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I want to run cat 6 from my desk to my router which one floor down directly below me. Is there anything more to it than simply stuffing cable down the wall and connecting it to a wall mounted socket at each end?
That'll do it. Just don't skimp on not buying a punch down tool. You can get something serviceable for a couple of quid.
Folk will be along soon to talk about powerline and mesh alternatives. I suspect you've already convinced yourself you want a dedicated wired solution, so I'll not bother 🙂
No.
Don't waste money on Cat 6 unless you're doing it to spec, 5e will do fine for 10/100/1000.
Alright. I only need about 4m of it and two sockets; and I'm doing it to reduce latency for game streaming so I don't want to do powerline.
Yeah, not realy, it will be the most reliable way to do it.
Just bear in mind CAT6 doesn't do 180 degree bends or 'switchbacks' to use an MTB term, very well, so avoid sharp tight small kinks in the cable if you can.
Don’t waste money on Cat 6 unless you’re doing it to spec, 5e will do fine for 10/100/1000.
I would agree with this, but if you're gonna put it behind a wall, and decorate over it, for the price difference, it's negligable for a higher spec cable with a lot more potential bandwidth.
You really don't wannabe digging it out of the wall in ten years to lay a better cable... which is very unlikely, I agree.
But Bill Gates famously once said....
The walls are dot-and-dab so I will make a hole in the plasterboard and poke the cable down. This works better with nice stiff cable, but it can't be too thick.
CAT6 is generally stiffer, but you want to avoid sharp bends for the same reason.
The exterior grade stuff is only marginanaly thicker than cheap CAT5.
So I would fit decent CAT6 regardless, as once the cable is in place, you only have to worry about how you terminate it.
That's ace for getting past crap and general detritus in the cavity.
Oh and cat5 e all day long just pure copper not coated ally
What squirrelking said.
Running four metres of Cat6 is mental.
Yup I've got an off cut he could have for free tbh end of a drum so would get scrapped anyway.
Or I would make long ish patch cable
I did a few lengths at mine recently. I wanted some dinky surface mount terminals that I could just whack on top of a hole in the wall rather than cutting out a load of masonry for a 3.5 inch square backbox.
These were the best I found. Don't even need a punch down tool. Piece of piss.
https://www .amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07ZVP39GQ
Edit: while I didn't use the punchdown bit of the punchdown tool, I did get a 2 quid one for the cable sheath cutting part of it, which was handy.
Given speed of Wi-Fi and mesh technology today I don’t get the use case for structured cabling outside of security appliances (cameras etc) and PoI need. Cabling a PC seems totally nuts.
Sorry, I missed your original question.
Is there anything more to it than simply stuffing cable down the wall and connecting it to a wall mounted socket at each end?
For a man of your practical ability, no. Proper tools turns a potentially faffy job into a piece of pee and they aren't expensive. A decent punchdown tool is worth its weight in gold over a disposable one for a couple of quid difference in price; you can get a (fairly nasty but functional) cable tester for sub- ten quid; and a coaxial cable stripper comes in handy more than you'd think.
Given speed of Wi-Fi and mesh technology today I don’t get the use case for structured cabling
Game streaming. As you can imagine, latency is quite critical to the experience. And in this case it's an extremely simple run so it might be worth doing.
Along those lines, I have been experiencing a lot of intermittent high ping issues recently. Sometimes they go away when I reboot the router, which is a bog standard Smart Hub 2. I'm considering replacing it with something more powerful to try and avoid this, and at least let me configure QoS. But I'm not sure if this will help if I am not using WiFi.
Also, 'gaming' routers are really expensive and look like an over-excited teenager designed them, I'd want to spend less than £100. There are a few options that look like normal routers not like something that would shoot at me as it drops out of hyperspace, but not sure if they will be a worthwhile upgrade from BT's freebie which does not have QoS. Does QoS do anything beyond your own LAN?
I looked into it and whilst you can get cheaper routers like the Ubiquiti ER-X they are very much bare bones, need to be programmed properly and you would still need your modem and a wifi hub.
Nearly everything is a worthwhile upgrade from an ISP router, some of the older BT ones can be reflashed with OpenWRT and cost buttons.
