Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Feb 25, 2013 11:15 pm My knowledge of IT, computers, data and networking is basic to intermediate in my mind but I am really struggling. I am currently finalising my plans for a new build. Its a double brick house in Western Australia. I have been really struggling with 'smart wiring' my house. I jokingly quote smart wiring, just adding data points. I asked my builder about adding data points but all I got was 'we don't do it'. I wasn't that happy with that response and I am trying to sort it out myself. I have 4 points where I want data points - Living (TV) - IT Nook - Theatre - Activity First of all, I have been thinking of getting the builder to put in. - Living (TV) - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 200mm off the ground with face plate or - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 1200mm (behind tv) and 200mm off the ground with face plates - IT Nook - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 1200mm face plate - Theatre - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 200mm off the ground with face plate or - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 1200mm (behind tv) and 200mm off the ground with face plates - Activity - 25mm conduit with draw wire from the roof cavity to 1200mm (behind tv) and 200mm off the ground with face plates So does that sound alright? The conduit will allow for more cables. Next area of question is the network hub. This is where I really struggle. I am trying to find a location in the house. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ So I dont know what type of switch/hub/network I should go? any thoughts? Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Re: Data Help - New Build 2Feb 26, 2013 9:50 am Will your builder allow third party contractors onsite? That would be the preferred option, having a cabler install the runs, rather than relying upon conduits post handover. If not the conduits will do. Why limit yourself to the four places you have identified? Future proof and run conduits to the all bedrooms - yes wireless will always be an option, but nothing beats a hardwired connection for speed and stability. I even had runs to the laundry and behind the fridge space. With the 4 areas you have identified, you will probably have at least 13 points - Living (TV) (4) - IT Nook (2) - Theatre (4) - Activity (3) Why not purchase a 24 port switch combined with a wireless modem router and you will be set. In regards to placement of your 'data hub', I would stay away from the garage. Garages tend to be less insulated than the rest of the house and because of that get quite hot and dusty. Where you have indicated in the linen cupboard is a good central placement - don't forget to install a phone point there. Alternatively you could look at installing a cupboard within the Theatre room. Re: Data Help - New Build 3Feb 26, 2013 3:20 pm Ultimately it's not going to make a huge difference where you put a switch (switch, not hub. Noone uses hubs anymore). And given that you're not exactly running a data center, the heat you're going to be dissipating? Not even worth considering as far as location being in the garage vs a cupboard - but if you do put it in a cupboard, do at least put a vent in. A cupboard is definitely a better place though, as thieves breaking in will tend to look for things like DVRs etc to knock them out early - hidden in a cupboard you can have it there as well - locked, if you like too. As far as which switch to go with? Let's be honest, the fact that you're asking this question means you probably don't need to go high-end. Something like a D-Link DGS-1016D is going to be a good, solid domestic gigabit switch as a core with room to grow (for what you're putting in), and cost ~$150. I absolutely do not recommend any kind of main router being the same primary device all your other cables go in to - keep them as separate devices. If the power supply on one goes, or a port, or whatever, you can just replace them individually - and reconfigure them individually. Could I also suggest, IF you can get them to install conduit, you do so between the wall of Bed 2 and 3. That way you've knocked over both in one go. atom_ute Why not purchase a 24 port switch combined with a wireless modem router and you will be set. A good reason to start would be "because wireless is frustrating at best". Building a Delta 21 at Craigieburn - http://homeofzero.blogspot.com.au/ Deposit: 26/02. Contract: 22/05. Settlement: 29/05. Site start: 18/10. Re: Data Help - New Build 5Feb 28, 2013 7:03 am If your builder doesn't do it, surely you can contact a data cable company and get them to