I'm building a 4 bed house, with several network points in every room. What kind of ball-park figure should I be seeing from an electrician doing first and second fix and supplying all the CAT5 etc?
I've had one quote so far but it seems way over the top.
On 22 Oct 2005 02:29:39 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com scrawled:
Depends where you are and how good the electrician is. I would hazard a guess at £5-6k. Do I win?
Personally, I don't like the sound of the electrician putting the cat5 in but you may be lucky and get him to do it half right.
A rule of thumb that worked for me a small number of years ago in the London area was £50 per termination point for electrical points, be it a lamp, socket, FCU, bell, etc. Plus a couple of hundred for the consumer unit part. That was on a rewire, add sockets and supply new extenison job. I'd expect it to be a bit less (10-15%?) for a new build but those more in the know can say if this does actually make it easier or not.
I did my own networking, so can't say how much that would be. It's a bugger to fix afterwards if a cable is punctured, etc. If your sparks has all the kit to make a good, tested job of it then great.
I'd ensure you're specifying the items you want and detail such as 35mm boxes for the networking points rather than allowing him/her to choose, especially on the networking side. There are some poor quality (more mechanically then electrically) RJ45 sockets available that can fail pretty quickly if you're plugging items in/out more than a few times per year.
Personally I think MK switches, sockets and networking frames (possibly using other trusted manufacturers for actual networking components) looks good in a domestic environment. They also do integrated phone/TV/Sat type plates if you want to blend these in. If that interests you then call MK's customer service number and tell them you're speccing an installation (you are, so no need to be shy about it) and they'll send a printed catalogue over (or did last time I needed one).
I then passed the list to my sparks who got all these items plus a roll each of CT100 (to loop aerial points through the house) and good quality CAT5e cable on his trade account and included their cost in his £50 per item quote (with open book on the networking bits he didn't fit).
HTH IanC
Well.. You're only out by 8k so not too bad. About the only good thing to say is that the guy does know how to wire CAT5 properley.
Thanks for that Ian. Definitely something for me to look at (I think I have the MK catalogue somewhere).
On or around 23 Oct 2005 06:39:15 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com mused:
You're down South then. Another thing, which would affect the job, is the specification. My guess was just that, a guess, based on what might be an actual job somewhere once maybe. I could have just as easily come up with £4k or £25k.
Who says he does?
Yep. No need to wire a place up for computers and phones anymore. Companies with up to 100 computers use wireless LANs now.
I read that the same can be done for TV. One cable or dish in, and a wirless central point to all TVs. Or a Freeview box on each TV which runs off a normal aeriel. Many have them built-in anyhow.
I was faced with the same problem and went wireless..... never looked back ! Very cost effective....
Eddie
I'd disagree with that - I did the job myself so it wasn't expensive but i'm very glad I did. My wireless laptop is only 802.11b but the connection drops often enough for it to be annoying and sometimes requires the laptop to be rebooted. Moving large files across a wireless link (audio or video) is frustratingly slow, and streaming video over wireless very unreliable. Next gen wireless technology is much better but in cities there are potential problems with your neighbours networks as well. If you're speccing a house i'd install a wired network if you can and use wireless where it's appropriate - only where a device has to be mobile.
the quotes you're getting do sound extremely high to me.
Bad move - wireless networks share the same bandwidth between all nodes, wired networks don't need to share bandwidth. If you have, say
1Gbps available your 100 computers can only average 10Mbps. This may be enough if they aren't doing anything taxing, but many of the places I have worked would struggle with this limit. You would also be surprised at how poor the real bandwidth performance from a wireless LAN link - I would be surprised if a busy office of 100 wireless PC gets better that 1Mbps or 2Mbps in reality.
This is an old chestnut from 20 years ago when people connected terminals to matrix switches.
The theory was that an ethernet segment at 10Mbit could only support a maximum of around 800 ASCII terminals - by simple division of the bit rates.
The reality was that it was very much better than that because usage patterns for most users and applications didn't get to anywhere near the theoretical values.
That principle applies to any shared medium.
There are several things here.
First of all an 802.11b 11Mbit network, with some level of WEP or WPA encryption, if cheap access devices are used will often only deliver a couple of Mbit of real data throughput anyway, even for a small number of users.
Secondly, it would be a very bad WLAN design to try to accomodate 100 desktop users anyway. Access points should be added such that the spacings are closer and they should be run at lower power levels. Optionally, association and access can be controlled to limit the user population per access point anyway.
The main risks with wireless networks are security as opposed to performance, although to implement adequate security (which means beyind the abilities of WEP and WPA) does imply reduced data throughput.
Its nowhere near that bad. Don't forget that there are three 802.11g channels and another 36 802.11a channels at 54M each. So you can have lots of wireless LANs running in the same office.
Indeed. Two company's installations I'm familiar with both forbid the use of any link level encryption on their wireless networks, to prevent people being under any misapprehansion that it might provide any security. Users are expected to run some higher level encryption such as IPsec or a proprietry VPN, if they don't want all their traffic observable/spoofable. The wireless networks are then always connected to the outside (public internet side) of their firewalls.
At my house in London I can already see at least six other networks most of the time and this is only going to go up. I dont deny that the problem is partly software - my music streamer rarely, if ever, drops the network but my fully patched winXP laptop does and it's annoying. Even if you get a *real* 10 or 15mbs out of a wireless network, standard for wired has been 100mb for years and is fast becoming 1gb.
I don't believe a fully wireless network is a good idea - apart from anything else, the ideal position for your WAP is centrally at the top of the house and it needs a cable from where-ever your modem is.
Why not do a selective install to keep the cost down? Do you really need multiple wired network points in every room? For streaming music, web-browsing and 'office' files wireless is adequate. For video it's not. Broadband speeds are increasing rapidly to the point where your wireless network could be the strangle point in future. How about wired network to your living room, kitchen (imv the single most useful place to have a PC and ideal place for a home entertainment PC), office/study and a central location for a server/NAS plus maybe one or two positions for wireless access points (depending on the size of your house).
Your call on whether you're likely to need wired networking in bedrooms. I can't stand tv in the bedroom but if you have kids they might want a wired point. You don't need a wall point for every device - a local switch provides expansion later in each room if needed, and if your're network is gigabit capable that won't be a pinch point.
I expect its a Centrino then. Go to
Indeed it is - thanks for that. I'd vaguely assumed that taking the driver downloads from IBM and Microsoft would be enough.
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