QoS is prioritisation, it's only relevant in a busy network. There's little benefit in saying "give my gaming traffic the highest priority" if gaming is the only traffic because, well, higher than what? Go to ASDA at 3am, you can be last in the queue and get served instantly. Where you need QoS is when you're trying to have a Teams call and sound like Norman Collier because you have a teenager in the next room torrenting half a terabyte of grumble.
That said, I have something purporting to be QoS on my home Asus router. It's like no QoS I've ever come across in a corporate environment, it's weird. I switched it off.
QoS is prioritisation, it’s only relevant in a busy network.
LAN, right? Doesn't affect the packets on their way to Nvidia?
Generally speaking when I am gaming there is one person watching HD Netflix and possibly someone else on a video call. But with 900MBps top whack fibre that should be plenty.
The Netgear nighthawk is the most ridiculous design I've seen completely aiming at the game market as it would be right at home in a space blockbuster but it works well.
If your gaming hard wire it or get a separate ISP for that device alone I know a few who do it and one who bets on cricket live matches with gigabit ish speeds
A quick google and Wi-Fi latency adds at most circa 1-3ms over cable. Human reaction time circa 250ms. Feels a bit like the expensive Hi-Fi cable debate.
Given speed of Wi-Fi and mesh technology today I don’t get the use case for structured cabling outside of security appliances (cameras etc) and PoI need. Cabling a PC seems totally nuts.
You lose 1/3 of the speed as soon as you unplug, so your 900Mbps in becomes 600Mbps stood right next to the router. Speed drops the further away you move, and the signal is flakey. Some cases mesh isn't suitable for starters - thick walls, shed offices. For a lot less money than a decent mesh set up, you can buy some cable, some switches and terminals.
Then you can downgrade your BB package to the maximum you actually use, and have that speed much more reliably where you need it. If you don't need any more than 25Mbps, you can get 25 at your smart telly and your work laptop, reliably, without buying 75, 100 to give you enough of a buffer for the wifi speed drop and the fact that it's a bit flakey.
Save in the short term, save in the long term, save time restarting the router when it craps out and waiting for it to fire up again.
LAN, right? Doesn’t affect the packets on their way to Nvidia?
As far as I'm aware. I Am Not A Network Engineer.
A quick google and Wi-Fi latency adds at most circa 1-3ms over cable. Human reaction time circa 250ms. Feels a bit like the expensive Hi-Fi cable debate.
I wonder how much of this 'established knowledge' is (not unlike HiFi) legacy. I remember the holy grail for twitch gaming being a latency of under something like 30ms. I've just run a ping test over Wi-Fi from my desktop at the other end of the building from the router and I'm seeing an average of around 15ms. And this is an 1890s house, the walls ain't thin.
If you can run cable then there's no harm in it, but I wouldn't be overthinking it.
You lose 1/3 of the speed as soon as you unplug, so your 900Mbps in becomes 600Mbps stood right next to the router. Speed drops the further away you move, and the signal is flakey.
IRL who is running a single device that needs these extreme throughputs? Mesh solves flaky so only other use case if shed out of range.
In fact on checking laptops not one has an RJ45. Only thing that does is the HUE bridge attached to the router. The other 35 devices connected all on Wi-Fi.
A quick google and Wi-Fi latency adds at most circa 1-3ms over cable. Human reaction time circa 250ms. Feels a bit like the expensive Hi-Fi cable debate.
If I use a different data centre, the average latency goes from 12ms or so to 22ms. This is noticeable, as a general extra slushiness. Remember, I'm streaming games not simply playing them online. So my control inputs need to go over the internet to a data centre where they're processed, and the resultant images are sent back to me. An extra 10-20ms of lag is noticeable yes. I'm playing a space flight game, so I'm not just clicking a button in response to seeing something (which is probably where the 250ms figure comes from) I'm timing my input based on moving images which is a different situation and would be a different test.
I reckon most semi competent musicians or even keen listeners could tell the difference between a song played at 120bpm and at 140bpm, that's only a 7ms difference between beat timing. It's all about timing.
The other issue is reliability. I can play at 22ms but it's not consistent - sometimes packets get dropped and sometimes the ping spikes up to 100ms randomly. And, in order to minimise noise I have to put the wifi dongle on the end of an extension cable in the middle of the floor, which isn't ideal. I could put it on the desk but then a bunch of power cables and the PC itself are between the dongle and the router, this creates noise and can cause it to drop from 5GHz band to 2.4GHz. That slashes throughput and adds about 30ms more latency on its own.
