What we really need are architects that add chases throughout the house so that you can add any matter of cable you want, be that electrical, plumbing, cable, fiber or cat.
I have a chase in the middle of my house which used to be a chimney for a now decommissioned oil burner. I have all matter of cables going through there now, including, but not limited to two cat cables that provide ethernet to my attic and second floor. Not sure I would have been able to DIY it without that chase.
If each house had a couple of these chases that would provide a ton of flexibility in terms of remodeling.
Yep. This kind of forethought is rare in home design, but magical when present. It doesn’t sell, though (not like the latest color or cabinets do).
I put thought into long term maintenance and upgrades for my current house and for the first few years got nothing from it. As I’ve had to do repairs recently I’ve saved literally thousands of dollars because the wires, pipes, conduits and fittings are all easily accessible.
Yes, exactly this. Although, fire codes do create a requirement here. You have to be sure not to create places where fire can propagate. And please use plenum-rated cables (fire retardant sheath). If you have punched holes in your old chimney in order to pass cables in and out, I'd do a fire propagation audit and mitigate any problems that you find.
40 years ago, the U of Minnesota built a new Elec Engg building. As I remember it, every single office for faculty and grad students, as well as every lab, backed up to a secure 6-foot wide hallway that was built specifically to be a cable chase. Brilliant idea. Experimenting with a new technology was a matter of changing out the access plate in the back wall of the office, and rounding up someone with a key to the hallway.
How does this work with IBC/IFC building code requirements to have a fire-stop between floors? Even assuming the conduit itself is correctly rated, you need to seal the interior while somehow still allowing future wiring to be added without the need to remove a wall.
I guess my point is: You'll fail inspection unless you're extremely careful. It isn't obvious how to add generic future conduit without fire-stops being a huge PITA (since the same thing stopping smoke/fire also stops you running cable).
Keep in mind new construction is held to a higher standard (newer version of IBC/IFC) than grandfathering into existing building.
I did what sokka mentioned. rockwool at both the top and bottom. The chimney is still present so there's a cast iron 4" pipe which is my conduit. When the previous owner decomissioned the oil tank they chopped the top and bottom of the chimney off and added caps at both ends and the roof was patched. All the cables go all the way through to the attic and I hit the second floor from the attic. Not sure it'll be to the liking of all inspectors but to me it's reasonable.
There are plenty of easy to use commercial products for fire rated, reworkable cable penetrations. Unfortunately they are rather expensive so you'll want to minimize usage. There's also foam and plaster products that meet latest codes but they're not as friendly to rework (chip them out and replace).
That won't pass inspection. Ignoring the fact that Rockwool isn't certified as a conduit fire-stop, you also cannot demonstrate its existence to a building inspector.
This is a hard/annoying problem to solve, "shove some insulation in the pipe" isn't in the ballpark of what a solution might look like.
Low voltage wire, to my understanding, does not in most / all US States require inspection or permits.
It's definitely 'encouraged' to put in fire stops and seal the holes you make but very few states in the US, if any, will stop you if you choose not to because they won't know.
Saw an ICF house a decade ago where they did some thin channel mounted on the wall & they ran everything through there instead of cutting into the ICF. Can't remember how it worked with the dry wall.
Would be nice to see interior walls built with such a thing.
I've seen this done a couple of times, but somebody has to push for it.
In standard suburban construction, this will never happen. These developers will cheap out to save $15 on a ventilation fan, they aren't going to run anything extra if people aren't demanding it.
To a 1st approximation, nobody (in the buying public) knows or cares.
At the very least there should be conduit between every room in the house and the utility closet. Wi-Fi is a miracle of modern engineering, but it will never truly be able to compete with the speed and reliability afforded by a hard copper or fiber optic interlink.
Higher density housing can be extra frustrating. My single family home is in a community dense enough to require fireblock in the walls on upper floors, and it has made running my own ethernet an even bigger pain in the ass than usual.
when we had an electrician dig new chases to completely rewire the electricity in my grandparents apartment in a century old building, i asked him to add an additional pipe everywhere so that i could wire ethernet as well. every room got at least one or two, some more. the key thing was that even though we didn't use most of those extra pipes, adding them barely cost more than the material, because the work to dig the chases didn't change.
An architect will optimise for liveable space. Whoever pays them can choose less liveable space in exchange for a chase. Most normal house purchasers won´t go for it.
Why would you need to prioritize one over the other? Plumbing, electrical, etc already utilize the same spaces inside of walls and floors. No reason this couldn’t be done the same way without cutting down the living area at all.
From a spacial perspective you are right, of course.
Perhaps the tradeoff is that for any given house price, the time & money cost of planning and adding "hidden" features that buyers seldom think to prioritize, has to be offset by reductions in other value that buyers are more likely to notice. But, not necessarily space.
Sure, but space maximizing cost efficiency isn’t a major priority in most homes as otherwise they would all end up as boxes with simple roof lines and uniform exteriors. Clearly modern subdivisions simply don’t look like that.
I think most residential homes in the US aren’t the work of architects these days, but designers. The difference being credentials, not diligence/skill.
Either way I suspect they aren’t optimizing for living space, but salability and construction cost. That’s what buyers will actually use in decisions - ability to pay and perception of quality/value.
Idk wtf architects optimize for. Some sort of truisms about what buyers want and builder cost I think because a lot of houses are designed really poorly.
You might be able to do this for coax, fiber, Cat-N, or other low-voltage (or optical) communications lines, but code specifies minimum physical separation distances between gas, plumbing, sewer, and line voltage.
Home builders are probably the worst option to design a home network as they're only interested in mass-producing crap as quick as possible, and they have no idea the difference between cat5, cat7, or fiber. You're lucky if you get electrical outlets in the right places and orientation.
My friend that is like me a network engineer just bought/building a new house, and was talking about getting a 8 port switch. I was like what, for a new, large-ish house? He was talking about just doing wireless, and I'm like ugh, but what about all your kids watching netflix on 8k+ tv's, all on wireless at the same time and complaining to you, you'll wish you had wired their tv's. Not to mention security cameras, doorbells, multiple AP's potentially, ethernet-based sensors for things, etc, all things that need Power over Ethernet too, or at least benefit from it. It got him thinking at least.
Then he went back to the builder and the builder gave him 2 options, take what they give, which is an ethernet drop in each room in a random spot back to a closet of whatever cable they happen to have that day, or nothing. I'd have been pissed, and he was at that point. I told him better luck next time on his next house.
It shouldn't take a network engineer to build a decent home network, but apparently it does and any home builder worth a damn should in the modern age should consider it.
A co-worker became friends with his contractor and put in his own drops in the evening after the workers left.
My place has two separate drops per room. One for Ethernet and one Ethernet that is setup as a phone line.
I picked up a couple used enterprise grade AP’s with traffic shaping and all is good.
> A co-worker became friends with his contractor and put in his own drops in the evening after the workers left.
Was talking to my dad over Thanksgiving and that's precisely what he did every time we bought a new house. He would go over to the new house after work and install conduit to the house so he didn't have to tear up the house installing it after drywall.
The first time I think he just did a giant PVC pipe from top to bottom, that's what he said. Seems like there was more to that installation that I should ask about. I was quite a young child when we lived at that house so hearing it had ethernet was surprising.
The second time he actually did all the ethernet runs while the house was unfinished and I remember it because he'd bring me along.
If you're just lazy like me, you just go through an exterior wall, staple the cable up along some trim, and go back through the wall into the room you want the cable. Caulk it up and paint it and you can't even tell it's there. Best to get outdoor-rated, or direct-burial cable. The layer of paint over it also seems to do a pretty good job protecting it.
I did this and had durability problems; it broke twice in about eight years. I am attempting to find a contractor to run cables through the walls/attic, which seems to be a frustrating "send in a quote inquiry, then when I get no response in a week call them and see that they actually got the inquiry, but the guy who actually does estimates is backed up."
The problem isn't using Cat5E, specifically - as long as they run conduit pulling new cable isn't a big deal. It's the complete lack of planning and design around home networking, which is just as important to our daily lives in 2023 as plumbing and electrical is.
