Whilst doing up the house been doing some reading up on the various cables I could/should be installing to have the ability to future proof it etc?

So what should I be doing, Cat5/6 cabling, anything else.

Want sky in a good few rooms and also some sonos zones

Geekify me
Cheers

Updated 01 May 2012 at 11:21 AM

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A yellow loltus

I would stick with cat5e. Cat6 is expensive and not used that much.

If you want sky in each room then there are mutliple routes.

Are you planning on multiroom , or magic eye sky ?

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GiraffeIT.com / Installations / Support / Training
Renault 5 GT Turbo and Renault R26

Can't say much about Sky. But deffo run some Cat 5e around the place.

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DeskJockey
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Now fueled by heavy oil...

Cat 5 won't be made redundant by wi-fi?
What can you actually use cat5 for, low power?

As for sky will be multi room in 2 (mancave cinema thing an the main rooms)

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A yellow loltus

Depends on your walls and ceilings, assuming they're pretty hefty then wifi will never replace a 1Gbps cable. We're re-doing our US office at the moment and the cost differential between Cat6 and 5e was only a couple of hundred dollars for 40 runs of cable - for a home installation of, say, a dozen runs, I'd go cat6 personally.

Cheers,
Jon

We pretty much use the iPads for browsing, and clearly cat5 can't be plugged in there, obviously, there's the online gaming, I was just wondering what else these cables can be used for?

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A yellow loltus

Can you access everywhere in the house at full wifi speed? If so then cables might be excessive but chances are the more you need high speed (streaming video) then the more likely you'll find some dark coverage spots in the house. For the sake of a bit of cheap wire you can guarantee high speed streaming anywhere in the house to a media device without microwaving the brains of everyone in the house

Foz said...

Cat 5 won't be made redundant by wi-fi?

I would have said so. I sniggered at Property Ladder one year when the owner/builder smugly said he was "future proofing" his house by running miles of Cat5 cable to every room.

TV in all but one of our rooms, all our web browsing, and all gaming is done over Wireless-N in our house. (Much better range than Wireless-G)

Updated 01 May 2012 at 10:04 AM

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Ampera • Women • Car Trade

We did this at home a few years ago, so hopefully you can learn from our mistakes!

- Sonos is a great system, but a single thick brick wall will stop it working wirelessly. Having a Cat5 network between rooms will work much better

- Think about how many set-top boxes you want, and how you will control them. We have V+ rather than Sky, and use an RF cable to get a picture from the box in the lounge to the bedroom. We used to use a Bluedelta device to send the remote (IR) signal back from the bedroom to the box to change channels - all fine, until Virgin gave us a new box without an RF output. So I bought a modulator to convert the SCART output on the new V+ box back to RF. The good news is that we now have a picture in the bedroom again. The bad news is that the modulated output apparently is too low a voltage to drive the IR sender, so we have to choose a channel in the lounge and then get out of bed if we want to change channel. (Or go to sleep, or whatever...). With hindsight, I would have installed a nice long HDMI cable and/or another Cat5 directly from lounge to bedroom (it's fairly easy to send IR via Cat5 as long as the signal is direct, i.e. not via a hub or router). Wireless IR transmission wasn't an option due to the thickness of the walls. I know Sky boxes are different, but it's worth giving this some thought in advance and doing your homework.

Hope this helps. In general, the cost of Cat5 is so low relative to the cost of taking up floors or the nuisance of visible cabling (or not having the functionality you find out later on that you want) that I would put double runs of Cat5 between all rooms if possible (both 'ring' and 'star' formation).

Good luck!

Jonathan

Wifi Homeplugs a good alternative if you just want decent internet in everyroom when surfing on your Ipad. I’ve also some got some LAN homeplugs which the PS3 and PC is connected.

Video distribution to my projector upstairs is done via a HDMI lead from the Onkyo amp which is in the lounge. I use the PS3 to stream movies and also a sky eye to control the Sky HD. Works perfectly well for not much dosh.

