Cottage jobs

[Tim Lamb]

Approaching the end....sigh!

I have a similar problem to the CU tails issue discussed elsewhere. Sparkly has brought the tails though the outside wall, below worktop height and then surface mount to the consumer unit on a wall at 90deg. I had planned to hide these with plywood boxing but now wonder about metal duct? Also, what are the issues regarding exposed tails below the worktop?

Data cables. Sparks has laid in daisy chained CAT6 to all the places I said we might want wi-fi or a direct connection. Mindful of the advice to quadruple the number of cables you first thought might be adequate, is this good enough?

Practically, I can parallel up feeds after the first run which is buried in plaster. This will get harder as I am just insulating and closing off easy access to the eaves/soffit areas which provide a convenient route between the rafters to the lofts.

Currently we do not use streaming for any TV watching. Land line connection is 10 or so Meg. at best with fibre not even on the horizon. Wi-fi from the router and a couple of Devolo mains links do for the i-phone visitors. The new house has chicken wire in the ground floor ceilings so local links might be good.

Any thoughts? I plan to bribe Tim

[T i m]

Then you can just put your feet up eh. ;-)

I don't think you can ever predict that completely so it's just a matter on doing what you can and picking up the loose ends as / when you can / have to.

That may be useful if you want to say put the router in the middle of the house but run the output back to another location.

However, the traditional solution would be to flood wire the pace from a central location out, points on the wall / floor wherever there is a chance something might be needed but I believe that ship sailed early on?

Ok.

It doesn't really matter what you are using it for (re the wiring) but more how you are doing it (bounded / unbounded networking).

Even if you have a few people (visitors) in the house streaming video they would probably be doing it over WiFi as that tends to be the nature of such things.

Yeah, (Powerline) is a good way of offering temporary / localised connectivity (ignoring any potential noise radiation issues etc).

Yup. I've had to deal with that for a mare with many foil backed ceilings and walls so RF was bouncing about all over the place. I got him some little TP-Link access points and we placed them strategically round the house and one PowerLine link to a bit where they didn't run network cable and that all seems to work fine.

[T i m]

This is quite neat so you can see all the options:

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. You dont want daisy chain, you want a star from your switch location

[tabbypurr]

there are various ways that can go wrong, we've no way to know what's been done. Daisy chained means you can only have as many outlets as you have cat6es, which is likely inadequate unless you go mostly wireless.

I'd have gone with cat5e, 6 is more than fussy about installation detailing, 5e is gigabit capable now too.

?

so cat5e/6 through that to a 2nd wireless node above.

[Fredxx]

A very important point. Chaining will be next to useless.

[spuorgelgoog]

No.

Daisy-chaining or spurring Cat6 outlets will deteriorate data rates and reliability.

I infer you have 4 x 4-pair cables running the length of the house? That wouldn't keep me in phones, before I started considering data.

At some stage you may want VoIP phones or wifi access points with Power over Ethernet. That needs 4-pair per device with no intermediate splitters/hubs/switches.

Have you checked the telly outlets haven't been wired as a ring?

Owain

[ARW]

There are no real issues with tails under the worktop, however they might be better off in trunking.

[charles]

Met that once. Aerial fed two outlet amplifier wich then fed about a dozen points in a complete ring. Complaint was that Ceefax didn't work. It was in the BBC pavilion at the Royal Welsh Showground.

[Tim Lamb]

Thought so:-(

Er.. Incoming phone line is in the office: ground floor at the end of the house. 1st. cat 6 goes to master bedroom above and loops down to the kitchen/diner middle ground floor. Then back up to lounge and then on to

2nd bedroom, ground floor.

The plaster board is not foil backed but there is the original cavity wall to attenuate wifi.

No. Just done. New aerial on London with a 4 way output separately cabled to likely locations.

Busy dealing with a snapped thread on the *buried in the wall* bath taps so I'll respond to the others this evening.

[spuorgelgoog]

16 extension PABX :-)

Owain

[Tim Lamb]

Wot I said... I need expert on site help!