When my aunt moved her custom sewing shop last October I put more effort into planning the network infrastructure for her modest storefront than homebuilders do for half a million dollar homes.
I've heard the secret to getting contractors to do what you want is "Name a price, then do it." Basically for everything non-standard you want in the build, let them set a price, and then pay it. Oftentimes it'll be a few thousand for extra wiring or moving some outlet around, $25K to raise the roof in a room, something like that. But if they feel like they're getting an extra few grand out of you, many contractors are very willing to do it.
It does mean that costs frequently balloon, but you should expect that when you do any form of home renovation, and just budget an extra $100K or so for it.
Lots of people out here not making the realization they need to be in the top ~20% of earners in their area if they want anything remotely nice in their life.
Edit: probably higher than that in certain locations where homeownership is impossible
Only because "remotely nice" is defined relative to people in your neighborhood. What percent of people worldwide have their own bedroom with >10gbps WiFi and an outlet?
Not sure the context here is "worldwide". I don't see any comments about running AC to bedrooms.
Also, "nice" things continually transition to being expected "basic" things. Especially when many people find the upgrades not too onerous. Other people feel natural frustration if happenstance makes the transition to a new norm more difficult for them.
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It took work to get good WiFi signals throughout my home this year. But an 80+ foot tree fell on the roof, centered directly over me in bed without killing me, during a tremendously dark and stormy night. So I won't complain about the signal resistant materials! Too much! In a closely adjecent "verse" I won't be complaining about anything.
I think I remember reading another comment from you when this happened! Glad you’re still doing okay and got some nice upgrades in the process of fixing your home!
Try in a 1930-40s house with vermiculite insulation. You need asbestos monitoring whenever you crack open a wall or a ceiling. Of course, the same can be said for and 1970-80-90's house with Chinese drywall.
I'll never get 10G from my basement to 2ed floor office. I can run fiber along the chimney, but there is no way down that doesn't disturb the vermiculite insulation.
I love old houses, but they present a whole different set of engineering challenges and DIY skills.
Could be messy, but possible. After all, our modern apartments are built with reinforced concrete first and then wires are laid into the walls, floor, ceiling.
I’m planning to wire not only for Ethernet, but also speaker wire. I’m not fully confident in my ability to make sure a ceiling speaker goes in the right place, but I’ll have to resort to that.
My options are either a guy that does all the big projects (churches, restaurants, houses for people that won’t blink at a 100,000 dollar late-construction review) or myself.
There’s simply no in-between, because it’s not in the mindset of the general population. Most one-man electrician shows probably have enough issues keeping their phone going.
I basically have whole house (including outdoor) speaker wire. But, to be honest, this was basically done 20 years ago by an electrician in concert with other work and I'm not sure I'd do it today unless it were really easy.
Even if they use a shitty cable you can pull your own cable through after the fact, no? Might not work well with flimsy fiber if they took tight turns, but CAT7 should be fine.
>Even if they use a shitty cable you can pull your own cable through after the fact, no?
Often you can't use the old (unwanted) cable to act as a "fish tape" or "mouse" to pull a new cable because the old cable is routed through many small holes in 2x4 studs, ceiling plates, or joists. The path usually has several tight 90 degree turns, with staples, and some of the holes are even spray foamed. There would be too much friction inside the walls to pull a cable for non-trivial distances.
If the old cable was inside of conduit, pulling a new cable could work but that type of install is very rare. Conduit for networking cable is typically only used underground to bury the cable between buildings rather than inside the walls of a single home.
Wait, it's 2023 and there are still builders that don't run structured cabling through conduit? Given what they charge to do this as part of a build, putting smurf tube in should be a requirement, not a luxury.
Not every time. In my current place the cable is stapled directly to the studs so it would require gutting basically everything to replace all of it. Luckily most of the runs go to places that make sense but I’ll never be able to upgrade from CAT5e.
That’s how my house is as well. The builder used CAT5 for all of the phone runs. Fortunately it’s a one story with easy attic access. I’ve rerouted many of them to a closet (the originally all terminated outside near the electrical panel) and ran a few more by drilling through top plates in the attic. I don’t have jacks everywhere I’d want, and most of the cable is CAT5, but it generally hasn’t been an issue. Most of the lines seem to support gigabit speeds.
In my previous house an upstairs leak resulted in a downstairs ceiling coming down which was a boon for wiring up most of the house and adding in ceiling speakers and can lights.
In some jurisdictions, every wall will have a horizontal 2x4 about half-way down the wall. Drilling through the top-plate will get you started, but you'll need a special 4' long drill-bit to make the second hole you need in that 2x4. It's kind of fun to drill with such a long bit.
I assume GP is assuming it would be hanging freely in (in-wall) conduit, which is pretty uncontroversially the best way to do it, just very hard to retrofit.
And if you are retrofitting a cable run, yeah it probably will be 'just hanging freely behind the walls'.
I've been in a newly constructed home with Cat-6, and they stapled it. This was within the last year.
From builder's perspective it is "controversial" to run conduit because they're trying to tick boxes as cheaply/fast as possible and conduit is the exact opposite of that goal. If you want conduit, I'd assume you have to pay for it as a bespoke upgrade.
Depends, I've seen cat6 stapled to the studs like all the other wiring. I'd probably at least ask for it to be placed in conduit if it were me, but I'd probably also just go in and do the wiring myself before they closed up the walls.
Honestly, modern meshes are fine. I Have clients with large families, everyone streaming at Netflix O'Clock, and the three-pack of Eeros they picked up handle everything without a single hiccup. My last house, many years ago, I did wire up with CAT5e. If I build again in the future, I may not bother.
As I wrote elsewhere, I've had a fair bit of Ethernet installed when walls were open and other electrical work was being done anyway. But this was years ago and a lot of what I do is over wireless these days. It's probably still a good idea to run some network wiring depending on the house layout but, with meshes, it's probably not really necessary--especially if at least some of the high bandwidth equipment is wired.
Yeah, I do technically have a few runs, for a pair of PoE security cameras. I wound up moving my Synology out of my office in to the garage (it was a rackmount unit, with screeching fans), just plugged in to one of my satellite Eeros, and I literally can't tell in terms of bandwidth. I'm not complaining, it's nice to not have to worry about wires!
My Synology is fairly low-end one. It's "only" something like a 1.8TB RAID-1. (I think it was probably cheaper than operating my old Linux box with btrfs to do the same thing.) But, yeah, I plug my various wired stuff in where it's convenient but basically don't sweat the details.
Unfortunately, many TVs only have 100Mbps ethernet, and sometimes that ethernet port doesn't even achieve 50Mbps because of software issues. People workaround that by using a USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter with the USB 3.0/3.1 port.
While the discussion has been on wiring and ethernet, I would argue making a digital twin scan for a new home construction before dry-wall goes up is one of the best small money investments I made for the ongoing upkeep of my home. No argument on all smart future proofing ideas for new construction (redundant wire drops, chase pull-wire pipes in 2-3 parts of the house, pre-wiring roof soffets for cameras, etc ...), but it has been priceless to be able to show service folks for big and small jobs ... an X-RAY of my home's studs, wiring and plumbing. I've been able to avert mistakes (protective plate for gas line sitting behind here), plan with the right assumptions (didn't realize there was a horizontal support board between those studs) and visualize possible remodel options (that exhaust duct could easily be re-routed to go out this wall instead). While digital twin scans are more and more common in commercial facility locations to document equipment for repair and insurance purposes - it's amazing to me that this still has not caught on with residential builders as a nice upsell option for trivial effort/cost. The digital twin should live with the deed and be handed over when the house changes owners. Every friend and service person I've shown it to - has commented - "wish I had that for my house".
Along with the other commenters, I'd be interested to know what you used. When I built my home, I took hundreds of photos of all wall and ceiling surfaces. I then later annotated those photo file names to the right places on the blueprint/schematics. Now I look up the photo file name from the schematic and pull up the right photo.