If you have multiroom that's one problem already sorted.

http://www.savantsystems.com/

that looks interesting!

Wheres audio chris gone?

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A yellow loltus

JonathanE said...

We did this at home a few years ago - Sonos is a great system, but a single thick brick wall will stop it working wirelessly.

Did you try Wireless-N ?

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Ampera • Women • Car Trade

_Mick_N said...

Wifi Homeplugs a good alternative if you just want decent internet in everyroom when surfing on your Ipad. I’ve also some got some LAN homeplugs which the PS3 and PC is connected.

+1, homeplugs are working well for me, plenty quick for HD streaming.

That said, if I was running new cable anyway (mains etc) I'd definitely be bunging some CAT6 in there - 300m = £300 for Cat6, around £200 for CAT5, which isn't a massive difference given it'll laugh at gigabit and will be good for 10gb once it becomes The Norm in consumer gear.

Which sounds silly, but it was only 10 years ago that 100mb was lauded as being excessive for home use and 10mb switches weren't unusual in routers. You try streaming HD over that...

My mate Deano works for these guys Your link text

Most of the work he does are in > £1 million properties, home automation doesn't come cheap.

Why overcomplicate things and spend money if you don't have too, Foz your requirements can be sorted cheaply and easily if you ask me.

Updated 01 May 2012 at 11:09 AM

Homeplugs in general are the way to go. I had the option of Cat 5 in my house, and I thought about it and decided against it. Newer homeplug/powerlan stuff is 200mb/s now. Even the cheap 85mb/s eBuyer ones I've got at the moment work brilliantly. There's so much Wi-Fi congestion where I live, that Wi-fi is next to useless for anything but casual surfing.

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Something witty goes here.....

Jorg Gray Ltd Edition Watch Number : 313631

exiges said...

JonathanE said...

We did this at home a few years ago - Sonos is a great system, but a single thick brick wall will stop it working wirelessly.

Did you try Wireless-N ?

I'm pretty sure that Sonos uses its own wireless protocol. We use wireless at home for other things, and generally it will go through one wall but not two. However, Sonos struggled with one thick wall, and drop-outs become very noticeable when you're streaming music (more so than for surfing or indeed video).

Jonathan

The house is 325m2, traditional granite with annexe, old part is 120 years old, as for what to go for I am
Not looking to chuck like 50k at this stuff just asking what I should be looking at putting in really

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A yellow loltus

Foz said...

The house is 325m2, traditional granite with annexe, old part is 120 years old

Bit smaller than my place, and half the age You'll be fine with wireless, so long as you can locate it centrally.. and if you have issues, place a wireless repeater at the edge of the strong signal.

We stream BBC HD without issue.

Updated 01 May 2012 at 11:37 AM

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Ampera • Women • Car Trade

I've run a bit of cat 5 around our house - WiFi is fine, but shuffling data around a pre-release-N WiFi network is doing my head in.

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DeskJockey
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Now fueled by heavy oil...

Foz,

Cat5E/6 around the house is useful because it allows wired connections (obviously!) and allows you to plug in another WAP if wireless isn't very good in that part of the house.

The performance of Wireless depends on many things e.g. number of walls, construction of walls, foil back insulation, microwaves, florescent lights, video senders, baby monitors, nearby wireless networks plus other things.

Wired >> wireless and Power Line networking when transferring lots of data e.g. backing up PCs across the network.

As Beany said, Cat6 will do 10Gb Ethernet to 35m, which may be useful in 10 years time.

If costs for Cat6 aren't much more than Cat5E, then go with Cat6.

You can run HDMI over Cat5E/6 cabling with baluns (note, this is not HDMI over ethernet) which might be useful if you want to send the output of your Sky HD box longer distances than a HDMI cable can do. Also, you can get HDMI combiners/splitters for distributing TV around the home - this can be where the HDMI over Cat6 comes in too. For this to work optimally it seems that two runs of Cat6 (not Cat5E) are useful.

Overall, putting in cables at first fix is much cheaper and easier than later on.