, go for it. Having that kind of flexibility can come in really handy.

I am not crazy about terminating low-voltage next to electrical outlets (code not-withstanding), I am not an electrician, but NM wiring can wreak havoc interference-wise.