I would love to be able to just "walk through" and look around in 3D my house before the insulation & drywall went up. I wouldn't want to pay for those 3D house tours that realtors are using now if I built another house and wanted to do something similar.
For my house, I bought one of those 360 cameras, Rico Theta something, it is about 3 years old, and took pics through out the remodel. There is free software to set those up like a 3D house tour, although not as flashy. I did that a few different points in time, but having the pics annotated to be searchable by room name or "wiring" or "duct" is more helpful.
The 360 camera was hugely helpful because I could take one picture of a room instead of 5-15. I could walk through 3K square feet and take pics of everything in about 15 minutes.
I tried to do the same thing using the free matterport app for iOS, but it failed terribly at stitching everything together before the drywall was up. I think it got confused by all the wide open spaces and lack of walls.
Ended up just taking a video as I walked throughout every room of the house which has generally proven to be helpful a number of times. In retrospect I probably should have looked into picking up a 360 degree camera.
I would love to hear more about how you did this digital twin scan. Agree it should live with the deed along with a survey, makes life easier for everyone. Planting trees whose shade you may not sit in.
We did an analog tech version of that with a VHS camcorder on my parents’ house.
The only time we had to use it, we had both an inside and outside view that just missed the one key place we were about to work on. :)
It was good enough to still be helpful (we were able to guess based on the likely path of the NM-B (“Romex”) in the spots we could see), but it was amusing how we missed the key spot by inches twice.
Replying to all 3 comments ... I considered a couple of options.
Option 1: I chose this path. I used this company [0] for convenience. They were easy to get a quick quote and found a person local to my area (I'm located in the mid-Atlantic) to do the scan. For < 4000 sqf homes - it takes about 3 - 3.5 hours to fully scan. Cost is dependent on size of area scanned and was in the 3 digit range. Post-pandemic, I suspect with a bit of hunting on gig websites, you can probably find local 3-d scanners who usually are hired by realtors for home-sale scans - but are equally willing to do other scan jobs as well. Many of them use Matterport equipment and from my small anecdote sample - scanning was a hobby which then got turbocharged into fun gig work by the realty virtual tour boom during the pandemic. They own the equipment ... and do scans for some side money.
Option 2: Buy the scanner camera equipment and DIY.[1]
At the end, I received a matterport model that was transferred to my free hosted account - limited to 1 model. While I have no need for more than 1, I did want to archive a backup of my model locally for safe-keeping. This project pointed me in the right direction [2]
Closing thoughts. I love being able to travel back in time through a 3-d render of my home when it was still just the skeleton. There needs to be better ways to achieve archiving of the model - given its value in terms of cost to acquire and security. While I didn't appreciate it at the time, using the model for quick virtual measurements of areas within rooms has also been handy when looking at furniture and rugs. If I forgot to measure before going, I can pull it up on my laptop and get a quick ballpark measure within the house. I'm thinking of doing another scan after I'm fully settled in ... to easily capture and annotate my stuff for insurance purposes.
The majority of the complaint here is really that:
* many new homes use metal "structured cabling" boxes (which block wifi signals)
* the box is not in a central location (eg: usually in a corner of the basement near where cabling comes in)
* Most people use their ISP-provided combination wifi/router
* The wifi is then located inside the metal structured cabling box
For most non-techie houses, if the access point is centrally located, it'll solve the vast majority of problems. However, to do this, practically, at least some of the following have to happen:
* The router and wifi need to be separate units, with ethernet cables to the wifi location
* The structured cabling box needs to be redesigned to be plastic or mount the router/wifi combo externally
* All the in-house ethernet and outside connections need to be run to a location near the center of the house, such that there are minimal walls between it and each living space
This isn't hard, it's just an incentives problem. Most houses don't sell for more money by doing this, so the builder has no incentive to fix it. ISPs have clearly decided that having a single modem/router/wifi combo is most cost-effective for them, and just let their customers deal with a less-than-optimal experience. In many cases people have little or no other ISP choice, so it's not like they lose the business.
> many new homes use metal "structured cabling" boxes (which block wifi signal)
Which are not meant to house a wifi access point, these are fine for (wired) network routers and the modem, but if you have this setup, your wireless access point should really be on the ceiling.
we know that, the people who make those boxes know that. However the people installing network in most houses don't know that: they see a box in a useful location for having switches and think "I'll just put everything in there" even though that box is in a bad location for wifi and is metal.
For the majority (I assume) of houses built without Ethernet runs, what's in there? Just the fibre/copper entry and modem if required? Or does it also house circuit breakers and meter etc. typically?
> All the in-house ethernet and outside connections need to be run to a location near the center of the house, such that there are minimal walls between it and each living space
If we're just talking wifi like 99% of people will do, this is literally one cable that needs to be planned. Shouldn't be hard, but like you said the people responsible for setting it up would need to care.
This drives me up the wall. I recently moved to a newly refurbished apartment in the Netherlands. The fiber connection is terminated outside in a utility closet on the balcony. Okay, fine.
The apartment has Ethernet wired to each room, that also runs back to the same closet. However, all of the ISPs issue a standard modem/router combo. If I leave the router in the closet outside, I have basically no signal inside, but I could wire up the Ethernet. But then I need extenders plugged in and taking up my wall jacks just to have wireless in my 75sm apartment.
I ended up using the plugging the router in inside and running the WAN connection over the cable to the outdoor closet. So I have no Ethernet but at least the wireless speeds are acceptable. On my M1 MacBook Pro, I get about 750mbps symmetrical in the living room and 600 in my office. Good enough I guess. My game console is plugged into the router directly.
In my experience the Xfinity (Comcast) WiFi boost pods work pretty well. You can just plug them into any available electrical outlet and they automatically form a mesh network to eliminate dead zones around the house. They might not be ideal if you need really high bandwidth and low latency, but for most homeowners it's probably good enough and much cheaper than installing Ethernet wiring.
Put a patch panel in the structured media center, attach all house Cat-5++ cables to it. Put in-wall keystone RJ-45 receptacles at the other end of each cable. Put ISP router/gateway/wifi box at some central location. Use patch cables and panel to connect ISP box to ISP. Add WAPs elsewhere as needed.
Part of the issue is that there isn’t really a professional class that is dedicated to home Internet like other home services. For Joe Homeowner, they call the plumber to put in a new sink, an electrician to hang a light fixture, the HVAC guy to put in A/C… and Comcast when the Internet is acting up? This would be equivalent to calling the city’s water department when your toilet is clogged with a Barbie doll.
Electricians are the closest match, but usually telephone wiring is the closest experience they have to running Ethernet. They know nothing about properly setting up APs and the RF considerations.
So when building houses, builders don’t bother, because getting that labor is specialized and homeowners are satisfied with the equivalent of a port-a-potty from Comcast in the living room because they don’t know any better.
When we built my new home office (above the garage), I bought a couple of big spools of Cat6A and told the electricians where I wanted them run. I also made sure they were aware of bend radius requirements, etc. (though if they managed to bend shielded Cat6A that far I'd be impressed). I've been doing the termination myself.
The ATT guy just drilled a hole in the side of my wall to pass the fiber through.
I rent, so I don’t really care, but if the plumber did that I’d be pissed.
I mean, do you expect them to alter the laws of physics to your preferred taste? Most overhead installs must attach to the closest point on your home to the pole.
If their experience was like mine someone from the ISP showed up unannounced and just started putting a hole in their house. They then called the ISP to ask if this was legit, and the response was "we can't answer that for you, maybe you should call the cops".
In this case, yeah, it would be unprofessional and they'd be pissed :)
Yes, actually, I do. Not alter the laws of physics, but run the cable where it makes sense. If that means running it in a conduit outside the house for a few meters to get to a sensible spot, then that's what they're going to have to do. They don't just get to put a hole in your wall "wherever".
In case people are curious, I had several lines of ethernet added throughout my home I wanted to add (cameras outside, ethernet port in garage, etc.) and I was charged $100 per line (they called them drops). This included going into my attic and doing as much as possible passing the ethernet inside the walls. When they went outside, they used conduit. I think most people would actually save money by dropping from 1Gbps to 200Mbps and using those savings to pay for a wired backhaul and good mesh network.
