Just brought a house which needs a re-wire. Figured, (assuming the cost isn't massive) that it'd be worth asking the electrician to run some network cable at the same time. We'd do the "wiring" of the cables etc but get him to fit the plates into the wall when the cables are run.. Couple of questions for people with more experience than me 1 - Is there any point in getting Cat 6A cable? Its a bit more expensive than straight 6 and looks like there are some restrictions on bending etc which could be a pain. 2 - Can a 1U (say) rackmount patch panel be mounted to a wall using some brackets? Can't find a huge range of decently priced wall mount brackets online... (We'd have about 10 cables run - 2 per room) 3 - A lot of the panels specify UTP cable - is there any benefit to getting Shielded? Can anyone recommend a decent place online to pickup cable, faceplates & patch panels? Thanks in advance!
I just bought Cat5e to cable our place with, worked fine and was easily 'bendable'. The CAT6 we put into the office was horrific on the other hand.
1 - There are still restrictions on bending cat6 cable - if you want it to actually be within the cat6 spec. 2 - it can be but there isn't any solutions I have seen specifically for this short of putting a small comms box on the wall somewhere, I would do that, costs might be a little bit more, but then you can put your switch in there, your router etc. and keep all comms in the same place. 3 - I can't see the benefit of you running shielded, it's more expensive and harder to terminate correctly. I get all my gear from comms-express or fruity cables. By - "you'll do the wiring" do you mean the terminating etc.? As some electricians can and some can't properly terminate networking gear.
Wait. hold it. If the guy wants to run the power and LAN in the same run you must get shielded cables.
I read it as him wanting them done at the same time rather than physically in the same run - yes if your mains and lan cables are occupying the exact same space (ie. same bit of conduit) then yeah will need to be shielded - though, it's best not to run cables in that fashion. More to the point, if whoever is terminating the cables doesn't know how to correctly terminate shielded cable, then the shielding won't work anyway and the extra expense is wasted Which is why it's best to just not run your lan in amongst power cables in the first place.
Yep, that's what shielded is for, close proximity to electric. Otherwise without it you will get interference which can severely degrade the network performance.
Just figured if the sparky cant terminate CAT cabling he will not know about shielding issues either. Also crossing over power cables at 90 degrees is very bad. just some food for thought. if there are any other concerns I missed? Like I don't know vertically stable cables please chime in. (I think that only becomes an issue when raising over 15-20 meters but I am not sure)
Personally I'd go with shielded CAT6(A). It shouldn't cost THAT much and is future proof - you can use cat-converters and run all kinds of material through a proper network... Might be a pointless thing at the moment, but you aren't likely to re-wire the house again any time soon.
I'd be looking for a coupler panel, there's a few about which are only a couple of inches deep, and could easily be secured by screws to a wall fixing. It's also worth considering double-running your cables in case one of them goes bad/gets damaged over the years, although if it's not broken you could use the old cable as a pull-through for some new.
Go with cat6, as cat6a is much more expensive and 10GigE will work, on properly installed and terminated cat6 runs under 40M. Monoprice has cheap wall mounts, patch panels, keystone jacks etc. Not sure how much they charge to ship cross the pond though.
The plan is for separate runs for network and I'll be doing all the terminating. We're up against it for time and money tough so if costs are high we'll just can the idea. Thanks for the advice guys, time to cost things up this evening!
Hummm, you could go for Cat7, a single one splices up to 2xCat5 which suffices for Gigabit. Bonus is the superiour shielding. That said, one line Cat7 costs as much as two Cat6 es, so meh.
Sorted, sparky fitting us 2 runs of cat6 per room - he's done courses (and he's fitted cat6 commercially before) so knows what to do in terms of separate routes to power etc. Should be good when it's all done!
Quick heads up - 10% discount at Comms Express if you like their FB page and send them a message. Been getting loads of the discount codes through work colleagues etc. and using them on various orders EDIT: Doh - should have read thread! You are sorted now...
