Dont try to future proof you house with ethernet, fiber or any other cable. Install pull tubes, plastic pipes and passthroughs for pulling whatever cable is the new standard of the time. A house with a crawlspace and some riser tubes to upstairs rooms, or one big tube to an attic space, is far easier to upgrade than one with cat-9 outlets permanently baked into the walls.
I keep saying that, come next general renovation, I want the flat to be cabled like ships in Star Trek are - with cable routes being walled only in half, like C instead of an O, with the open side masked by panels that can be removed to access the wiring, whether to inspect, repair or replace. After all, isn't it ridiculous that to do anything with cables, one has to pretty much demolish the whole flat first?
Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I say this, and for some reason no one has seen such installations, nor heard of anyone doing them. Am I crazy or what?
(And yes, if I ever build a house, I'll make sure to add Jefferies tubes!)
I noticed the parent commenter used the word flat so they are probably in Europe and thinking of stone/brick houses. Meanwhile a lot of replies, probably from North Americans, mention drywall and drop ceilings. There’s a huge difference in construction styles in different regions. Not to mention average age of buildings and likelihood of renting vs owning. Just something to keep in mind when reading comments.
If you're inspired by spacy things, why not just use flat ethernet cables ON the wall, which come in all colors? Then combine them with triangular LED-panels (powered and brightness-/color-controlled over those cables) at places where they have to turn sharply, or branch from a little switch (hidden behind such a triangular LED-panel)? If you don't get what I mean, search for pictures of 'Nanoleaf' to get an impression of the many forms you can build.
That looks rather OK for my tastes. And is simple to implement, up to 1Gbit/s. Not because of the limitations of the cables, they go up to 40Gbit/s in flat form factor, but for the small switches, or SBCs which could be 'abused' as such.
Anyways, Nanoleaf or any others don't come ready for POE, so have to be modded, but not by much. Controlling them over ethernet requires more modding, but not that much either. One could also use the remote, and just give power over POE.
IIRC Panduite is the brand name version of something closest to that. Though you could also use Unistrut as a trough and protect the cables that way in a different enclosed space.
More generally I'd like modern houses to have more 'wet walls' like they had in the Matrix, where there's a space big enough for a worker to actually maneuver between rooms. Problem is that's also a space pests and fire can move.
Why do you need to access the whole cable? The thing you care about is where it emerges from the wall. Put in plenty of spare junction boxes and conduit from junction to junction and you'll have a modular maintainable system and your walls won't look like junk.
In older places here in Singapore, that predate widespread indoor electricity, I see that the cables are often on top of the walls (but hidden inside some plastic sheathing).
So that works like you suggested, but is a bit ugly.
Practically speaking, the bigger issue is going to be that you don't have wires going to where you want them. Cat 5e supports gigabit speed and was became the standard in 2001. Practically speaking, many cat5 cables from before than happen to work well enough to be used as if they were cat5e (particularly if you don't push the distance), which pushes the date back to 1995.
A lot of equipment you can buy today still only goes up to 100Mb/s, and a lot of houses still don't get even that from their ISPs.
Even if you have a gigabit connection, most of the time the computer at the other end isn't going to be sending you data at gigabit speed.
You might want gigabit speed to support multiple devices. But most houses don't have that many devices consuming high bandwidth at once, and when they do, you can feed them with multiple wires and/or access points.
All of this is to say, for almost every house, the standard cable from 1995 is still perfectly adequate. Cat5e will probably still be fine, by the time you sell your house.
You dont even need real tubes, just some holes between floors and pull ropes installed behind the drywall. In commercial construction there is a whole industry of wall/door passthroughs. Go backstage at any concert hall or sport arena and you will see 8"-wide pipe ends near the floor for running cables between rooms.
People do stupid stuff with wiring all the time. Here it's not uncommon to have electrical wires cemented directly into the walls or strung in the space between the outer and inner walls. There's no replacing those without destroying the wall, it's idiotic.
Older houses have plastic or metal pipes for running cables, ensuring that you can repair or upgrade the wiring. New house nope, forget it, costs to much.
I wanted to do a fiber run from my office (where my home automation Pi and office computers are) to our living room (where the fiber gateway is), but the cable breaks incredibly easily, dealing with SFP modules is a pain, and if cats discover it, it's game over. Surprisingly cheaper than CAT7 copper
Interesting. I was helping a friend wire his small business with 10 Gbit fiber, and the fiber patch cables from 10gtek ("the cheapest thing on amazon") were surprisingly resilient - we were yanking them through the false ceiling, getting caught on things, etc, no worries at all.
The fiber coming in from the ISP, OTOH, felt like the most delicate thing on the planet.
Single mode fiber is cheap, it’s been around for a long time, and as far as I know, even old single mode fiber supports modern standards just fine. (There have been improvements in tolerance to bending and in performance at extreme bandwidths far, far in excess of anything in your house.)
Single mode fiber transceivers are now cheap and use less power than 10GigE copper, but until recently they were expensive.
Multimode fiber comes in OM1, OM2, OM3, OM4, and OM5, and the older variants don’t get amazing speeds by modern standards.
Copper takes quite a bit of power at faster speeds.
First, fiber rules out PoE, which is one of the major advantages to a wired network to begin with. Devices like APs, cameras, and phones will need local power, which is going to add a lot of expense and/or installation complexity. In most installations today power delivery is one of the main purposes of network cabling.
You'll also need either fiber interfaces or media converters, which besides cost is an installation complexity. It'll add another thing you need power for and more equipment to conceal (or leave visible...) at each AP. Even assuming all of your devices are all full-on desktop computers I think the higher price of fiber NICs will eat much of your savings.