Part of the problem is that even if you know this is what you want, it's a classic hiring problem.
You're typically doing this once every what-- 20 years-- so you don't have a "default guy" and odds are you're one of maybe 3 households in your block of 450 houses who are even considering the problem, so it's not like you can ask your neighbours.
What the market needs is a national franchise, maybe implemented as a co-op model-- enforcing some basic level of "predictably not great, but not terrible", and offering a one-stop pricing and quoting system. You know they won't be the cheapest or best, but the franchise structure sells confidence. If they try to take you for a ride, you can escalate to the brand, who has leverage over them, to get satisfaction before having to duke it out with the local Contractor Licensing Authority.
Yes, there are guys who specializes on security, CCTV, smart home, etc.
They should charge properly. Nobody will call them for lying few meters of RJ45.
A recent wiring overhaul at my house saw the electrican bundling about 6 cables with my cat6a runs. Never been happier that I went with shielded; no apparent issues despite zero clearance, but imagine non-shielded buried in a wall somewhere, undiagnosable
It's probably something of a generational thing. The fairly young electrician who the contractor who did a few fairly large projects I used seemed to know what he was doing. It's probably not perfect but it seems to work fine. Everything isn't wired but the cable comes into my office where my modem/switch are and it goes off to ports next to a couple of complexes of electronics downstairs that also have local switches.
I still use wireless a lot but quite a bit of the higher bandwidth gear is wired.
Yeah, I learned that if I want something a certain way I make sure they include it in the quote and check while they're working just like a General Contractor would do. For things like fiber conduit I'm going to make sure the driveway people bury it.
The real solution is to plan for having a low-power access point in every room. Maybe even hidden in the ceiling of every room.
Everything gets faster and more reliable when you limit crosstalk. If anything, I’d want my future home to have WiFi-blocking walls and access points everywhere.
The most expensive Unifi in-wall AP is $170. Even if you had ten of them, that’s only $1700. If you’re building a house, that’s not that expensive for making basic infrastructure work well.
THIS! The fact that of all the things we regulate in housing construction by codes, and how we’re turning to view the Internet as a fundamental access need, you’d think we’d be more prescriptive with “in order to make maintenance of this communication medium flexible and future proof, all communication cables in homes should be ran in conduit.”
Yep. When I was growing up 15 years ago, my dad wired the house with Cat6. I am now a homeowner and wiring my house with Cat6.
10Gbps at 55m (180ft) is plenty for residential when the top-end residential internet offerings cap out around 1Gbps. Unless you have a buzzing internal network, you are wasting your money going above Cat6/Cat6a imo.
Cat7 is no speed increase over Cat6, only distance and cross-talk improvements. Cat8 is rated at 4x Cat6 for throughput and costs 3x more than Cat6 (~$530 per 1k ft vs $170 per 1k feet).
There's no reason to buy a Lambo if the speed limit is 35 mph.
You are lucky, my first network was RG58 (coax), and my second was cat-3 cable (10baseT). They didn't age well. I switch to cat-5 as soon as it was an option and luckily that has aged better.
Indeed I am. I grew up on the cutting edge of tech for sure thanks to my dad. I don't remember a time without internet nor (relatively) fast internet. When I got into a serious relationship, it was a culture shock to find out how others lived tech-wise growing up.
I embarassed myself accidentally in my first apartment when I was mistook an RJ11 for an RJ45 from a distance when I commented to the agent about it having ethernet. I knew what RJ11 were, I just forgot that ethernet wasn't a normal thing to have.
I remember finally getting permission to touch the home server rack in my sophomore year of my CS degree. That was a milestone.
Are you sure? My B+G access points still work with modern equipment - they are slow, but they work (I need to get them to a recycler as I don't use them). Newer standards are diminishing returns - older equipment is likely to be good enough far into the future just because it is unlikely anything will really need faster.
GP said 'outdated', not non-functional. Your 802.11b/g APs are outdated, like you say 'they are slow' - i.e. you've become accustomed to newer faster models.
True, but I'm not convinced that modern network gear will become outdated. It is fast enough in general so it is hard to think of why everyone should rush to wifi-next anymore.
So far in networks in general we've increased the size of data we're interested in moving at roughly the same rate as we've increased the throughput available. It's repeatedly been 'fast enough', and then not.
Many countries houses have brick internal and external (ours (UK) is - apart from one or two internal stud walls). How do you place a router so that it hits a 4/5 bed house with brick walls?
Airtime contention is a big thing - anything with low signal takes a disproportionately large amount of airtime to carry the same amount of data. You might be able to do it, but everything will suffer (even things close to the AP/router).
We’ve got 4 UniFi APs inside, one outside, and there are still some devices with poor antenna design that are clinging on.
>This is too expensive, how about a correct placement of a one router
Because this has it's own set of limits. Especially if you're the in tech living in suburbs type that doesn't have a tiny house.
I had Cat 6 dropped to the TVs/media devices because I don't want constant streaming devices "using up all the wifi". The offices where computers are have network drops too.
This leaves a few wifi units around the house to service truly mobile things like phones and the assorted device that uses wifi that doesn't make sense to network.
If you're going to try to fed 2+ TVs across a sizeable house with a bunch of other wifi capable devices off a single wifi router don't be surprised when your latency is high and or your speed suck.
All of this is why I had high hopes for LiFi - completely blocked by walls, zero crosstalk, allegedly great performance within each room, and you can run it through lights that you wanted to have anyways. Obviously there are trade-offs, but it really did look like a great solution to a lot of these problems. Unfortunately, I suspect that 1. the trade-offs really didn't hurt, and 2. Wi-Fi is already utterly pervasive and it's almost impossible to get a second standard that's not backwards compatible to that.
I have two unifi access points inside and another two outside due to brick exterior walls that blocks most wifi. It seamlessly switches, to the point I can be on a video call on my phone and wander around without any interruptions.
(1) We need 240V outlets for EV charging (costs cents at construction time, costs $3000 - $8000 later)
(2) We need electric panels and wiring future proofed and can also seamless upgrade to solar, battery, complete electrification of home with heat pump water heater and heat pump instead of a separate gas furnace (fridge and AC use heat pump already), induction stove.
(3) Home electrification should allow power intake from car, eventually everyone is going to have electric cars. This will serve as emergency power, no need to buy a separate gas generator.
(4) Indoor air needs a lot of work, in addition to heat pump for heating and cooling, we have to consider heat recovery, enthalpy recovery, humidity, UV and most importantly particulate matter. And mold prevention. Recent discussion on mold, lots of people reporting problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543229
(5) Homes can be built with solar shingles. Right now, we install a roof, then we install a structure to support panels and then panels. If we can just install solar shingles, it is just 1/3 of materials and far more importantly 1/3 of labor and a lot less than a third in time. We now have nailable solar shingles: https://www.gaf.energy/timberline-solar/
(6) Electric utility (or the city) can lay electric and fiber at the same time. Either the city or electric provider can provide internet or give equal access to providers. We don't need any gas connections, homes can be completely electric.
I'm sure there are a lot more, but nobody is asking for these. Builders can just build these if people start asking for these as standard. Its a tragedy that people buy 50+ year old homes for 500K - 1 million USD, moldy, rickety, poorly insulated crap homes with so many ongoing issues and will cost hundreds of thousands to retrofit and make it livable.
> (1) We need 240V outlets for EV charging (costs cents at construction time, costs $3000 - $8000 later)
Cents for an outlet vs thousands for an EVSE retrofit is comparing the cost of different things.
The $3k-$8k isn't paying just for an outlet, but for the labor required to run a suitable gauge conductor from a suitable breaker to the outlet, including opening and repairing any walls.
In new construction, it won't be as high, but it will be around $1k (depending on your labor market) when you include electrical design and installation labor. I know this because I've done both retrofit and new construction installation of an EVSE.
