[hybrid_eg]

if you're building new construction, do yourself a favor and at least pre-wire the house fully.. you should have a closet someplace where all structured wiring will go. Now is the time to figure out all TV locations, speaker locations, camera locations, etc.. then run all that Cat6.. since all of this stuff is LV you will not need to have any conduit at least not here in CA. If you end up staying in the house long term you can start adding equipment little by little as that's usually where the biggest expense is, but at least this way you're fully pre-wired for home automation.. it should help with resale as well.

I have Control4 system and love it..

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by glennQNYC

It used to be CAT5e was the standard, and CAT6e was the upgrade. I find now CAT6e is the standard, and CAT7 or fiber is the upgrade.

Definitely plan for a hard-wired network including plenty of access points. Don't forget about outdoor access points and surveillance cabling. You want as much things hard wired to the network as possible, this way you're leaving WiFi capability for the devices that can't be hard wired.

I'd pull at least 3 CAT6e to anyplace with a TV. You'll want one for the TV to connect to the network; one for video signal (via HDMI extender); and one spare.

I'd want dedicated 20A circuits with isolated grounds for my audio/video gear; perhaps even a 220v outlet for some real hardcore subs... but you don't sound as crazy about AV as I am.

I would still recommend doing Cat6a. And fiber gets into a whole rat hole. I've had many debates with others about whether fiber is a good idea for home use. The problem with fiber is it's expensive and is not as future proof as many think it is....I guess within reason. For a while 62.5 micron multimode fiber was thought to be good enough. Then 10Gig Ethernet came out and 62.5 micron was no longer adequate. So 50 micron multimode fiber hit the market. As speeds increased with Ethernet, you then have subsets of quality of 50 micron fiber with OM2, OM3, and OM4. So far the only fiber I've found that has weathered the test of time is 9 micron single mode fiber. Going to single mode fiber exponentially increases the cost of already expensive multi mode fiber entry. Not to mention, fiber is very particular with how it's installed and such with bend radius considerations. Another idea for fiber installations is PONs (passive optical network). At work, I've seen discussions of the use of PONs in the office space to distribute network connectivity to each cubicle. I've seen implementation of PONs which also provide provisions for PoE power. I don't know how expensive it is to deploy. And I can say I haven't run across any of my clients/customers that have actually taken the leap to use PONs.

When I had my A/V room built out, I did do dedicated power circuits for my equipment where the regular outlets and lights were a different circuit to minimize any potential noise from things such as light dimmers. I also went the extra step and had balanced power transformers installed and a rack version of the hard wired balanced power transformers to feed the source equipment in my rack. The hard wired balanced transformers are feeding my two Velodyne subs and the Bryston 6B-ST amp.

[pennsiveguy]

Originally Posted by hybrid_eg

if you're building new construction, do yourself a favor and at least pre-wire the house fully.. you should have a closet someplace where all structured wiring will go. Now is the time to figure out all TV locations, speaker locations, camera locations, etc.. then run all that Cat6.. since all of this stuff is LV you will not need to have any conduit at least not here in CA. If you end up staying in the house long term you can start adding equipment little by little as that's usually where the biggest expense is, but at least this way you're fully pre-wired for home automation.. it should help with resale as well.

I have Control4 system and love it..

I'd also recommend setting up a 19" comm gear rack, either hanging from the ceiling or mounted to the wall. You can buy the rack rails really inexpensively. That way you have the option of rack-mounted switches, firewalls, routers, NAS boxes, etc. And you can put shelves in it for non-rackmount gear. Get a Furman power conditioner for it and mount that at the top of the rack.

[hybrid_eg]

Absolutely! Pipe everything into a rack big enough where you can expand into fully later. I barely got started..

[jimbobiggens]

Think about how much technology has changed in the last twenty years. Twenty years ago the CD was just then replacing the cassette player. Now CD's are almost obsolete with the advent of MP3 and jump drives. The point is now is the time to take a shot at future-proofing the house.

AC wireless and 10gig Ethernet should hold up pretty well. Ten years from now those will be like N wireless and Cat 6a cable today - better options will be available, but those two will still be usable.

If you plan to stay twenty years or more, it really, really won't hurt to run everything in conduit to make the inevitable upgrades as painless as possible.

[TXSTYLE]

Like we did 2yrs ago in our new house: Cat 6 Cables throughout!
And depending on where you are, I strongly suggest Radiant Barrier in the roof.

[Dog Face Pony Soldier]

Originally Posted by jimbobiggens

AC wireless and 10gig Ethernet should hold up pretty well.

