How should I wire my two story house?

[+primortal Subscriber²]

If you have a bathroom on the second floor that directly over the bathroom on the first floor you might have a "conduit" where all the pipes are to run a cable line to the attic.

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

I know what you mean about preferring cable over wireless 100%. I don't even do any 1080 streaming or anything super-high bandwidth needed, I just enjoy the reliability of cables over wireless, especially if you're going to be living there for some time.

It's not going to be the easiest thing to wire an already completely house with cable. I've done it before for just 1 room (installed a jack for ethernet cable on 1st floor coming from the basement) and the room below in the basement was still unfinished so I was able to just string it up basically.

Don't got too much advice besides find a so you can make the least amount of holes etc but if you want to wire the whole house it won't be that easy. Good luck.

[cybertimber2008]

This article is good: http://www.cablestogo.com/help/network1.asp

[Crisp]

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

Is running a couple of cables along the outside wall of your house an option?

Thats how we wired our house up a couple of years ago.

In the computer room we have an 8 port gigabit switch which the switches in the other rooms connect to.

The wire comes out the wall where some plant is so you carn't really see it.

It then runs along the top of the wall near the roof

Then back in to the wall upstairs where it is wired up to a network wall point

A 5 port gigabit switch is connected to the wall point in each room to allow multiple devices to be connected.

Pulling the skirting board up, destroying the wall or running wires under the floorboards was a big no no when doing this. I think this was a pretty good way of doing it without creating a huge mess.

It probably cost about ?30-40 for all the network cable and wall points, much cheaper than multiple wireless access points or home plugs.

Your also guaranteed gigabit speeds, although realistically due to the speeds of most hard drives you will be lucky to see much higher than 400mbps transferring files between computers.

Also Cat5 cable is cheap and perfect for gigabit networks, I didn't see the need to break the bank buying Cat6.

Hope that gives you a few ideas :)

[RiverCampher]

I've a belkin powerline router, and they are poor to say the least. The 1gb advertised speed is only in the same room where you might get something like 20-30mbps. Another floor (and this is a house built in 2008) down and it drops to 10-15. Impossible to stream 1080 at that, especially if you want good surround sound as well so don't waste your money! A review is here.

Apparently there are new Wireless routers around 600mpbs out this year on the full N standard (and a new powerline one apparently)... But nothing is ever going to beat a cable for latency for a long while.

Currently I have a cable that just trails under the carpet & down the stairs until I get some proper wiring... Mines a 3-story house so it's going to be tough & expensive to do it properly :(

[Crisp]

It then runs along the top of the wall near the roof

Damn, i never thought of this. Just a dumb question throwing out there, are these weather proof?

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

Damn, i never thought of this. Just a dumb question throwing out there, are these weather proof?

Cat5 is basically just 8 wires in plastic coating, so unless you slit the plastic coating I don't think you will have any problems.

You can buy Cat5 that is sold as been weatherproof, however i'm not exactly sure how this differs from normal Cat5.

The Cat5 going around our house has been out there for 3 years. In that time its had to cope with the -20c temperatures the UK got this winter, along with loads of rain and the cable still looks as good as the day it was wired up.