> (4) Indoor air needs a lot of work, in addition to heat pump for heating and cooling, we have to consider heat recovery, enthalpy recovery, humidity, UV and most importantly particulate matter. And mold prevention. Recent discussion on mold, lots of people reporting problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543229
Even beyond mold, there's allergens. Since living in an air-quality controlled home, my seasonal allergies have greatly diminished, which directly translates to better sleep.
> 1 million USD, moldy, rickety, poorly insulated crap homes with so many ongoing issues and will cost hundreds of thousands to retrofit and make it livable.
There is a general problem with the real estate market that, lacking regulations that require disclosure, buyers aren't educated about energy/air-quality issues they might be getting into, and sellers are incentivized to cover up any such issues (i.e. by throwing open windows and running air filters during open houses). Simply requiring a disclosure of a summary of energy use over the last year (at monthly granularity) would make a big difference.
> (3) Home electrification should allow power intake from car, eventually everyone is going to have electric cars. This will serve as emergency power, no need to buy a separate gas generator.
That sounds good in theory and I know it's only for emergencies but I don't think that's going to last that long or be that beneficial. At least not right now.
> (6) Electric utility (or the city) can lay electric and fiber at the same time. Either the city or electric provider can provide internet or give equal access to providers. We don't need any gas connections, homes can be completely electric.
Do they even get buried at the same depths? My understanding was electrical lines get buried deeper than communications lines.
>That sounds good in theory and I know it's only for emergencies but I don't think that's going to last that long or be that beneficial. At least not right now.
Having a large battery is useful in many, many ways and not just for emergencies. Be it for power cost decrease, emergencies or load balancing, all of these are very much expected consequences of electric cars being in most households.
A recent volts.wtf podcast guest spoke about being able to run their entire house for more than a week on their Rivian truck. Now imagine that in a more generalized, non emergency, scenario. That opens up plenty of opportunities.
Our recent fiber installation burial was accomplished by a single person with a handheld trencher. The trunkline conduit near the street was buried using a boring machine, but I don't think it's very deep.
They can be at the same depth. However they often are not: if there is a problem you need different training for each type of cable so if they are near each other the tech needs both types of training.
> (1) We need 240V outlets for EV charging (costs cents at construction time, costs $3000 - $8000 later)
6/2 (plus ground) cable is not that cheap. And current code actually requires EV-readiness in many places.
> Wny not 48V POE for most of home wiring? Most everything can be smart by default.
I would take regular #12/#14 wiring, so long as the neutral is wired up correctly (which it almost always is with NM-B or any similar factory-made cable) over some 48V let’s-hope-it’s-still-useful-in-10-years setup.
People buy expensive old houses because there is no vacant land to build new houses in those areas. If you want to live in a certain neighborhood then you take what's available. It's the location that counts; the quality of the house itself is mostly incidental.
We need simpler/smaller homes. No one really needs a home larger than 3k sf. For new construction, air tightness/Energy efficiency should be at the top of the list. The rest are easy to retrofit if the homeowner wants them.
They are less efficient at converting solar radiation to electricity, but far more space efficient. PV panels can't extend to the edge of roofs because of fire access code, and have restricted layouts due to their geometry.
If the GAF nail-on PV shingles can approach or beat the price of a roof + PV panels, then they will be a good solution. Hopefully with their standard nail-on format, GAF shingles will have similar labor cost of installation to regular shingles, vs the specialized labor needed to install Tesla solar tiles.
they're also more efficient than drywall, but I'm not going to clad my bedroom in them, because it would be a waste of money.
Because the economics matter, we have to understand if it's a better value versus asphalt + solar, or asphalt + ground fixtures, or asphalt + a solar farm.
> (1) We need 240V outlets for EV charging (costs cents at construction time, costs $3000 - $8000 later)
My understanding is that there needs to be some kind of upgrade on our grid so everyone can charge their cars. This would likely involve increasing its capacity to handle the additional load from widespread EV charging.
> (2) We need electric panels and wiring future proofed and can also seamless upgrade to solar, battery, complete electrification of home with heat pump water heater and heat pump instead of a separate gas furnace (fridge and AC use heat pump already), induction stove.
I remember seeing a social media post urging people to check their electrical panel and if it was a specific name, “Federal Pacific Electric” for instance, to call an electrician and plan to have it removed because they were known to cause fires. I absolutely agree though. The future is all electric and the sooner we can drop natural gas to homes, the better.
>(3) Home electrification should allow power intake from car, eventually everyone is going to have electric cars. This will serve as emergency power, no need to buy a separate gas generator.
Ideally, we would all live close enough to free-of-cost to the rider public transit but yes, we should allow power going back and forth between car and house. Maybe we can skip the battery in the house altogether, send all power from house solar panels to (in order of priority) the car if connected, the grid if car is not connected, the house locally if grid is not connected. This could be implemented practically with the right infrastructure and technology.
> (4) Indoor air needs a lot of work, in addition to heat pump for heating and cooling, we have to consider heat recovery, enthalpy recovery, humidity, UV and most importantly particulate matter. And mold prevention. Recent discussion on mold, lots of people reporting problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543229
I don’t have a link but I remember reading a few years ago about how in places with low pollution such as Colorado and where days are hot but nights are pleasant in the summer, perhaps one way to cut costs could be to over ventilate at night in the summer (after measuring temperature) forcing (filtered) cold air from outside into the house and forcing the existing warm air out. This would also require a good insulation system to maintain the temperature balance. Thoughts?
> (5) Homes can be built with solar shingles. Right now, we install a roof, then we install a structure to support panels and then panels. If we can just install solar shingles, it is just 1/3 of materials and far more importantly 1/3 of labor and a lot less than a third in time. We now have nailable solar shingles: https://www.gaf.energy/timberline-solar/
I am all for it if solar shingles are cheaper than solar panels on top of roofs. While the upfront cost of solar shingles might be higher, the long-term savings and aesthetic appeal could make them a worthwhile investment.
> (6) Electric utility (or the city) can lay electric and fiber at the same time. Either the city or electric provider can provide internet or give equal access to providers. We don’t need any gas connections, homes can be completely electric.
Yes, absolutely agree. I used to love gas until I learned that gas leaks and gas connections going to homes leak A LOT. Now, I am all for all electric. And yes, we need fiber everywhere please. High-speed internet access for all is especially important in the context of remote work and online education.
Does this mean we don’t need step down transformers? Is it simply moving the step down transformers from the street into the house? The potential benefits of 48V POE could include increased efficiency and safety.
> My understanding is that there needs to be some kind of upgrade on our grid so everyone can charge their cars. This would likely involve increasing its capacity to handle the additional load from widespread EV charging.
It might help that most home EV charging will likely occur at night, when home power use tends to be at its lowest.
A home level 2 charger has a load comparable to an electric clothes dryer plus an electric water heater, and so is comparable to someone in an all electric household doing laundry. The average such household even does laundry for about as many hours a week as a typical EV in day to day use needs to charge.
That suggests that at least the parts of the grid nearer the end users, which would probably be most of the grid in most cities, should be fine as least as part of the grid's maximum capacity goes. If laundry during the day doesn't push them over, then home EV charging at night probably will not.
There may not be enough total power available per week to handle the EV load, but at least for that where upgrades would be needed would be at the power sources and maybe at some long distance distribution parts of the grid.
That's probably good news if true. I'd expect "we need to upgrade or build some long distance transmission lines" and/or "we need to upgrade or build some power plants" is probably going to be more feasible than "we need to update most of San Francisco's electrical system".
> perhaps one way to cut costs could be to over ventilate at night in the summer (after measuring temperature) forcing (filtered) cold air from outside into the house and forcing the existing warm air out.
Setups like this are fairly common, especially in commercial construction. There are “economizers,” various forms of “whole house fan,” and a few HRVs/ERVs with a built in bypass feature. Also windows. HRV bypasses are not especially high flow.
Sadly, most whole house fans are designed quite specifically for houses with vented attics. While most house do have vented attics, there is very little excuse these days to build a vented attic, especially in wildfire-prone areas.
