Looking at the DIY wiki & some other stuff on the WWW, I see that Cat
6 wiring has its pitfalls, & that "cat5e is the current general recommendation for home use in 2010".Is that still the case?
Thanks.
Choose your Cat6 carefully:
Cat6 will do 10gig at upto around 30-50ish metres depending on which article you believe.
Cat6a will do 10gig at 100m.
Both are likely bastards to install compared to Cat5e as they are very stiff (by design). 6a has lots of foil shielding too - not sure how much harder that makes it to terminate - not tried yet. But if your house will involve sub 30m runs, Cat6 will probably be good enough with no loss.
So you can be bothered with a more difficult install, Cat6/6a may well pay off in (guessing) 5-10 years.
The world's gone digital media. The media are getting fatter every year.
There was a time people in offices were grateful for a shared 10Mbit/s bus (10base2). Now my mobile phone gets more bandwidth from the Internet over 4G and by tomorrow (hopefully when Mr BT man comes) my DSL will be near to using most of a hypothetical 100baseT link, at least downwards (I'm all gig in the house).
So future-resistance is a good plan, but tempered with not making things unreasonable hard and/or expensive.
Just my 2p's worth :)
I think so. Cat 6 is significantly more difficult to install to specification with very strict rules on bending radius, proximity to mains cables, etc. and really needs to be in purpose designed trunking.
I'm installing Cat5e (rather badly in some cases) and hoping it'll last as long as I need it to.
Owain
But not 10 Gig fat. B-)
Blueray as it come off the disc is only 40 Mbps. DSAT HD streams are about 10 Mbps. 4k (2160 x 3840 pixels, HD is 1080 x 1920) capable is starting to be the default for new Outside Broadcast trucks. 4k may be routinely available to the public within ten years but even though the raw bit rates are high 3 or 4 Gbps that doesn't get out of the truck/studio at that rate, (lossy) compression is used.
Looks like Netflix 4k streams are a mere 15.6 Mbps, but 30+ Mbps is a more realistic requirement for high quality 4k, with todays compression technology. So yer bog standard 100 Mbps LAN will be fine, though I'd still aim for Gigabit which is fine over Cat5e.
Gigabit LAN should ample, provided the switches and kit can actually handle sustained gigabit speeds across multiple if not all ports.
And even if the LAN can handle it, you ain't likely to have a gigbit feed that can also be filled. VDSL is capped at 76 Mbps for technical, non-interfrence reasons, not that it can go much faster anyway. FTTPoD is 330 Mbps, if BT ever sort that out, and customers don't have need for their arms and legs.
CAT5e will run gigabit just fine - which is ok for hi-def streaming etc. You can also run HD video over a pair of CAT5Es with appropriate baluns, but distance is limited. CAT6e will let you go further for video apps (but that may be a moot point in a home).
If you want some future proofing you may be better of laying in loads of CAT5e and adding some (unlit) fibre for future expansion.
Yet. It is possible to get gig (flat out, not just burst speed) to the home in some places, for a very reasonable £8582.76 per month *cough*.
Point being, what used to cost a bloody fortune, half the country's now got. Soon enough a non trivial number of people are going to get gig.
And it won't stop there.
"64kB is enough for anyone" etc...
I don't disagree now and indeed for afair few years.
But if you are going to the bother of lifting floorboards, etc, the amount of extra effort and dosh in putting in the next level may pale into insignificance.
The fibre is a good idea.
And whilst fibre testers are very expensive, you can, from personal experience, get a very good idea of whether you damaged it or not during installation but having someone point a torche down one and and look at the other end. Certainly if you don#t see two equally bright ends, you may have broken it. Leave a full loop in the box each end as you always need to cut back to good clean cores when terminating later.
That's what I did in the refurb. Each room has two Cat5 sockets & Coax with double mains in diagonally oposite corners across the corner that has the door. Mains also either side of any window or door and no more than about 10' between mains sockets.
