Domestic ethernet

It will depend on your house

at one extreme

Concrete floors, plaster straight onto brick walls and laminate flooring then your going to make a right mess

on the other side

suspended floors with a crawl space, and stud walls and it will be nice and easy downstairs

spur into the loft will depend on if you've got an easy way to get up there, in a lot of places its easier to go outside then up the exterior wall.

have you considered using ethernet over power line adapters? or looking at a mesh wifi?

Its fairly simple to run in yourself as you can buy lengths of Cat6 off the shelf but when i did it many many moons ago i had to terminate the cables myself although admitadly this did make it easier for getting them through tight gaps. If youre going into the loft and theres power up there you could maybe run a cable from your router up there into a switch and then just feed from there but as itlab says itll depend on the make up of the house how easy or hard itll be.

Currently using powerline - it’s OK but not massively reliable.

Similar issues with mesh from many threads on here?

I think we’re going to have floors up for some remodelling work which might make it easier.

Don’t want to do this myself as I’ve no real idea what I’m doing.

have you considered using ethernet over power line adapters?

That's the easy option. Costs about £20 and takes 5 minutes. Works fine.

If you consider trunking “hidden” then pretty easy, otherwise not so much unless you were planning on redecorating anyway 😀 Actually trunking would be a huge improvement vs the cables I have taped on the floors & walls at the moment 😂

Agree going outside is probably easier/neater a lot of the time. Depends what you’re trying to achieve, and why… do you actually need a hard-wired network?

Yes and no. There’s a box in the loft that could do with being wired in.

Apart from that I’d like a couple of WAPs to improve coverage with wired back haul so we don’t get dropouts/having to switch everything off and on again because it’s not working.

Running a cable to the refurbished kitchen will be easy enough (assuming I can find someone to wire it up) but really need someone who can do it to have a look at how to get the cable to the other side of the house.

What’s the maximum length between switches?

That’s the easy option. Costs about £20 and takes 5 minutes. Works fine.

For some people, for others they don’t work at all. Much like mesh systems, it’s really all about finding the right solution for the individual issues/use case, rather than ‘I’ve got these, there brilliant…’.

It’s always worth buying from Amazon solely for the easy returns policy should the solution not deliver as expected.

I just used exterior ethernet cable and ran it outside. Couple of holes in the wall, bought the magic press down tool, put in sockets at each end, and pretty quick and easy.

Also PoE makes it a lot easier if you can.

100mts of good cable will be pushing speeds fine. It's really not that hard in a domestic setting. It's hardly a AWS server room.
I only use flush fit boxes in each room unless you can hide the cable run.

What’s the maximum length between switches?

Also PoE makes it a lot easier if you can.

Top tip from my recent experience is don't buy a cheap termination tool. The first one I had was £15 and did one cable successfully, the £50 Screwfix one worked much better along with their solid copper core Cat6 cable. Be generous with the tails when terminating the cables.

Agreed, as hard or difficult as your house and other projects make it. If you're pulling a house apart anyway it's super easy, if you're not wanting to make unsightly holes (and repair after) then harder. Paintable corner trunking up the edge of a room is pretty subtle if you're getting cables between floors.

I was planning to wire everywhere when we bought our first house - been here 7 years now and not bothered. Powerline for a few bits like the printer but I found I could run a wire up the stairs quite easily and mounted a decent Unifi access point on the ceiling in the middle of the house. Thought I'd do some more cable runs later but actually that one AP gives solid 100+Mbit wifi everywhere - quite a bit quicker than the old powerline adaptors we have. I just did one other run under the living room suspended floor to under the stairs, so that the router, switch, NAS and other gubbins like the hue hub can live on a shelf in there.

100m is going to be a lot more than is needed even with a slightly roundabout cable run.

I have in my head how it would work…

Looked at this in our house. Figured the easiest way is to run the cable externally. Two runs, both from the front corner where the router is. Both terminate in an RJ45 socket, then use patch cables to connect each socket to a port on the router.

One run terminate upstairs at the front, the other upstairs say the back. Again both terminate in an RJ45 socket. Then either WiFi adaptor, switch or both plug into the RJ45 socket to provide network connectivity. Obviously everything running off that would be capped at whatever speed the cable and downstairs router port supported.

Much easier than running cable inside.