My house was built in 1991 and consequently has a hilarious early 90s intercom wired throughout the house, with it being on the never ending TODO list to remove and replace with something reasonable. What is so curious is that even if you want to wire ethernet through the house (and I have to some extent) there aren't readily available decent things to shove on the wall that provide equivalent functionality which you can safely assume will not need replacing in five years. *
The technology ecosystem just doesn't historically mesh well with the physical structure of homes at all. The whole success of Wifi is it allows us to be non committal about things. That we use it to connect TVs and doorbells to the network is really quite insane.
I would like to see something in this space emerge and evolve, but it seems to be fundamentally incompatible with the VC backed tech industry at this point.
Something I'd like to see: internal conduit with pull lines that you can use to thread any "wire-like" material through the walls. Need to run a long HDMI cable? Open access panel, pull out existing bundle, clip your cable to it, use pull line to bring it back through the house. Same for Ethernet. In-home fiber becomes cost-competitive? Replace your Ethernet lines with it. Same for any new technologies.
We should also do this for city infrastructure, eg. have conduit runs under the street that are a public right-of-way, and then any new company that invents a new telecommunications/energy/etc technology can pay the city to run its lines through existing infrastructure instead of having to dig up streets or beg the electric company for space on poles.
Sounds like you have done this before... quick question: is it normal to run multiple conduits carrying the same type of cable parallel to each other? For instance, multiple conduits running up from the first floor to the attic where all the final runs are done.
It seems like 2" smurf tubes are relatively rare (I can find them but seems like they aren't interested in selling them in 100 foot rolls) so 1" are more common. According to conduit guidelines, 1" conduit for 40% Cat6 is a measly 6 cables while 2" is 22. So even at 2", I would still need 2 - 3 two-inch conduit runs.
Is this off-base or do people generally hunt down 2"+ conduit?
I didn't have that situation (I was putting in Smurf tubes while insulating an old balloon-framed house, so I was mostly doing straight runs down the walls, with the occasional bend around a window, before filling up the airspaces), but if I did, I'd try to just build a void in to go all the way up to the attic. If you don't want to leave it bare wood, you could put in 4" PVC, with the T's at each floor, instead.
My house is old and had multiple additions so its layout is all topsy turvy and there are no straight cavities so I might just run lots of flexible conduit at least up from the server closet into the attic. At least then it will be a little easier to run new drops.
Smurf tubes are great, but plugs like on Cat5 or HDMI cables get easily hung up while pulling cables. The ones you link above look smoother than the ones I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with, which were ribbed, making snags frequent & annoying, especially at any sort of 90 degree bend. It's still significantly easier (and safer) than blind runs through walls.
At least for cat5/6, wouldn't you be cutting and terminating once they're pulled? Never thought about pulling one of those with the connector on - for the reason you mentioned, but also just because you might not know how much cable you'll need until it's all finished.
I'd imagine HDMI would be mostly shorter runs (or using cat5/6 extenders) due to the limits/requirements of the cable.
Before someone says conduit in all the walls, that only works if the conduit comes out where you want something. Your intercom system probably terminates by each door at around waist level - which is unlikely to be where you want Ethernet cables to come out in the room - but perfect for an intercom. In the 90s people were starting to run phones to more rooms, but not to all rooms, at least those phone jacks would be in the right place. Likewise in the 90s people were running coax to more rooms - but a TV in every room was still seen as a sign of wealth and so most bedrooms wouldn't get it (the master would. though often that coax would be near the ceiling for watching in bed and thus not a great location for Ethernet.
It doesn't have to be perfect. If you had an opening by the baseboard on major walls, you could run through conduit to get to the right room, and then tack a cord along the baseboard and up corners of walls until you got to the right place, the same way most people wire their TV/media room right now. The main issue is running cords through doorways, which keeps them from closing and is a tripping hazard. People can live with cable ties as long as you get most of the run hidden.
Beyond that, if you have conduit running to different rooms, you can now treat those as junction boxes instead of termination points. You can run the cable to the box easily, and then have ten feet of the old fashioned painful cable pull from the junction box to the point on the wall/ceiling you actually want to have a socket.
I've been amazed watching contractors cut out a slice of drywall, make mods, and replace the drywall. In under an hour. But you need to paint afterwards.
I am surprised intercom-over-IP isn't a big thing. There could be plug and play UDP multicast intercoms powered by PoE, and wifi walkie talkies, there's not really any tech challenges, but for some reason there's no popular standard for how to make that happen.
SIP phones could handle this trivially. You could run a server on a raspberry pi that would be plenty and easily tie into an actual SIP telephone line, so both intercom and external calls.
There are also decent products for not very expensive in this market.
Pretty much any data cable you see in homes can be made to run Ethernet at a decent rate with just an adapter at each end. Coax can easily carry data at Gigabit speed.
Cat5e has been the standard for decades, and can run gigabit speeds as well.
It is interesting how all of you jumped to the wiring and conduits as the problem, when the point I was trying to make (badly) was even if the wiring was there then there is a distinct lack of things on the market to connect to it which do anything useful.
We have a chicken/egg situation for home networks where normal people only see them as useful in the wifi sense, so we fail to exploit the potential we could have if things were wired.
This is not entirely true. The things exist, you just aren't aware of it or it isn't the form factor you want.
List a thing and I could likely give you a product that will solve your problem, it may just be out of your price range because it isn't mass produced or doesn't look the way you want again, it's not mass produced.
* well everything points to an intercom like system so is what you’re trying to build not related to that l? (Since you said provide equivalent functionality)
Maybe whole home audio with zones and voice communication?
I mean, we have zigbee/zwave/Lora/matter now, the wireless comms game is changing to allow low power low bandwidth devices ad not just super duper 'i'll run my data center comms over the medium of air' level wifi
I am living in one of the worst place possible for Internet. I have over 400 2.4GHz APs accessible from my apartment. And it was built pre-Internet age with absolutely no forethought.
And yet I have perfectly working Internet.
Yes, when the network operator installed their AP it absolutely sucked. But I turned it into modem, put on my own pfSense box. Configured traffic shaping to reduce bufferbloat and ensure bandwidth is always reserved for things like zoom calls.
Then I put on a decent (Ubiquiti) access point in every other room. I have reduced power of those access points so that they fall off naturally, this helps clients who move about the large apartment to roam. It does not make sense to have the AP radiate much further than the puny phone modem -- it just keeps the modem stuck to that AP while the AP struggles to receive signal from the phone. And so on.
I have also upgraded almost all devices to 5GHz. 5GHz has much shorter range but it is actually a benefit -- it means less interference from devices of my neighbours.
For security, I have separated VLANs and WLANs (separate for my work, for network management, for my family and their unsafe devices, for some legacy devices like printers and finally for guests).
Everybody who visits me notices how well the WiFi works.
I don't see how you need to build for "good Internet". "Good Internet" is just function of knowing what you are doing.
It may cost a bit more to set up networking like mine. But this is drop in the ocean compared to trying to somehow improving your wifi coverage by chosing more expensive materials to build your house.
I mean, at the very least, running CAT-6 into every room of your aforementioned apartment and terminating them somewhere sensible with a fiber/cable endpoint wouldn't cost awfully much and would make everything you did here notably easier. Even if it's not used by a given tenant or owner, this stuff like any infrastructure is inherited by the next occupant. Since we got fiber internet, I've not touched a single coaxial line in my home, but when I sell it and move, that cable is still there, ready to be used by whomever buys it. Whether they will or not is obviously their decision to make, but at least this way the option is there. I see no reason why ethernet couldn't work similarly. Every house I've lived in has had a nest of coaxial cable lines in some corner of the basement or other utility area, and most have RJ-11 for phones too.
I would also say that your last note: "a function of knowing what you're doing" does unintentionally I think really well at illustrating the problem. I do not have the slightest clue how plumbing works, but my home came designed from stock with working toilets and showers. I also have a fair bit of knowledge about electricity (enough to change outlets and switches anyway) but not enough to really build out circuits, and my home came designed from stock with appropriately placed (mostly) outlets ready to be used. My point being: people shouldn't have to know how their infrastructure works, and I would argue while a new entry and one that could use some standardization, Internet absolutely belongs in that category.