802.11AC Wave2 FTW
Cost no object I like Ruckus APs; otherwise Ubiquity delivers an awesome value.

[bigrum]

I always thought the outlets underneath the outside awnings of the roof we're cool for clean holiday lighting.

I also have ethernet in every room and use it whenever I can, as others said it is always faster than my wifi.

[AlpineWhite_SJ]

Originally Posted by jimbobiggens

Think about how much technology has changed in the last twenty years. Twenty years ago the CD was just then replacing the cassette player. Now CD's are almost obsolete with the advent of MP3 and jump drives. The point is now is the time to take a shot at future-proofing the house.

AC wireless and 10gig Ethernet should hold up pretty well. Ten years from now those will be like N wireless and Cat 6a cable today - better options will be available, but those two will still be usable.

If you plan to stay twenty years or more, it really, really won't hurt to run everything in conduit to make the inevitable upgrades as painless as possible.

I don’t believe there’s such thing when it comes to home infrastructure. My parents built in 2006, which if you think about it, was still pretty mp3, DVD, 1080p centric. Fast forward to today and it’s more about streaming services, 4K soon to be 8k, way more tablets/phones, home assistants and IP cameras. What they put in back then is obsolete or at least severely limiting towards what people today expect to do nowadays. Doing state of the art doesn’t always work out on the time horizon a lot of people have for living in their house.

[jimbobiggens]

My house was built in '74. I installed cat 5 in every room in '94 (when I bought the house) Two years ago I replaced all the cat 5 with cat 6 and ran cat 6 to my shop.
If Elon Musk has his way, twenty years from now we all will have Starlink Gen 10.0 wireless.

[bimmer456]

Originally Posted by jimbobiggens

My house was built in '74. I installed cat 5 in every room in '94 (when I bought the house) Two years ago I replaced all the cat 5 with cat 6 and ran cat 6 to my shop.
If Elon Musk has his way, twenty years from now we all will have Starlink Gen 10.0 wireless.

I brought some cat 7 cable 15 years ago.

[dreamingat30fps]

Originally Posted by pennsiveguy

I'd also recommend setting up a 19" comm gear rack, either hanging from the ceiling or mounted to the wall. You can buy the rack rails really inexpensively. That way you have the option of rack-mounted switches, firewalls, routers, NAS boxes, etc. And you can put shelves in it for non-rackmount gear. Get a Furman power conditioner for it and mount that at the top of the rack.

Dafuq you doing running porn sites out of your house??

I consider myself pretty tech savvy and have waaaaay more connected devices than the average person. I have never had an issue with my wifi on any of my devices. Maybe if you have 20 people in the house all trying to stream and download stuff, but I would imagine even then you would run out of bandwidth from your ISP before you maxed out a good wireless setup.

[Red Bread]

Originally Posted by dreamingat30fps

Dafuq you doing running porn sites out of your house??

I consider myself pretty tech savvy and have waaaaay more connected devices than the average person. I have never had an issue with my wifi on any of my devices. Maybe if you have 20 people in the house all trying to stream and download stuff, but I would imagine even then you would run out of bandwidth from your ISP before you maxed out a good wireless setup.

I work from home with Google Fiber. It's around 500-800 mb/s over Cat7 and about 150-250mb/s over AC wireless. I send and receive large files all day. That slower wireless speed is painful when I'm not connected to the wired setup.

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by dreamingat30fps

Dafuq you doing running porn sites out of your house??

I consider myself pretty tech savvy and have waaaaay more connected devices than the average person. I have never had an issue with my wifi on any of my devices. Maybe if you have 20 people in the house all trying to stream and download stuff, but I would imagine even then you would run out of bandwidth from your ISP before you maxed out a good wireless setup.

I guess you would go into shock with what I have running in my server room. Yes, I said server room....it's actually been called a mini data center by many of my colleagues.

As to wireless performance, it really depends on the wireless NIC in the devices, what type of usage is being done from each client and how many simultaneously, and environmental factors such as house construction and ambient RF interference. Also thinking that one should have their network built out according to what their ISP provides is a bit short sighted. There are plenty of reasons why one would utilize more bandwidth than what is provisioned by their ISP. The whole LAN vs WAN networking. It's common place in enterprise businesses where a WAN circuit isn't close to what the organization is running on their LAN/data center.

[wdb]

Great thread. I ran 5e everywhere I could back when the walls were open and 5e was the top stuff. I have a couple of rooms in which it's never been used but, hey, the walls were open.