help you. The builder should allow them onsite to do it properly. Conduit isn't cabling - there is a bit of mucking about with crimping etc on top. Re: Data Help - New Build 6Feb 28, 2013 8:01 am My advice, do more than you are as it’s a lot easier to do before the plaster goes on the walls. Conduit will help but it will still be a mission climbing through the roof to install it all We put LOADS of stuff into our house thinking we would need it and it was a waste to be honest. We simply don’t use a lot of it unfortunately. The person we used to do the work simply went over board and didn’t think outside the square. You don’t need that many cable runs in my eyes if you want to do a simple TV, data and phone install What we ended up using was Living - 2 cat 6 (one HDMI convertor and one infra-red) and one coax free to air (FTA) TV Media - 2 cat 6 and one coax (one HDMI convertor and one infra-red) and one coax FTA TV Bedrooms - one cat 6 and one coax (we should have run 2 cat 6 to use as above) Alfresco - one cat 6 and one coax (we should have run 2 cat 6 to use as above) Cat 6 will work as HDMI when used with a cat 6 to HDMI convertor which means you can do away with all your Fox and DVD players in the living or media room and simply put them next to a hub. It also means you can send Fox to all rooms in the house, though with only one box you are limited to watching the same program everywhere. It still does come in handy though. Cat 6 is also used for infra-red remote stuff which is needed for moving your boxes to the hub area. With regard to placement, unless the linen is large i would use the robe in bed 2. Don’t forget you will probably be best off putting your alarm beside the hub as you will probably also use the hub for phone and it’s a lot easier to run the alarm straight into the hub and the screamer will help keep thieves away from the phone lines. Phone lines are simple, i used study and walk in pantry as most phones these days are wireless anyway so you don’t really need to go overboard unless you have a fax machine, which in this day and age is unlikely Data point, we put them everywhere but honestly they aren’t needed in my eyes. Our wireless router supplied by Telstra works fine. Most smart TV's ie Samsung and Playstations work wirelessly so no need to worry about data to the TV unless it’s a long way away from the wireless router With regard to cable, i am no expert but i am led to believe that cat 6 will work in both directions, cat 5 is a directional cable? please someone correct me if i am wrong. I think that’s about it. I don’t believe our house will really go out of date that quickly given that technology is moving forward and surely wireless systems will only get better and better. Our wireless is as fast as being connected by cable, it probably shouldn’t be, and unless you download movies i really don’t think it needs to be any quicker. I can watch Top Gear as its being downloaded as a HD file which is great. Good luck with it all and I hope we arent confusing you too much Re: Data Help - New Build 7Feb 28, 2013 8:08 am BradS Data point, we put them everywhere but honestly they aren’t needed in my eyes. Our wireless router supplied by Telstra works fine. Most smart TV's ie Samsung and Playstations work wirelessly so no need to worry about data to the TV unless it’s a long way away from the wireless router That's only for people who aren't interested in streaming high definition video throughout the house. I am, so I want data points in each room. Wireless may be suitable for your needs but it isn't suitable for that. Just an FYI for the original poster. My Hamptons build (completed): viewtopic.php?f=31&t=63370 Moved in Wednesday 11th Dec 2013 Front landscaping completed June 2016 Re: Data Help - New Build 9Feb 28, 2013 1:13 pm BradS With regard to cable, i am no expert but i am led to believe that cat 6 will work in both directions, cat 5 is a directional cable? please someone correct me if i am wrong. Sorry but that's incorrect. Cat 6 is simply an updated standard to cat 5e. Both will support gigabit Ethernet just fine in both directions. Cat 6 however will support 200 MHz and Cat 5e supports 100 MHz. The difference is more bandwidth and less crosstalk. In a home situation you are not going to see any difference between the two with your home grade gigabit switches and devices. Cat 6 is superseded by Cat 6a. That will get superseded by something else! Completed a knock down and rebuild in northern Melbourne. Handover completed 27/09/2013 and now moved in. Re: Data Help - New Build 10Feb 28, 2013 2:52 pm On the Cat5 vs Cat6 debate... I'm an IT professional who has a ridiculous amount of gadgets in his