Additionally, you're using some pretty top-of-the-line consumer electronics there with Ubuquiti APs. I looked into those some years back and to replace my Google Wifi's that I had at the time would've cost me about $1,500, which, I can afford and did consider, but ultimately never pulled the trigger on and I wouldn't be upset in the slightest if Joe Consumer looked at that price tag and had fit, since bottom-shelf wireless routers on the market do the exact same thing (distribute internet OTA) for like, $70.
Now, I don't use bottom shelf personally, I have a mesh network too but mine doesn't allow me to tweak the power of the transmitters nor really do traffic shaping or service prioritization. This is, in my mind, akin to someone saying "there's nothing wrong with the highway, I have a Ferrari and I can get to work in 10 minutes if the cops aren't in the way." No kidding. You've bought one of the best answers to the question at hand, but not everyone can have that. And this is made worse by the fact that there are absolutely tons of shit quality routers built and sold every day that do a bad job of this task, and the only way to avoid that as a customer is knowing a decent amount about network administration so you know what to avoid.
If a home fittings company made faucets that worked as badly as many routers out there do, they'd be sued into oblivion if not fined by the FTC for selling lemon products. I think we need more regulations on Internet-adjacent hardware so customers can have a baseline level of expectation that these things will function at the task they're built to accomplish to at least a certain level of reliability.
There are companies making faucets as bad as that. Places like WalMart sell them for cheap ($30). However no builder or professional plumber will touch them - they know that spending $200 on a good faucet is worth it.
In this realm, something I’m going to be doing some time soon is running ethernet through to the various rooms of my home, because it lacks this wiring despite being built in the 00s with a fiber connection being part of the original plan.
While I don’t yet have a professional’s opinion, this is likely to be somewhat involved and expensive as it seems that walls will need to be cut open and in one place, floorboards pulled up. It could turn out that some of the existing wiring has conduits that could be used but I’m not betting on it.
Depending on the why and what you ultimately want, you might find powerline adapters useful, or the flat ribbon ethernet cables that are so small that you can actually fit it easily between the baseboard and carpet. You could probably run that under carpet and padding (to pass doors or jump halls) and straight through walls at specific points and get fairly good access everywhere with much less work.
Powerline is very bad. It generates huge amounts of RF interference and I’m surprised to see it keeps getting recommended here. MoCa is far better as long as coax is available.
It gets recommended because much of the time coax is not available, so the options are use powerline, use wifi, run cabling around walls, or run cabling through walls. The first two are far easier and less costly in time or money than the latter two, but each has downsides depending in your specific situation.
If you not familiar check out powerline network adapters and access points. Not as good as cat6+ but better than WiFi as backhaul, I've been pleasantly surprised with the performance and throughput of the newer standards. You can get up to 2400 Mbps with the recent models.
> It could turn out that some of the existing wiring has conduits that could be used
Unless it is low voltage in the conduit, you don't want to mix 120v with low voltage wiring.
In residential, it's not a huge deal but does come with the risk of data loss along with, to my understanding, an extremely minimal chance of fire due to inducing voltage. The chance of fire increases as the voltage goes up so generally it's only a risk in commercial or industrial.
You don't have to get inspections or follow code to my understanding but the rule of thumb iirc is 8 inches minimum between low-voltage and 120v. So if 120v is in one stud 'bay', you go to the next one.
Tips: get an "installer bit" -- this is a really long, flexible drill bit that lets you cut a hole for the mounting plate, and drill directly from there down into the floor below. In the ideal case, no drywall patching is needed at all. You mount a low-voltage retrofit box/ring in the hole you made and the keystone wall plate attaches to that.
Also, there is typically a small hole on the end of the installer bit, just below the tip, that lets you use it as “fish stick” and poke your pull line through after you drill the hole.
Doesn’t that require powered converter boxes, similar to MoCA? The nice thing about ethernet is being able to plug in anything anywhere in the house without a power brick.
Given recent research into using WiFi to “see” through walls or at the very least track what humans are doing in a space, I would argue we should go in the opposite direction. I’m pretty happy with my current house and adversarial-to-WiFi cement walls. Sure, I had to run some cable and buy enough access points for about 3x the amount of square feet of my house (if you go by the advertised specs) but this is a one-time investment that is pretty small in the grand scheme of home-related things.
The wire might be one-time per 30 years. (The Cat-5 spec is only ~28 years old.)
The APs are going to get replaced more than once a decade I think. We’ve been in our place 16 years and I’m on the third generation of APs, one Netgear that I moved here with, a set of UAC-AC-Pros, and a set of UAC-U6-LRs.
AFAIK the wifi "see through walls" exploit requires an array of wifi routers. Even in lab conditions the imaging capabilities seem... aspirational. An adversary would be well served to stick to other forms of surveillance
I wish ethernet only cost "a few hundred dollars".
I am currently about $600 in the hole and I haven't even bought conduit, new drywall, or another switch. I am guessing it will be in the $1,000+ range when I am done. That's assuming I don't need to go get another 1,000 foot roll which I am guessing I might (doing 48 drops + PoE)
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While interesting, I don't think the article really was for me. It felt shallow and like an info dump rather than a real opinion piece.
The solution to "I have bad internet" is ethernet yet the author seems against or as if it is stepping back into the past. We rely on wires to get it into the house generally, why are you advocating for getting rid of wires then being confused when your coverage sucks.
The technology is there to have good wireless internet (wifi mesh driven by ethernet) but the author seems like they want to complain rather than looking at the problem rationally.
"Doc, the Wifi AP doesn't work very well when I put it in a metal box" ... "Have you tried not putting it in a metal box?"
It feels like the author has a self-induced problem where she indeed knows better. But she's trying to emulate what she thinks a non-techie would do, and getting that quite wrong by limiting herself to fewer pieces rather than widely available off the shelf products meant to solve the problem properly.
Obviously the metal box is meant for modem+router+switch, and then you hang wireless APs off of where the ethernet cables run to. When I was in an apartment that had a similar setup, I found it a bit limiting and still ran various ethernet lines under rugs and whatnot, but it was much better foundation than draping cables in hallways and stairways.
Yes, it is a frustrating article. Feels more like a Twitlonger than an actual news article. Mostly complaining and info-dumping vs offering up a solution or deeper information.
If the author had dug deeper and reached out to experts, the article could have been great.
To set the stage: European houses are different from US houses. Smaller, also a lot more concrete, brick and rebar.
With that in mind, when we built our house a few years ago, I went for a combination of wired and wireless. Heavy users, like the television and the PCs in the office have dedicated cables. But running cables everywhere just didn't make sense - so most devices are expected to live on the WLAN. Since WLAN doesn't penetrate between floors, there is a central plug on each floor for an access point (or mesh satellite).
> brick, wood, drywall, plywood, concrete, metal, and acoustic ceiling tiles is usually cheaper than Wi-Fi-penetrating materials
What are these alternative Wi-Fi-penetrating materials? And what trade offs do they have? (Cost is mentioned, but there many aspects other aspects to building materials besides cost and wi-fi penetration.)
I’m thinking the author should start by not putting their wi-fi router behind a metal plate.
Housing developers are really bad at doing large scale low-voltage work.
I used to work for an ISP here in the southeastern US and there were entire neighborhoods that had permanently shitty service because the housing developer decided to do the wiring on their own for the extra profits and did a terrible job of it.
Then the individual communities never want to pay to have the work redone properly -- they think the ISP should eat the bill, even though we gave the developers the opportunity to do it right the first time. Doing hundreds of reworks of the last mile of service at once is expensive.
Often we would come to some arrangement and heavily discount the wiring work down to like $30k from the community in exchange for exclusive contracts. The communities that wouldn't spend a dime were just permanently SOL.
I just bought a house this year, the previous owners lived in it for about 2 years from brand new. Thankfully it has an ethernet drop to every room upstairs, and in reasonable places on the main floor. Far better than the situation at the last place I lived in.
