Hello Mudspikers! So, this may be a slightly different vein of DIY, but I figure there’s a lot of general know-how here.
The house I bought was remodeled approximately ten years ago, and when they finished the basement level, the owners added cable in pretty much every room downstairs, plus the rest of the rooms upstairs. For obvious reasons we’re not using that, and I’m interested in pulling ethernet cable throughout the house.
The cable drops are literally everywhere I want to put ethernet connections, and I’m thinking (hoping) that there’s an easy-ish way to pull the fiber along the already existing cable routing.
Anyway, any tips, pointers, or good sources for information or resources would be great! Thanks in advance!
Well unless you want to buy transceivers you won’t be using fiber!
A variant of CAT6 cable will do, and its important to note you will need a switch at a central point.
Ethernet CANNOT be daisy chained (unless you want switches everywhere, then be my guest haha).
Typically just buy a roll and snake all the runs from each room to one spot for your network switch. You will have more cables than router ports more than likely, as a home router typically have only 4 ports.
Around the basement, I have wallplates like this - the ethernet all wires back to the switch point, and one run goes upstairs to the router for internet access.
So, I already have the entry point that AT&T put in for my cable and internet service- is that where I should look at putting my switch, or should I look at relocating it to a more central location in the house? It’s at the penetration point on an exterior wall of the house, and at the exact opposite side of the house from our offices and computers are set up.
The location for the switch has to be somewhere you can then wire to the router - which can be the same room.
It will depend where you get all the wires from the other rooms too, which may not be the router room.
Edit: Ie, in our basement it easy to make a central spot from each room to my entertainment center as its right by my desk, and run one line upstairs instead of a half dozen.
IMHO, meshed Wi-Fi is so good now, I would not bother pulling Ethernet, unless you have a specific need, like getting it out to a camera on the far side of a garage or out to a carriage house. I’m using the Orbi 50 series router and satellites. We had Comcast pull the cable to the second floor and my office is on the third floor. My PC is connected to an RBS50 satellite which is meshed back to the RBR50 router on the second floor. Just running a speed test now. If the Internet is not the bottleneck, I’m getting > 400 Mbps over WiFi with the kids downstairs doing distance learning. With all of the Wi-Fi devices in homes now, including streaming TVs and set top boxes, smart thermostats, security cameras, phones, tablets, laptops, irrigation system, VoIP phone system back to the office, etc. a better investment is your wireless infrastructure.
Wireless always has potential of congestion and degraded signals, something I would never trust for gaming. Funny enough, League of Legends did a survey and that the odds of winning were better on cabled ethernet and that more high skilled players used cabled ethernet.
So much this. Depending on your housing situation, you may have a lot of neighbors nearby spamming all the WiFi bands. If you have spare cable tubes, do yourself a solid and get Ethernet.
Additional to what Wes has mentioned, there’s 2 types of Ethernet cable, the one intended for installation and the one intended for use as patch cables. The former have a much stiffer hull and better shielding, but you have to pay close attention to the minimum bend diameter or the line loss suffers terribly (once you bend it too much, you can not fully unbend it, they are not that flexible).
If you’ve never done an RJ45 socket, watch a youtube video before attempting your first one. Be very thorough with the shielding (the closer you can get the shield to extend towards the actual contact, the better bandwidth you get in the end). And get a good punch down tool. The cheap ones are ■■■■ (i had to do a lot of wall sockets for my company with a cheap a** tool, it’s no fun).
The problem is if you buy that many nodes, it costs more than a spool of cable and one switch for guaranteed connectivity.
Even at work we have Wifi but it is only for cell phones. Our coverage is larger than our building almost. Our access points are all connected to the network on wire so that there is no wireless relaying of data.
Even at home, I have an RT-AC3200 router with external antenna plus I had a PCE-AC68 wifi card with external antenna on my PC until I got this new motherboard with Wifi built in. While I could easy have over 700mbps over LAN, that was no replacement for lower latency WiFi.
Your base ping on speedtest is over 40ms, by comparison my all wired setup with fibre to the house is under 10ms most days.
I have so far only had to work with Cat5e where there is no shield - and to be fair, Cat5e will support Gigabit and work for home - it’s just not as future proof. Cat 6 is stiffer in general due to the better insulation and shield, which protects against bends as a bonus.
To outline the cables - there are solid and stranded wire cable. Solid is less flexible and for in-wall type applications, with the bend limits Sobek mentioned.
Stranded is used for flexible connections and costs more - it is what patch cords (the ones you see running between switches on a rack, wall plate to device or use for your PC to Router) are made of. It’s best to just buy patch cords from a network cable store as pre-made ones with connectors moulded on will beat the hell out of making your own and are cheap when bought from a big supplier - less then $1 per foot CAD!
Big note: Avoid cheap cable and anything labelled as CCA (copper clad aluminum) - it’s cheaper, but doesn’t handle the high frequencies for more bandwidth well. Plus just ask an electrician about aluminum wiring…
For solid cable you may also see Riser and Plenum options, where plenum is only needed if you are installing inside an airduct (it costs a bit more and is a bit more fireproof to prevent a fire spreading up the cable to another floor).
LOL, when I connect with Ethernet, I get pretty much the same results. I think that the latency is coming from the crappy Xfinity cable network we are on. In Atlanta, we would often get less than 20 ms pings, but that was AT&T fiber. So to my point, the latency is not from our WiFi. Your WiFi may be a different story.
FURTHER TESTING
Pinged from my laptop, which is on Ethernet downstairs to my gaming PC upstairs, which is on meshed WiFi. So, yeah, there is an average of 3 ms of latency.
C:\Users\dblake>ping -n 20 -4 deluxe
Pinging deluxe [192.168.1.15] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.15: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=128
Ping statistics for 192.168.1.15:
Packets: Sent = 20, Received = 20, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 6ms, Average = 3ms