house. A server rack, NAS, multiple wifi access points, several media centre computers, a couple of high-end desktop PCs, and whatever random gadget caught my eye in the last few weeks. When I did my electrical appointment I selected Cat 6 cabling with Cat 5e faceplates. Why? Because they only offered me Cat 6 cabling, and Cat 6 faceplates cost $37 extra per point. Cat 6 offered me absolutely nothing that I needed, so had I been offered Cat 5e cabling in the walls at a reduced price I'd have cheerfully accepted it. We won't see anything higher than 1 Gbit/sec on Cat 6 any time in the near future, so unless I plan on running extremely lengthy cables (well over 100m) or am bundling hundreds of cables together I only need Cat 5e. My NAS can saturate a 1 Gbit/sec link most of the time, but struggles to get much further than that even with two links enabled. That requires a sophisticated network switch, a high-end NAS, and a lot of techie effort to make it work for little benefit. Even with solid-state on my home machines (which they mostly have) I rarely see Gigabit speeds for more than a few seconds at a time, things simply don't need it. If you want the best of all worlds, here's what I suggest (assuming you have a large house)... - Organise yourself a centralised patch panel for every network cable to terminate, probably in your garage, guest room, closet or pantry - Make sure the termination point has decent airflow and doesn't get too hot (35 degrees would be a fair limit) - Buy a decent network switch, 16 ports or better (I'd recommend Dell, would avoid Linksys, and would consider DLink but those are personal preferences) - Buy a decent router that doesn't have a modem built into it (I use a NetGear R6300) - Buy at least one, preferably two WiFi access points that support bridging (so they can act as extensions of the same WiFi network) - Place your wifi points carefully, aiming for good coverage of both the house and any outdoor living spaces you might have. I'm putting one in my ceiling space over the main living room, another in my office - Wire anything that relies on lots of bandwidth or low latency: - Movies are getting to be very large, so need tons of bandwidth - Online games are fussy about lag/latency - Storage arrays (including single-hard-disk style file sharing appliances) will easily saturate your wireless network - Wire anything that doesn't physically move, such as desktop PCs - Don't skimp on your network hardware, a cruddy router will waste so much of your time that you'll quickly regret the $15 you saved buying an el-cheapo model - Don't rely on integrated devices which combine switch/modem/router - technology changes so fast that you won't want to replace the combo device just to get access to faster wifi later in life - Buy a bigger switch than you need, spare network ports are cheaper than replacing the entire switch - Consider noise levesl (my NAS is loud, so it lives in an area that I don't ever go near. Some switches have fans which can be annoying too) - Don't make your own cables! Either buy pre-wired (good suggestion from other forum members on this) or pay somebody who knows what they're doing (flakey cables suck to debug) - Buy a cheap cable tester on eBay to prove everything is wired right (again, time vs. money) Remember that wireless is a shared medium, wired is dedicated. This means that a single busy machine on your wifi network can degrade performance for everybody, while a busy machine on a cabled network cannot. So pick your solution carefully based on how it will be used. Your iPad can't do much harm to your network, but your 13 year old kid might spend half his time copy 10GB files back and forth between machines. My current place has a total of 6 wired points, and that does the job. The house I'm building has 18 right now. I'll be putting a 24 port switch in, two wifi points, the NAS. Happy to go through more detail if anybody asks. Re: Data Help - New Build 11Feb 28, 2013 3:13 pm +1 to everything Lurgen said. My current build is being cabled in Cat 5e for that exact reason. Whilst I threw out all the enterprise grade toys I was running in the full height server rack at the house I demolished (yes another in IT that likes his toys) I still have a lot of gear running much like Lurgen describes. I had the option of either Cat 6 or at a reduced price Cat 5e and it was a no brainer to go the cheaper option as I'll have no performance hit by doing so for anything I run. By the time home networks outgrow the capacity provided by Cat 5e we'll be well past Cat 6 and running fibre optic throughout or the like. Completed a knock down and rebuild in northern Melbourne. Handover completed 