But annoyingly, it's all Cat5e! Sure, it's fine for gigabit, but now that I have proper networking equipment, I wish they'd have spent the extra few bucks and put in Cat6A or Cat7 so that I could get 10Gbps to my office from the rack in the basement...
If they didn't screw up too bad installing it (which is not a given), you may be able to tie off a new cable to it and use the existing cable as a pull.
> but I couldn’t (and still can’t) do anything about the cable Cthulhu monstrosity lurking behind a metal plate in my closet that drives most of my frustration.
I wonder if this person has any idea of the amount of infrastructure the average house contains such as cable runs, pipes, chimneys and so on. Or they imagine things just "happen" magically when you flip a switch.
Google's own mesh WiFi products (under Google and Nest brands) are shit. It took 8 months for the support morons to discover there were too many APs, with one taking all of the others down without any user-visible feedback.
While I use Ubiquiti non-mesh now that only gets 600 Mbps max even with WiFi 6e NICs, hardwired works and provides dedicated, point-to-point bandwidth.
>It took 8 months for the support morons to discover there were too many APs
Yea, the Unifi is nice because it will show you that. In theory if you're in a moderately noisy environment you can setup the hub to scan once a day and move channels around to maximize what you have.
But in your case, you need to do the opposite (which if you rent you probably can't) and block as much wifi from outside as possible. Everyone getting wifi units and cranking them up to 100% radio transmit isn't great.
How exactly are you meshing through non-permeable walls?
And if it does work (e.g. due to access points having better antennas and maybe positioning), it wastes spectrum like nothing else, which exacerbates that problem in high-density apartment buildings.
All I want is conduit for my Ethernet. When they're spraying up every cubic centimeter of the walls with insulation and fire proofing it gets super hard to maintain or run/re-run any cable
They are like $10 on amazon. When I remodeled my place, I ran some power from another plug and I put my cablebox/wifi router into the wall (high up), behind a plastic door that lives behind the tv. Super easy and works fantastic.
Is there any value in preserving old phone lines these days? In my home I've kept vestigial coax runs because they're great for MoCA adapters, but I haven't been able to think of a reason to keep phone wires. So if I'm doing work on a room and they're in the way, I rip them out.
Can't imagine. Occasionally run networks over power cables but I've never seen gadgets to do something useful with old phone cables.
People used to have intercoms on them cables, but everyone has a phone in their pocket these days
Does anyone else feel like 5G made this a lot worse? I used to get strong 4G LTE at my house but now that I have a phone capable of 5G and things around me have "upgraded" I can barely get a useable signal inside my house. Similarly, my local walmart is a deadzone now. Yay progress?
>The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) noted in a recent blog post that if the US were to focus a significant chunk of its efforts on creating a better digital infrastructure instead of “fixing” our physical infrastructure, it would result in “superior longer-term economic growth, competitiveness, national security, and environmental benefits.”
Presumptive industry lobby says to spend money on what they make money on.
I don't like the phrasing that we need to make better wifi signals in a home "instead" of replacing lead pipes or repairing bridges.
But yes, I wish homes were a bit more repairable, with chases as another commenter calls them. Currently in my apartment, I have an Ethernet cable running along 60ft of baseboard to wire my desktop to the router, with WiFi for the rest of the place.
(This is the time of year where I think of my idea that fridges and freezers should be built to draw in outside air, for climates where ambient is cold enough for fridges without additional processing).
Shelter is a luxury good. There are millions of homeless people on the street, ignored while the talking heads claim the economy is "better than ever".
Counterpoint: etherner on every wall is great and wifi should resistance is good because it can be used to track movements and even reconstruct conversations from a distance.
the overarching point behind the article hits but the specific example the author used is something i'm personally jealous of. ethernet going into every room? please i am stuck setting up runners along baseboards and drilling through concrete to run ethernet between floors...
This is why the Xfinity “10g” commercials are so disingenuous. They make it sound like the limit in homes for high quality simultaneous streaming and gaming is the cable internet connection instead of the home wifi network.
Well, it depends; if your downlink is 10Gb then yeah the local side might be a bottleneck, but some of us are out here on 10Mb internet connections and only benefit from upgrading the local network if it means better reliability.
That was possibly the worst written tech article I’ve read in a while, despite generally agreeing with the premise of home Wi-Fi being important. I look forward to LLMs actually eliminating the bottom 75% of human writing.
But when does that speed actually matter? Streaming 8k content can apparently be achieved with a 50mbps. So the article is concerned with applications that haven't been invented yet, did I get that right?
Maybe you live alone or something, I have some days that will look like this at my place.
3 people remote working. 2 of them have streaming TV going at all times in their room. Then if the kids are home there are likely 2 other tvs going plus what they are doing with their phones.
It matters in brief periods of annoyance. If two kids are downloading the same 50GB GTA5 update, and two people are streaming netflix, and nobody gets upset, that's worth a few extra dollars to some people (not me)
Uhm, no? I ran cat 5e through my house in all the bedrooms and common areas back in high school and I'm still using them in addition to my Wi-Fi network, which historically hasn't been 1/1,000 as reliable as the copper cable. Even now I have higher bandwidth (1gbps) for each computer connected, and it doesn't have wireless interference to contend with.
> Remember all the people who spent big money running CAT5 to all the rooms? Then we got in-home WiFi and all of that cabling was just forgotten.
I dunno 'bout that- seems to me someone who knows enough to run Ethernet also knows that WiFi is a collision-detection protocol; I retrofit CAT6 into my current place just a couple of years ago, and while I have a mesh WiFi6 network at home (with Ethernet backhaul, of course) I also ensured all the TVs (most of them 4K) and as many computers as possible were on Ethernet.
I'm sure someone once said that about 120V wiring, and about POTS.
We can't anticipate what will be obsolete. But fifty feet of ethernet cable or single strand fiber is quite cheap and easy to install during construction. Honestly, so what if it is obsolete in a decade? I doubt my parents are regretting the money they spent running now-obsolete POTS into their house in 1950.
POTS is obsolete, I'd guess most new houses aren't wired for it. Cable TV coax is obsolete except as a connection for a cable modem, will soon be replaced by fiber or wireless in most places where it hasn't already. Took a while but technological progress is on an accelerating curve.
Mains electrical and plumbing are about the only things that will remain as-is for a good while.
I don't think it should be run to every room but ethernet cables to the main places where you want solid internet connectivity would be good. Like an ethernet line to your TV for good connectivity on streaming devices and if you're going to use a room as an office. Everything else can be wifi. Maybe a few others just in case.
I'm off the opinion that anything that can be wired should be. If a device is stationary and used often, wire it. It's not just about a better quality link that device, it also means less contention for your other devices that must be on wifi.
Eh, for most houses this is overkill. For one, they tend not to have a wring room to bring 20+ cables back to and put in to a patch panel. The other is that a great number of houses have a pretty singular optimal layout for a room.
In your design my house would have around 40 drops, rather than 7. 40 makes no sense.
Do many consumer TVs even have an RJ45 connector anymore? Despite what a few of us here might like to do, average homeowners hate cables and love Wifi.
I would be curious to find out about others because all the flat screen TVs I had there was an RJ45 connector. I don't do any streaming on the TV anyways so I do not even have wifi configured. For me the ethernet would be for Apple TV.
Yea, every one I've seen recently. Of all devices they are the number one device to put on a network drop as they will use more bandwidth more consistently than any other device in your house.
On my TV wall I had a singular network drop to the TV wall. When I built a faux fireplace for it, I put a switch there in the access hole and now have it split out between the TV and all the consoles.
Why not give people the option? What's a guest bedroom today can become a home office tomorrow, and stability/bandwidth needs per room can vary accordingly.
I have a chase in the middle of my house which used to be a chimney for a now decommissioned oil burner. I have all matter of cables going through there now, including, but not limited to two cat cables that provide ethernet to my attic and second floor. Not sure I would have been able to DIY it without that chase.
If each house had a couple of these chases that would provide a ton of flexibility in terms of remodeling.