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.