And I'm playing in 4k so it does need a fair bit of throughput.
In fact on checking laptops not one has an RJ45
I'm using a desktop PC.
I did this, running to cables up and over through ceiling to office, for wife and i and a third to garage for a second router for turbo trainer.
I did it at a time where i was adding sockets to house anyway, so went the whole hog and did proper chases and used these Click modular sockets, they have been great for not only
Used the same for speaker cables too, looked really smart, plus ethernet cable is pretty cheap really, and just wanted the stability, as my wife especially spends a lot of time in zoom meetings
QoS - what @cougar said. If your home bandwidth is never swamped then QoS is pointless.
I leave it off with our 500Mbps access.
I'd be tempted to try a powerline first
Cheap and saves any DIY
You're streaming games from a server or to a server?
I assumed you meant the latter, like you're broadcasting on Twitch or YouTube or something. If the former then, well, why?
I appreciate that I might as well be suggesting that TJ pops to the middle of Lidl for a pair of jeans rather than getting you to consider anything different from what you've made your mind up about but, is this really the best solution? Can you not play it locally or drop the resolution rather than drag a 4k game across the many foibles of the Internet? I have FTTP hardwired directly into a £200+ router and streaming HD TV still farts occasionally because Internet.
I reckon most semi competent musicians or even keen listeners could tell the difference between a song played at 120bpm and at 140bpm, that’s only a 7ms difference between beat timing. It’s all about timing.
Hang on, the use case is cable vs Wi-Fi for a router 4m away.
Difference is typically only 1-3ms with modern kit so personally I wouldn’t be drilling holes as think it’s a pointless exercise which was to the original post on why cabling is even a thing given how far Wi-Fi has come on in last 10 years.
You’re streaming games from a server
From. It's called cloud gaming, it's a thing.
Can you not play it locally
I'm sure you can come up with an answer to that.
Gaming PCs are very expensive to buy and actually pretty expensive to run. However, I can stream a game from an absolutely top spec PC for not a lot more than what my electricity bill would be. I did drop some cash on an expensive wifi dongle, and it has been fine for a while (except for the middle of the floor issue) but given how easy it will be for me to drop a cable inside the wall I thought I'd try that. I haven't checked the prices but I'd imagine a couple of sockets and 3-4m of cable won't break the bank.
Hang on, the use case is cable vs Wi-Fi for a router 4m away.
4m away through a floor and past a load of power cables and the PC, which necessitates putting the dongle in the middle of the floor to avoid interference. This isn't a theoretical situation, it's my actual setup, and I think for a few quid and an hour work it's worth it. If nothing else, for neatness.
I’m sure you can come up with an answer to that.
I can. Two, in fact. The first is "come back in five years or so when the infrastructure has caught up with your expectations."
Back on the original topic, can I just cut the ends off a long patch cable or is the stuff you put in the wall different?
The first is “come back in five years or so when the infrastructure has caught up with your expectations.”
I've been using it for 6 months. It works pretty well, except that sometimes I think my router can't handle it. Hence the question about routers. The cable thing is mostly just for neatness and if it helps latency slightly then great.
Funny that you think I'm chucking loads of money at an arbitrary problem without first having tested the free trial, then gone with the basic HD package and decided if the 4k upgrade was worth the extra money; and if it's a feasible alternative to an expensive gaming PC and associated electricity bill...
I don't know why people bother running cables.
Mesh wifi. I have an old 1800's farmhouse with 60cm thick stone walls. Mesh wifi works fine, no problems.
IT Pro. I just can't think what I'd want cables for any more. They're a PITA and I have to plug things in rather than walk about with my wireless devices (or play games wirelessly on my PC-master-race PC). 4k film streaming? Check.
Meh. Each to his own I guess 🙂
Back on the original topic, can I just cut the ends off a long patch cable or is the stuff you put in the wall different?
It's different. Cabling what you'd put in the wall is solid-core wire for punch-down reasons. Cabling what you'd use as a patch cable is stranded for flexibility. But you'd probably get away with shitty punchdowns over such a short cable run.
Questions like this are reason number 173 why consumers need to step away from Cat6.
I’ve been using it for 6 months. It works pretty well, except
except when it doesn't, which was my point.