The XP box and wheelchair motor drive assembly await your collection:-)

There are two fixed m/cs: my desktop you know and Angela's laptop which remains anchored to her desk. She also uses an i-pad which roams a bit.

My hope is that a router in the office can feed to her fixed laptop and then star out from there.

[Vir Campestris]

I'll leave the sparks to others. But the data...

Ideally run conduit. You never know when you might want to run fibre.

I've taken the view that I wanted a wire to the TV (it goes from the under-stairs cupboard, up to the loft, 6ft across, and then back down again the other side of a door...) and one out to my man-cave in the garden. Right now the man cave isn't finished and I'm running on WiFi from the other end of the house. Which is synching at 100MBit or so. That should be good enough for most purposes.

And we do have fibre :) BT finally rolled it out. As we're fairly spread out we got _real_ fibre (FTTP), not the fibre-to-somewhere-up-the road that is commonly called fibre. We also don't really have a WiFi contention problem.

Andy

[T i m]

Well, hardly an expert but I'm happy to work out a practical solution with you with what you have and what you / we can still run in etc. ;-)

Oh, I forgot about those. You will have to distract my Mrs while I put them in the car ...

And that's the thing with (most) laptops. Unless they are fast to boot (SSD?) or have a very good battery, most are already tied somewhere via the power supply. That said, some still find it handy to be able to unplug the power and just wander somewhere else with them and have them stay online.

In which case she will need general WiFi coverage for that.

If you are getting a wireless router (generally they are) then you would either put that in the middle of the building in the hope it provides coverage all over the house or if it suits better then you can put it say at the back so that it also covers the garden and add another (or other) access points to fill in any blank spots.

As we already know you may have some WiFi deadspots, I can bring a tablet and access point and we can do a basic site survey. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Lamb]

In message , T i m writes

Power available but no phone connection yet.

[Dave Liquorice]

places I

adequate,

I think it would be better to say that daisy chained or spurred won't work. Ideally each outlet (for clarity each individual RJ45 socket) needs its own dedicated 4 pair cable back to a central point.

If you don't want to use gigabit ethernet, 100BaseT (or 10baseT) only requires two pairs so you can connect two outlets onto one cable. One uses two of the pairs, the other uses the other two pairs. Bit of a bodge and liable to come back and bite you when you try to use something that wants all four pairs... Wouldn't want to have that "shared" cable more than a few tens of metres either.

16 wired phones?

Real IEEEE 80 PoE can work over two pairs. Agree it has to be direct point to point though.

[Brian Gaff]

Remember 5g might improve the broadband situation soon, but that very much depends on matters like how well the signal penetrates the building. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

If you have the offending end(s) take a close look at where the blade meets the cable. Ones for solid core wire have splayed "teeth" that straddle the wire. Ones for stranded wire are flat and go straight into the wire.

Finding plugs for solid core cable is akin to finding hens teeth so I expect they are stranded type.

TBH I've had more connection problems with euro module sockets than I have with stranded core plugs on solid core cable. But that is down to the nominally 24 AWG core cable being 0.42 mm dia not 0.51 mm.

[Dave Liquorice]

I'm ever hopeful that is what they will do here. The ADSL2+ gives us

5 Mbps reliably so exceeds the current "basic broadband" requirement of 2 Mbps but there should be a "universal service obligation" coming in during 2020 of 10 Mbps and longer term a desire for a "full fibre" network (2025?).

I've seen several FTTP installs in the area but they are generally small clumps of premises with the existing copper install all on poles. Here the premises are spread out, hundreds of yards between 'em and a lot of the copper is direct buried. AIUI if poles exist they can use/replace/move 'em little. If they don't exist they can't plant new ones. Direct buried means no duct, so the only option is expensive digging of some sort. B-(

Presuming you are now on this FTTP service, loads of questions: Wwhat gets installed to provide "POTS"? What power outage backup is there? Can the same box also do data? Who can you get as your ISP?

[Dave Liquorice]

"soon". The 700 MHz band isn't cleared until Q2 2020, then the network(s) have to be built/roll out. I'm also rather dubious about the speed claims, 1 Gbps, 10 GBps? Maybe, 3' along a lab bench, inside two Faraday cages...