Building new house, questions.....

[ZandarKoad]

I can't belive no-one has mentioned PURE COPPER RG6 or RG11. For MY dream home, my coax will be nothing but pure copper. I use copper clad steel for all my installs, and it works just fine... but still, I'd go BIG BIG BIG for my own house. And at least one RG11 to each location is probably insanely useless, but that cable is so FREAKING HUGE, I GOTTA HAVE IT. And a wireless network won't ever be as secure as wired network. It's just the nature of the beast. Go with some good cat6.

 

[Liquidforce88]

RG11 in house! Waste of money

 

[SimpleSimon]

RG11 in house! Waste of money

Yeah - but the Jones' will NEVER catch up.

 

[ZandarKoad]

Yeah - but the Jones' will NEVER catch up.

Word.

People spend money on dumber things than RG11.

 

[Mike500]

In both prewires and in old work retrofit installs, I prefer to build an OPEN WORK system into the structure of the house.

This means that nothing is stapled to the wall studs. Cables enter the wall structure above and below the wall opening through large 1 or 1-1/4 to 2 inch holes for easy future access. These holes are closed with galvanized sheet metal plates with folded over edges that fit against the wire entering the hole. The plates are fastened to the wood with hex head sheet netal screws.

All wall wiring fit into open ornange PVC frames made by Carlon for low voltage structured wiring.

In the future, this makes it easy to pull any newly developed cabling or additional kinds of cable needed.

On all prebuilt houses in which I do retrofits, all accesses are designed with additional easy upgrades in mind.

 

[markspace]

Cat5e cables are all you need for gigabit connections. If they uses at least 4 pair cable (which is normally the minimum) you can get 2 phone (even DSL) + a network connection in each cable, as normal networks only need 2 pairs.

For anyone considering the suggested shortcut: beware. While it might work under some conditions some/most of the time, it's false economy, and can cause you signficant problems as the speed increases on your data lines (or outside factors such as rf noise come into play). The 90v telephone ringing voltage can do a real whack on gigabit ethernet (even 100 Mbps is susceptable). Keep those signals in separate jackets. Most of the cost of this type of installation is the labor and the end connections. If you need to save a few strands of copper (by trying to "reuse in jacket"), then just eliminate one or two of the locations.

-- Mark

 

[Foxbat]

I second what Mike500 says, put in structured raceways so it doesn't matter what you have run. Need more coax? Pull some more. CEA decides that every Home Electronics Interconnect is fiber from here on out? Use the now-worthless CAT6 cable you had run to pull the single-mode fiber

Do it before the sheetrock is put up and it's a lot easier. I'm slowly retrofitting my 1987 house to 21st Century standards. It's not much fun trying to snake 2" raceway through insulated walls from a 110 degree attic!

 

[StevenD]

Full-duplex gigabit ethernet requires all 8 conductors, so you cant run your phones off the same cable anyway.