One thing I wish I had taken more into consideration is battery backup power. I live in the wooded boondocks and we have frequent enough outages that we have a generator. However it is not instantaneous. So I have small battery backup units all over the place to insulate my sensitive and expensive electronics. I kind of wish I had run 120V power cabling to all of the same locations I had run the 5e. That would have allowed me to centralize my battery backup.

EDIT: Just read back through that. Yikes. I sound like I'm preparing for a zombie apocalypse.

[vreihen16]

Put whatever wire you want into the walls/floors/ceilings, but don't staple it down. Should you ever need to use one of those runs, whatever wire you install will serve as a good drag line to pull the cable du jour when the time comes.....

[pennsiveguy]

Originally Posted by dreamingat30fps

Dafuq you doing running porn sites out of your house??

I consider myself pretty tech savvy and have waaaaay more connected devices than the average person. I have never had an issue with my wifi on any of my devices. Maybe if you have 20 people in the house all trying to stream and download stuff, but I would imagine even then you would run out of bandwidth from your ISP before you maxed out a good wireless setup.

I'm on CenturyLink fiber at 1Gb/s up and down. Getting my money's worth out of that bandwidth, and running a site-to-site VPN, means running a dedicated firewall/edge router with some horsepower and hardware encryption/decryption. A rackmount 1U 2-socket server with dual 10Gbe ports fills the bill nicely.

I also have a 36TB 12-drive rack-mount NAS server that holds my media, source code, and documents. I have an Oracle database on a dedicated 6U server, and a VM server with 24 processor cores and a half-terabyte of RAM. All mounted in a rack. Having a bunch of stuff on shelves or on the floor would be a huge waste of space and a hassle to wire and clean and work around.

My electric bill is around $250 a month in the winter, and about $500 a month in the summer when I'm running the AC. The server room pulls about 30-35 amps steady current draw.

And no, I don't host porn. I run a tech consulting company. Same money, without having to split it with a bunch of bimboes.

[Mandi90TT]

Originally Posted by vreihen16

Put whatever wire you want into the walls/floors/ceilings, but don't staple it down. Should you ever need to use one of those runs, whatever wire you install will serve as a good drag line to pull the cable du jour when the time comes.....

That's what conduits are for.

[zx10guy]

I'll just leave this here since people are sharing their setups....

And yes, the cabling is a mess but it's my lab and I keep changing crap around.

[dreamingat30fps]

Originally Posted by pennsiveguy

I'm on CenturyLink fiber at 1Gb/s up and down. Getting my money's worth out of that bandwidth, and running a site-to-site VPN, means running a dedicated firewall/edge router with some horsepower and hardware encryption/decryption. A rackmount 1U 2-socket server with dual 10Gbe ports fills the bill nicely.

I also have a 36TB 12-drive rack-mount NAS server that holds my media, source code, and documents. I have an Oracle database on a dedicated 6U server, and a VM server with 24 processor cores and a half-terabyte of RAM. All mounted in a rack. Having a bunch of stuff on shelves or on the floor would be a huge waste of space and a hassle to wire and clean and work around.

My electric bill is around $250 a month in the winter, and about $500 a month in the summer when I'm running the AC. The server room pulls about 30-35 amps steady current draw.

And no, I don't host porn. I run a tech consulting company. Same money, without having to split it with a bunch of bimboes.

Server rack at homme, 36TB of storage, penis username... you ain't fooling no one buddy!

[dreamingat30fps]

Originally Posted by Red Bread

I work from home with Google Fiber. It's around 500-800 mb/s over Cat7 and about 150-250mb/s over AC wireless. I send and receive large files all day. That slower wireless speed is painful when I'm not connected to the wired setup.

I work from home also but I guess I just don't deal with big enough files. My internet is around 80Mbps-100Mbps which is fine for 99% of what I do (plus it's "free" with my HOA). Only time I wish it was a bit faster is the rare occasion I have to download a 50GB game on my xbox or pc... that takes a bit longer than I would like, but that's an ISP issue not so much wireless. Considering when I was a kid it would take longer than that just to download a jpg far enough to see some nip... can't complain.

Only thing I have hardwired is my little Qnap NAS but that's like 3 feet from my computers so no issues running a cable behind the desk. Even then I rarely need to transfer big enough files to matter much.

Originally Posted by zx10guy

I'll just leave this here since people are sharing their setups....

And yes, the cabling is a mess but it's my lab and I keep changing crap around.

If you have that shit in your closet then I'm guessing you most certainly need some cat7 cabling.

[MADBMWX5MC]

Before walls come completely up ( I assume you are using sheet rock), take a picture of where the wire is going. I did this and it paid dividends when I connector went bad and I was able to pin point where it was behind the wall.