off topicthe home of tomorrow?

Colin McGregor colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Thu Sep 7 01:38:22 UTC 2006


--- dave morton <dmortondc-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> we are doing a major renovation this winter.
> 
> gazing into your crystal balls, i am sure most would
> agree that wireless in 
> some form or another, will be the future in homes
> (for streaming etc.), 
> however, does anyone have any thoughts on what might
> be useful to include in 
> our new house's hard-wiring?

I last seriously looked at the question of home
networking a few years ago when I pulled Cat 5 cable
from a small 19" rack in the basement to several
places in the house (this being a house that was built
in the 1920's). 

One key thing I did do was to make sure that any cable
run that was a TOTAL pain to do first time out will
not be a pain to replace. Most of the basement in my
place is unfinished, but there is a finished den. The
cable run into that den was a SERIOUS PAIN to do, but
when I did it, I put in a large heavy duty conduit
pipe out to an unfinished part of the basement (where
the run to the 19" rack is painless). If I every want
to change from Cat 5 to say optical cable it will be
just a case of tape the new cable to the old and pull.
Similar story for the run from the basement to the
attic, royal pain to do once, it will be easy to
replace cables through the conduit I put in place.

Besides the "main" basement rack, I did set-up a small
hub in the attic (protected inside an old wooden shoe
box), which made the cable runs MUCH simpler as it
means that every room in the house can be reached
either from the attic or basement...

I trust you know about the Leviton Quickport wall
plates. Basically we are talking plates the same size
as standard electrical outlet plates with 1 to 6 holes
into which you can snap RJ-45 Cat 5 connectors, RJ-11
(analog phone) connectors, BNC connectors, etc., etc..
They look very slick and I have used them through out
my place. Also, when I did this the only colours
available for the plates was white and off white,
neither of which matched the living room baseboards
(dark brown). Easily fixed with a small paint brush
and a small bottle of plastic model paint...

I still don't totally trust wireless networking, in
part due to my holding an amateur radio licence
(VE3ZAA). A basic rule in my books has been, get a new
radio, see what it can pick up. So, cordless phone
calls, oddball radio stations, (like XMJ225, Toronto's
most boring radio station, all Toronto weather, all
the time) etc., no problem (well, okay, the phone
calls I have heard were BORING, but that is beside the
point). Basicly encryption or not, I don't want to be
transmitting anything I care about, PERIOD. Besides
Cat 5 feeding into a switch will give you bandwidth
that can blow away a wireless network (yea, okay, so
normally your big bottleneck will be the cable/ADSL
connection, but still... :-) ).

> i can envision a day when low voltage wiring will be
> the norm for lights etc 
> but what
> about 'wiring' (fibre, cat5 etc) in the home of the
> near future? is gigabit 
> ethernet going to stay within the wires or will it
> become just another part 
> of the radio spectrum as soon as bandwith glitches
> are cleared up?
> 
> since we have the opportunity to rewire from
> scratch, it seems a good time 
> to consider what should be sticking out of the
> electrical boxes as the 
> wiring goes in. perhaps nothing more than cat5 cable
> will be handy for most 
> near-future needs...i don't know
> 
> i am pretty typical of most of us in this group,
> everything is hybrid: ADSL, 
> wired linux servers, wifi debian laptops, bluetooth
> for blackberry , imac 
> hardwired to a printer but remote-controlled, rogers
> cable, wirefree phones 
> etc, etc, etc.
> 
> for sure... all this stuff will be connected
> differently in just a few years
> 
> the question is, can i hedge my bets on any coming
> trend(s)?

Well, my key points:

- If doing it first time out is a total pain, make
sure re-doing it will be fairly painless.
- Make it look good.
- Don't trust wireless.

Colin.
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