Doing it for neatness makes total sense. I'd hardwire my desktop back to the router if it was in any way practical, having Wi-Fi dongles randomly strung about the place is an arseache when you have internal walls half a metre thick. Trying to shave a couple of ms off latency, not so much.
Funny that you think I’m chucking loads of money at an arbitrary problem
In my defence, you do have previous. 😁
I don’t know why people bother running cables
I explained it twice.
The PC didn't have built-in WiFi, so I put in a PCI ethernet card I had. It wouldn't do 5GHz because there's a load of power cables where the PC needs to go creating interference, so I bought an expensive dongle that works but it needs to be positioned in the middle of the floor to get a reliable 5GHz signal on a little stand with an extension lead.
Both router and PC are right next to where their respective sockets would go, so it's a much neater and more reliable solution than current with slightly lower latency.
except when it doesn’t, which was my point.
So your solution is what? Don't bother? Or put £1500 on my credit card?
In my defence, you do have previous.
I always have carefully thought out reasons for the things I do, and people always try to persuade me that I'm wrong. Ho hum. Original question was about how to actually fit cables.
So your solution is what? Don’t bother? Or put £1500 on my credit card?
Manage your expectations.
Drop the resolution; buy a console; accept that it's going to glitch occasionally. You're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. In your position I'd be doing the same thing, but I'd consider any performance gains of the type you're aspiring towards to be a happy side-effect.
Your second post here said "I’m doing it to reduce latency for game streaming" whereas "the cable thing is mostly just for neatness and if it helps latency slightly then great" came much later. The latter I can get behind.
I always have carefully thought out reasons for the things I do, and people always try to persuade me that I’m wrong.
And you never listen.
Ho hum. Original question was about how to actually fit cables.
Your original question already assumed a solution.
You need ~10m of Cat5e UTP cable suitable for structured cabling, because if you're running one you might as well run two. You need two backboxes, two faceplates and four Krone (or similar) equivalent jacks. You need the tools I already explained in a previous post. You obvs need patch cables to hook up your devices to the new sockets. Test everything.
TBH, I would (as I suggested on Page 1) run two cables for redundancy reasons but I'd only bother terminating one, leaving the other hidden behind the faceplates - unless I thought I'd have anotehr use for it any time soon.
If you do that, remember to terminate both ends of the same cable 😉
Manage your expectations.
Drop the resolution; buy a console; accept that it’s going to glitch occasionally. You’re doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. In your position I’d be doing the same thing, but I’d consider any performance gains of the type you’re aspiring towards to be a happy side-effect.
I don't even know what you are telling me. If it wasn't worth it I wouldn't be doing it. The original post about latency was not necessarily accurate, although 25% less latency will be nice and is a consideration.
You seem to think I am on a futile quest for the perfect experience. But really, I've been doing this for 6 months, quite happily, but with a few issues I'd like to tidy up. There's no problem here, there's nothing you need to save me from. I just fancy running a cable because it's cheap, it's not going to be too hard and will make things a bit better.
If you're doing it because your existing Wi-Fi solution is pants then it's probably a good idea.
If you're doing it because you think it'll revolutionise your online - pardon me, cloud - gaming experience then there may be better gains to be had.
Cheap does not necessarily mean smart. Is that the best spend of whatever budget you've allocated?
Just go quick and dirty - drop a 5m patch lead between floors and plug one end into your router and the other into your pc. Be sure to tell any network engineers you run into what you've done to get bonus apoplexy points.
If you’re doing it because you think it’ll revolutionise your online – pardon me, cloud – gaming experience then there may be better gains to be had.
Did I give the impression I was expecting a revolutionary experience? I am an IT professional, remember, I understand these things reasonably well!
there may be better gains to be had.
Genuinely open to ideas. The last couple of nights it was fairly grotty, which was probably either the router needing a reboot or a network problem en-route to London. Tonight it was spot on though which suggests the latter. I suspect a better router may help if it has more processing power to handle more packets, but not exactly sure of that. NVidia have what looks like a pretty old list of approved routers but the ones still on sale seem to be expensive so I don't fancy those.
Before you make any holes in the building beg/borrow a long enough - in and out of windows, whatever - ethernet cable to connect router and pc directly.
Does it make any difference?