Edit: So something like this downstairs

https://www.toolstation.com/axiom-rj45-cat5e-wall-outlet-kit/p64596

Running to two of these, one front, one back of house.

https://www.toolstation.com/axiom-rj45-cat5e-wall-outlet-kit/p42722

When we had this house rewired in 2017 I specced 17 Cat6 outlets dotted around the house, returning to a "node 0" (aka the cupboard under the stairs, which houses a 24 port switch).

One of the best decisions I've ever made, certainly one that's aged better than having 6 underused TV aerial outlets put in!

Only thing I can add to other replies is that if you're going to have to chase plaster or pull up floorboards, run at least couple of cables/outlets to each of those rooms. Keystones are cheap, a single sized plate can house two anyway and they're not particularly difficult to terminate. Make sure you're using decent solid core cable too.

Top tip from my recent experience is don’t buy a cheap termination tool. The first one I had was £15 and did one cable successfully, the £50 Screwfix one worked much better along with their solid copper core Cat6 cable.

The problem there wasn't the punchdown tool. Can everyone please just stop buying CAT6?

What should we use? I'm about to embark upon a rewire and don't want to install either obsolete or superfluous cable.

CAT5

Cat 5 e it's that's simple

To get the benefits of Cat6 or above, it really has to be installed to a specific standard. It’s a little thicker, stiffer and harder to work with, so unless the person who is installing it has decent knowledge of the appropriate installation guidelines and is equipped with a proper cable certification tester, then you are getting minimal gains from using it, especially in short run domestic settings. 5e should do the job adequately unless you are aspiring to run over 1Gb

Phew! I was worried that we might all have to move to a number bigger than 6.

Make sure that it’s got solid copper core

But keep an eye out for anything with the acronym CCA. If you just search eBay and sort by price A lot of stuff on will be described at cat5e CCA

Which is copper coated aluminium, more prone to faults, can’t be used with PoE and in general is usually poor quality.

When you get the cables just cut the end off before you run it and double check the wires look all nice and coppery. With CCA you can see the grey cores on the wires. Much easier to check before you run the wires(don’t ask me how I know)

It's either CAT5e certified cable or it isn't.

To get the benefits of Cat6 or above, it really has to be installed to a specific standard.

Bingo.

It's horrid stuff and unless you're a professional structured cabling engineer it gains you nothing.

Useful info. We're about to embark on a full house rewire sometime next year too. Old lathe n plaster walls so as it;s going to be messy anyway, we might as well go all-in. Current CCTV PoE cables are simply running around the edge of rooms tucked under the carpet which is less than ideal.

The problem there wasn’t the punchdown tool. Can everyone please just stop buying CAT6?

The cheap tool failed on Cat 5e, not Cat6. (Assumption and all that. . .)

If you can run GbE on Cat 5e surely it’s going to be fast enough for almost any domestic use case?

What should we use? I’m about to embark upon a rewire and don’t want to install either obsolete or superfluous cable.

Futureproofing is always a good idea, but probably not necessary.

Broadly Cat5 is good for 100MHz and depending on whether its 1,2 or 4 pairs connected up is good for 10/100/1000base-T networking, which is faster than anything you'll likely ever use in the house.

Cat6 is good for 250MHz, which gives you 2.5G networking.
Cat6A is good for 500MHz, which gives you 5G networking.
Cat8 will be good for 2000MHz, which will give 40G networking.

(Cat7 isn't compatible, it's the DOT5 of networking).

So unless every link in the chain is capable of multi gigabit speeds (which means £200 switches rather than £20, and even PC motherboards only started using it fairly recently) it won't offer any benefit.

For comparison, netflix in HD is 5Mbps, 0.5% of the capacity of well installed Cat5.

The retirement plan is to shift the back-haul on the wireless at home to 2.5G because at some point not too far away it's going to be needed and I'd rather do it now while fit enough mentally and physically.
Fortunately the kit to do this from Ubiquiti is not ruinously expensive.

thisisnotaspoon
Full Member

What should we use? I’m about to embark upon a rewire and don’t want to install either obsolete or superfluous cable.

Futureproofing is always a good idea, but probably not necessary.

Broadly Cat5 is good for 100MHz and depending on whether its 1,2 or 4 pairs connected up is good for 10/100/1000base-T networking, which is faster than anything you’ll likely ever use in the house.

Cat6 is good for 250MHz, which gives you 2.5G networking.
Cat6A is good for 500MHz, which gives you 5G networking.
Cat8 will be good for 2000MHz, which will give 40G networking.