27/09/2013 and now moved in. Re: Data Help - New Build 13Mar 01, 2013 8:44 am Lurgen My NAS can saturate a 1 Gbit/sec link most of the time, but struggles to get much further than that even with two links enabled. That requires a sophisticated network switch, a high-end NAS, and a lot of techie effort to make it work for little benefit. Even with solid-state on my home machines (which they mostly have) I rarely see Gigabit speeds for more than a few seconds at a time, things simply don't need it. Yup. I would see it like this: If you're asking on this particular forum, you probably don't need the advantages now. Certainly go with it for future proofing, but for people like myself, Lurgen, a few others - sure, we can easily saturate GigEth links (I have a get 10Gig links between devices at home) - but for non-geeks, don't get overly concerned about it. However, using wireless for anything more than about 100kB/s is a silly idea. It's fine for web surfing, maaayyyybe streaming mid-quality video. For high quality video or anything that needs good QoS (eg, Voice over IP), don't rely on it. Lurgen - Buy a decent network switch, 16 ports or better (I'd recommend Dell, would avoid Linksys, and would consider DLink but those are personal preferences) D-Link manufacture Dells switches, and do all the hardware design too. As with all networking equipment, avoid like the plague cheap equipment. You hear all kinds of whinges about their gear being crap, because someone bought the $50 router instead of the $150 switch and a separate $350 router. There's a good reason we don't run data centres on gear you buy from Harvey Norman Lurgen - Buy a decent router that doesn't have a modem built into it (I use a NetGear R6300) This, absolutely. The exception is if you want to go to something like certain Cisco gear. For home, something like a Cisco 871/877, 1841 with HWICs or 2811 with HWICs is perfectly acceptable - though in most cases, overkill. Lurgen - Buy at least one, preferably two WiFi access points that support bridging (so they can act as extensions of the same WiFi network) Again, this - and don't skimp. Something with WDS is probably the way to go. I'm still running D-Link 3200APs (802.11g), which are an enterprise grade product - retail they were around the 430 mark (also, don't pay retail). A Cisco Aironet or enterprise level Netgear would also be similarly acceptable. If you like having your entire wireless network fall over every time you try to stream a video from YouTube, by all means, spend $50. Lurgen - Place your wifi points carefully, aiming for good coverage of both the house and any outdoor living spaces you might have. I'm putting one in my ceiling space over the main living room, another in my office There is one single critical word to be remembered when planning AP locations: perpendicular. To a radio signal, a concrete wall at 45 degrees will cause 70% of the signal loss of a wall that's parallel to a signal. There's a lot of math that goes in to getting it right, but let's just say that walls aren't the problem, angle of walls are the problem. If you're using plenum rated APs and putting them in the roof, then remember that the roof is also a wall. Lurgen - Don't skimp on your network hardware, a cruddy router will waste so much of your time that you'll quickly regret the $15 you saved buying an el-cheapo model This. As an example, at my parents house we use a D-Link DGL4100. Not terribly expensive (~$300) - but you'll understand why when you realise it can actually handle people running torrent clients without everything falling over. Same goes for the 2811 that's going in at the new house. Lurgen - Don't rely on integrated devices which combine switch/modem/router - technology changes so fast that you won't want to replace the combo device just to get access to faster wifi later in life Again, this. Lurgen - Buy a bigger switch than you need, spare network ports are cheaper than replacing the entire switch The difference between a good 16 and 24 port switch might be $50, unless it's a layer 2/3 switch. In which case, you're not asking this question on this forum. Lurgen - Don't make your own cables! Either buy pre-wired (good suggestion from other forum members on this) or pay somebody who knows what they're doing (flakey cables suck to debug) One day, you'll waste hours of your life wondering why things keep dropping out. And it will be because you spent $2 on an ethernet cable, not $10. Building a Delta 21 at Craigieburn - http://homeofzero.blogspot.com.au/ Deposit: 26/02. Contract: 22/05. Settlement: 29/05. Site start: 18/10. Re: Data Help - New Build 14Mar 01, 2013 9:24 am You'll be working towards something