Didn't go for that but it might not have been a bad idea between the central termination point fo all the Cat5/Coax and the "media center" position. That has 6 Cat5 and 6 Coax, a four core fibre cable, media convertors and small switch could do the lot.
actually
Agreed, the cost of the physical installation work far out weighs the cost of the cable/fibre. Don't know how much media convertors are these days but bunging fibre in (single or multimode?) may well be a very viable future proof solution.
BT are installing a brand new 96 fibre spine from Hexham to Alston to support the FTTC service. It's 40 km. No new digging it's a conduit to carry the blown fibre being shoved through existing ducts, blockages permitting... At a *very* conserveative £10/m that's £400,000, if they were digging and laying new ducting it would be nearer £100/m = £4,000,000 ouch! The truth will be somewhere betwe en but I wouldn't be surprised at £1,000,000 (£25/m).
The 96 fibre cable costs about 75p/m or £30,000 for the 40 km run.
Terminating fibre can be tricky but Corning (I think) has a neat little termination system that is a doddle to use. No cleeveing, polishing, staring through microscope, heat. Simply expose the fibre and it's cladding, cut (cutter built into jointing gadget), insert the connector, place fibre into guides, close gadget, I forget the next operation but the whole process including cabe prep etc takes less than 10 mins and you end up with a standard fibre connector properly attached to the fibre.
Snag is the connectors are around £15.00 each and the gadget a couple of hundred. They also do fibre "dropwires" that have a weatherproof connector that simply plugs into a vacant socket on a fibre breakout box in a hole or up a pole. The system is designed for installing PON or GPON into peoples homes.
It really depends what you're doing. SSDs are hitting 1Gbyte/s these days, and if you want to throw around big files then 10Gbit comes in handy. I'm throwing about 100s GByte disc images and the port bandwidth ends up being the bottleneck. Even a single HDD can saturate a 1Gbit port.
That's not an internet connection, but if you're doing remote storage then it can come in handy. It does depend on 10Gbps switches, which aren't really there yet for sensible prices, but they'll come. There is also 802.11ac wifi which can do up to 6.77Gbps so it's not hard to see the bandwidth being used.
So I might consider cat6 for internal wiring and maybe fibre for anything outside (where getting copper wet is going to be a problem). But I might choose cat 5e if cat 6 was too difficult. It appears cat5e is good for
2.5Gbps (when the standard gets finished) which might be a useful interim- if nothing else, it'll burn less power than 10Gbps.
Comcast in the US are offering 2Gbps connections, Google Fiber 1Gbps (subject to the messed up US broadband market). It'll come here, though probably in only a few locations.
Theo
You've just got to look at 802.11b vs n
The former was so damn slow it was painful at the time. "n" on the other hand is quite impressive - 84 Mbit/sec with iperf just now.
I've love to try ac when I have devices that can speak it...
If it's going any sort of distance it'll be single-mode. Where I was working, part of the European backbone included fibre pairs between some of the major cities (e.g., London-Paris, Paris-Geneva). On one fibre pair you could, then, use up to 96 different light wavelengths at
10Gbps each. Quite a bit of the data from CERN's LHC is being pushed out to labs across Europe (& possibly elsewhere) using such channels.
Hyperoptic 1 GB is £50 a month, if you're in one of the comparatively few blocks of flats they cover.
Owain
In article , Tim Watts writes
Might be an idea to suggest eclipse viewing precautions for these kinds of operations, prob not best to encourage looking down fibres.
Thanks. Based on this (& others' similar points) I'll just get some
5e. I'm not actually laying in loads of anything, just connecting the router cupboard to the study after rearranging stuff in the house. The wi-fi works well enough for everything else.
If you have one fibre and you know what's at the other end, where's the problem?
I agree, in a datacentre it's silly to look down fibres that might be being fed by a moderately powerful IR laser, but the OP is not in a datacentre so I think he's safe...
Off-Thread,
But...
Boooyahh!
I hate you. Lots.
One more thing, sir [Columbo voice]
Am I right in thinking that the "IDC insertion tool" for RJ45 sockets is the same as the one for phone sockets?
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