(Cat7 isn’t compatible, it’s the DOT5 of networking).

So unless every link in the chain is capable of multi gigabit speeds (which means £200 switches rather than £20, and even PC motherboards only started using it fairly recently) it won’t offer any benefit.

For comparison, netflix in HD is 5Mbps, 0.5% of the capacity of well installed Cat5.

You can push them a fair bit harder than that

Cat 5e will give you up to 10G if the cables are properly done and < 45m (more realistically, 10m)
Cat 6, 10G up to 55m
6a 10G up to 100m

This is not a recommendation, just saying 1G is likely not the practical limit for 5e

I hard wired both this and the last place for surround sound & HiFi, CBA'd for network - what's wrong with WiFi & Bluetooth?

what’s wrong with WiFi & Bluetooth?

@intheborders The appeal of walking round the house restarting all the power line/mesh as the network has dropped out (as I was doing this morning) wears thin after a while.

Bluetooth has latency issues

Wifi isn't completely reliable (and always slower)

But it comes down to use cases, e.g. the latency of bluetooth isn't enough to throw off the lipsync in a video. Wifi is more than fast enough to stream 4k Netflix.

The only reasons to add network cable are therefore if you want no dropouts (e.g. any sort of gaming) or fast transfer rates (I guess if you were a professional photographer/videographer and wanted to put your server in one room and work in another). e.g. it takes about 8 minutes to transfer a 30minute 1080i50 broadcast quality video file over 2.5G connection, which is painfull for working on it. But to just watch it back on Neflix (i.e. compressed and in real time) only needs 1/25th of that bandwidth.

The appeal of walking round the house restarting all the power line/mesh as the network has dropped out (as I was doing this morning) wears thin after a while.

Wifi is more than fast enough to stream 4k Netflix.

interestingly, the samsung TV built in netflix app is almost unusable over wifi. its ok wired, but not perfect.

the apple TV I now have plugged in is perfect quality over wifi.

so it's not always the connection..

interestingly, the samsung TV built in netflix app is almost unusable over wifi. its ok wired, but not perfect.

the apple TV I now have plugged in is perfect quality over wifi.

so it’s not always the connection..

Might be different generations of wifi, or just down to the antennae location, the TV's is probably next to a big solid wall, and the apple TV box is probably on a shelf with space around it?

Mines wired into the TV, but via a fairly old powerline adapter. Works perfectly because in that use case it doesn't need any more bandwidth than that ancient powerline can deliver. So the powerlines do phone browsing / TV / Zwift etc, and the office is all hardwired in directly.

The cheap tool failed on Cat 5e, not Cat6. (Assumption and all that. . .)

Fair enough. Apologies.

interestingly, the samsung TV built in netflix app is almost unusable over wifi. its ok wired, but not perfect.

I expect that's a problem with the TV / app rather than the network. I have a Samsung TV here, the 'smart' bit of it is dire.

@zilog6128 You might be right, I think at least in part there’s an issue with individual powerline components getting less reliable with time.

Also one of my mesh things doesn’t support WPA3 so for the cost of replacing it all I’d hoped to be able to run some cable plus a couple of WAPs.

@jam-bo I’m told Samsung TVs are horrors for the amount of data they’re quietly using. We have one and not infrequently individual apps are broken pending update, which isn’t an issue with the streaming box plugged into it.

@jam-bo Sounds like a Pi Hole is a requirement for Samsung TV usage.

Also one of my mesh things doesn’t support WPA3 so for the cost of replacing it all I’d hoped to be able to run some cable plus a couple of WAPs.

Unifi UDR (router) is about £230, that provides one WiFi 6 access point and then additional ones (which will need to be wired but are powered over the network cable so can be installed quite neatly) are £100 ish (doubt you'd need more than 1 unless your house is huge!) I can't [I]guarantee[/I] that'll make all your problems go away, but I've had (AFAIK) 100% uptime (bar actual power cuts or scheduled reboots) with my WiFi network since getting mine!

Well if it makes you all feel better I've just spent 3 hours making patch cables each one 200 mm longer than the last all through concrete walls and ductwork.
Pin 4 missing on all the connecters and I never noticed. New box, bunch of arse... 2 testers lobbed up the wall and toys out the pram and someone nicked my fire stop sealer all 12 tubes.
Good job the fiber spice is being done tomorrow and I'm off as it's the room is ankle deep in mud