EDIT: arse, as Johnners puts it
It’s interesting lots of IT professionals & gifted amateurs alike, like to talk about WiFi as if it was a single defined thing.
They don’t always acknowledge that different radio frequencies have different properties, speed, distance & penetration among others. They often omit to point out that the higher the frq the greater the throughput but the lower the distance & ability to penetrate solid objects.
It’s very infrequent that they acknowledge that WiFi was until relatively recently a one device broadcasts at a time protocol that meant throughput & latancy were always factors of the volume of clients on the network.
This is still a factor despite the improvements made in wifi 5, 6 & 6e around multiple client support with the introduction of mimo functionality. You need to understand a bit around mimo 1*1, 2*2, 4*4, etc what configuration your accesspoint has & the volume of wireless clients connected to it, if they also have mimo antennas to understand how your theoretical maximums are being skewed by real world interactions.
In other words you can have a healthy speed test result but in real use see sub optimal performance because you have multiple wireless clients all competing for the same ‘slots’ on the wireless channel.
Very rarely is the impact of channel saturation discussed.
Don’t get me wrong WiFi is great for many situations, most domestic situations included but it is not (in general use) as stable or fast as a wired connection, because let’s face it, if it was then the majority of data centres & corporate offices would have ditched ethernet & fibre for WiFi to save in installation, management, support & hardware costs involved in deploying copper &/or fibre cabling quite some time ago.
So if you have an application where latency & stability are desired & the ability to install structured cabling why would you not???
I'm a total amateur on this, but currently putting cat6 cabling around our house while we're in the middle of a complete rewire. Floors are open and the electrician's routing the new power cables into the solid brick/plaster/lathe walls anyway, so might as well. Installing runs from router location to my office upstairs plus cable runs to the two TVs we have, plus another for the CCTV HD.
Only despire is more reliable signal for working in the office where the wifi struggles to reach reliably - I guess due to wall thickness and/or cast iron staircase railings, house is mid/late 1800s with crazy thick walls. Currently using a network cable trailing down the stairs to the router, plugged into my work laptop, for reliable connection.
Cost is minimal so thought I might as well while the house is in bits.
Thanks @captmorgan. So you're saying that the more devices on the LAN the more contention there could be? It is true that when I get stuttering sometimes the client doesn't report actual packet drops, which did make me wonder.
Last night it was smooth as silk though for hours... smirk..
@molgrips slightly more nuanced than just volume of clients, they need to be actively using bandwidth so other folk streaming video, devices downloading data / apps / games, devices backing up to a nas drive, etc
Though often the issue is when you’re performing task A you have limited control over the usage of the rest of the household.
@a11y an eminently reasonable approach, worse case you have unused cables & spent a few quid, best case you don’t have devices stuttering due to poor wifi.
One piece of advice, run a couple of network drops & power to the loft. It opens up the option to place some devices out of the way & also allows you to put wifi accesspoints up there, if you have poor wifi currently this can help as wifi is (generally with traditional U.K. building techniques) able to penetrate through floor much easier than walls.
Suspended in a loft allows it to fire down & through the home rather than across the home & walls.
If it's low latency you want then do it properly - Infiniband EDR will get you 0.5us latency and 25Gbit/s from a single connection.
Probably only cost you 20-25k all in...
Thanks @captmorgan. Electrian's yet to do route the cabling from downstairs to upstairs so I can add in a couple of extra runs of cabling - Got a rather large amount of cable leftover on a reel at the moment. Like you say, even if it goes unused it's worth doing now.
My problem may be having to buy a whole drum when I only need a bit.
How much do you need
5m at most even with contingency.
Make it 10m
Pm me your address and I will get some in the post external black cat 5e
If you're not an expert, I'd just use a single cable poking out of brush boxes on the wall rather than trying to fix sockets.
The electricians who did the ethernet sockets when we had a rewire did it very poorly and the transmission speeds were crap.
It's a lot easier to fix a plug on the end of a cable than to fit two sockets.
It is easer to terminate with the correct idc punch down tool, easier than crimp on plugs.
Also solid copper core cable is not designed to be used as a patch cable with plugs. It can lead to fatigue & premature failures.
Lack of skill does not mean the correct process shouldn’t be followed.
Well rap my knuckles and send me to bed with no pudding...
I charge extra for that Jim… 😉