like this:- Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Im running the cat6 cables myself with a cabler(only does commercial installs but is a friend) terminating the connections - fairly easy access into the ceiling cavity. Definately use prefab cables... Building with Jandson Homes - Eclipse 18. http://adgnetworks.blogspot.com/ Re: Data Help - New Build 15Mar 02, 2013 9:08 am If you really want a kickarse wifi setup, you can't go past the price performance of Unifi. They can be ceiling mounted, and look great, and have some serious chops. You can also chain them together etc. Really sweet controller software means they are easy to deploy and easy to manage. Here is a 3 pack cheap: http://www.wisp.net.au/pack-unifi-enter ... l?cPath=55 Product page: http://www.ubnt.com/unifi I'm having 2 Long range APs in my house, in the ceiling, facing down. Also having 13 other Cat6 points around the place. The electrician wouldn't install cat5e, said he couldn't be bothered buying it anymore. I didn't argue. Re: Data Help - New Build 16Mar 02, 2013 9:30 am 1 conduit for activity, living, ( maybe 2), theatre and main bedroom at least. You will also need conduit in where were you plan to have it all ending up. That is where your switch and modem etc will be so that all cables end neatly out of wall socket at the end . For example in our place we have an office room so all cabling ends here. Our first phone point is here also. Great for using the cabling to extend the phone to the bedroom. ( we also have 2 wireless phones) I regret not adding a conduit near where we have the tv in the main bedroom. We added it near the bed instead for phone/internet use. If we'd added it near the bedroom tv it would have been easy to watch movies etc streamed form our data storage in the bedroom. The only way we could do that atm would be to run a cable across the floor and since that is messy it doesn't get done. We do have a few points around the house where there is too much interference for wireless to work well. so I'm glad we also have a wired network. Cables/points per conduit- Lounge 2. You might want more for a dedicated theatre room. We use one to connect a dw tv box to our tv. Activity room 2 Main bedroom 2 ( handy as the wireless isn't always good) Living area 5( we have a lot of computers) We have 2 conduits in the office which all cabling goes down from ceiling to exit plugs. One also houses the phone line. It was a tight fit. We also added an additional conduit for tv cable/whatever in our livingroom. This is currently not in use. In the office we have a 24 port switch ( was cheaper than a 16 port) , printer/fax/scanner connected both wirelessless to the system and also cabled in. At least one computer connected by cable at all times. We used to have a separate voip machine but now its part of the modem, phone connected to modem ( does "fall back" to main phone line if internet is down) love the easy of access when i need to check connections/modem etc. Lurgen's comments: * On cat5a versus cat 6- our installer told us the exact same thing about pretty much nil difference between the two if you are running distances less than 100m. Nice to hear it repeated as I was beginning to feel a bit unhappy we only have cat5e. * Separate modem/router/voip is handy and good but then I'd def want a dedicated case for it all. This is where we've been a bit slack. Since our office is the size and location of the original garage it's big enough to have 2 long trestle tables down one side of it. Plenty of room for a switch and a modem on the trestle next to the phone. Did consider a rack but seemed a bit excessive for such a small amount of gear. Unless I set up a dedicated work storage as well. Until then it can stay where it is or be houses on wall shelving. * WA double brick- steel door frames? consider electrical interference- My 2 drop out points in the house are where the wireless has to get through a fridge ( on the opposite side of the wall to modem) and then 2 walls + kitchen cupboards ( to one corner of the main living area) and, when it has to go through 3 single brick walls and a steel door frame( to main bedroom) . Scientists have used random matrix theory to demonstrate theoretically that the neutrino mass hierarchy can be explained mathematically. When a substance is fragmented… 21 20624 If you're referring to Eufy homebase, then just put a switch between a datapoint and put the homebase elsewhere near another device in your home unless you want teh… 9 13825 Thank you so much everyone. This all makes a lot of sense. I guess when you talk to a builder who butters up everything to look very polished, you get to start believing… 7 17199 |