While that’s an interesting idea, is there really any point in using anything beyond Cat 6 given the connectivity found on most devices today and for the foreseeable future? Terabit-supporting fiber is cool, but ultimately not that useful when all my devices only have gigabit Ethernet, or 10gig Ethernet at best. I can’t see SFPs showing up on mainstream consumer devices anytime soon, which renders the fiber dream impractical for a home environment.
I am not familiar with the tools and cost associated with terminating fiber, yet I can easily do that for copper cable.
Also- I am a big fan of PoE. My ceiling mounted aps depend on that for power. With fiber now I need to also run power to access points, whereas I only have one cat6 cable for power plus data.
Seems fine? Our house has Cat5e going back to ~2008 (before we owned the house). It supports my 2.5Gbps PoE AP uplinks.
We're about to remodel and this has me thinking I should go to Cat8.2. Maybe a thousand bucks in cable? If that? I'll also add fiber for the furthest reach of the house for "future-proofing" but fiber is the tech that keeps being promised Real Soon Like Now but nobody's using it for their devices.
If you have drops where you want them, test what you've got installed. Cabling that only hits the minimums of Cat5e doesn't meet the specs for 10GbaseT, but the specs for 10G are for cabling in a dense conduit with a total run of 100m. In a residential setting, you likely don't have dense conduit or there's only a small section with dense cabling, where it leaves the patch panel. Additionally, cables are often exceed the spec they claim on their jacket, especially when there were not higher specs defined when made. My house was cabled with cat5e in 2003 or so, and I run 10g along one segment joining two buildings without significant error counts. My systems lack the tuning to really use that bandwidth, and I don't have a real usecase, but I wanted to see if it works, and it does. I've also run gigE over a segment with a mix of cat5e and cat3 at my previous residence, because pulling a new cable would have been onerous; and 100M would have been acceptable if gigE didn't work.
I'm not sure that cat5e will work beyond 10G, but 10G seems likely to be good enough for a long time. As of right now, used 10g fiber equipment is significantly less expensive than used 10GbaseT equipment, and there's power/heat savings too, 40GbaseT is going to run really hot.
> the 4-bit-5-bit (4B5B) encoding of 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), which encodes 4 bits of data in 5 bits, which would normally require 125 MHz of bandwidth to transfer,
I object to this number. I would say that "normal" here should mean plain old one bit at a time, 125 million times per second. This would make the maximum frequency 62.5Mhz, when it transmits 101010, or more specifically alternating between positive and negative voltage.
10Mbit Ethernet requires 10MHz specifically because it doesn't do the simplest thing. It transmits 20 million times per second.
> but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is MLT-3 (Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz.
I would clarify that MLT-3 has four steps in the cycle. +1v, 0v, -1v, 0v again. So that way it cuts 62.5 in half to 31.25.
> can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring
It assumes flawless wiring if you go for maximum distance, which is not particularly common.
When you find that 100M box of cat6 on Amazon sold by PQUALOOOX for 1/4 of the price of everyone else, it's probably cat5 construction and made of copper clad aluminum wiring.
I recently bought patch cables for the first time in maybe a decade. I ended up with with a Cat6a U/FTP, but the process to find out was the current "OK" cable standard was very confusing. Apparently there is a lot of "Cat7" cables that do not adhere to the standard (which do not allow for RJ45's?), which made it hard to find out what was what.
Not that it matters, this was a 5 m cable between my fiber box and my new wireless router. So the cable will not be the bottleneck in any of this.
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Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I say this, and for some reason no one has seen such installations, nor heard of anyone doing them. Am I crazy or what?
(And yes, if I ever build a house, I'll make sure to add Jefferies tubes!)
That looks rather OK for my tastes. And is simple to implement, up to 1Gbit/s. Not because of the limitations of the cables, they go up to 40Gbit/s in flat form factor, but for the small switches, or SBCs which could be 'abused' as such.
Anyways, Nanoleaf or any others don't come ready for POE, so have to be modded, but not by much. Controlling them over ethernet requires more modding, but not that much either. One could also use the remote, and just give power over POE.
More generally I'd like modern houses to have more 'wet walls' like they had in the Matrix, where there's a space big enough for a worker to actually maneuver between rooms. Problem is that's also a space pests and fire can move.
So that works like you suggested, but is a bit ugly.
A lot of equipment you can buy today still only goes up to 100Mb/s, and a lot of houses still don't get even that from their ISPs.
Even if you have a gigabit connection, most of the time the computer at the other end isn't going to be sending you data at gigabit speed.
You might want gigabit speed to support multiple devices. But most houses don't have that many devices consuming high bandwidth at once, and when they do, you can feed them with multiple wires and/or access points.
All of this is to say, for almost every house, the standard cable from 1995 is still perfectly adequate. Cat5e will probably still be fine, by the time you sell your house.
I couldn’t find anyone local who would install any kind of cable tubing after spending a fair amount of time searching.
Stuff like this:
https://usabesco.com/devices/pass-through-devices-cable-fire...
Nobody does it except possibly between floors, as fish tape and other things aren’t terribly complicated, and the cost is way higher than naked runs.
Older houses have plastic or metal pipes for running cables, ensuring that you can repair or upgrade the wiring. New house nope, forget it, costs to much.
Interesting. I was helping a friend wire his small business with 10 Gbit fiber, and the fiber patch cables from 10gtek ("the cheapest thing on amazon") were surprisingly resilient - we were yanking them through the false ceiling, getting caught on things, etc, no worries at all.
The fiber coming in from the ISP, OTOH, felt like the most delicate thing on the planet.
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But in any case, fiber remains impractical, expensive, and power-hungry.
Single mode fiber is cheap, it’s been around for a long time, and as far as I know, even old single mode fiber supports modern standards just fine. (There have been improvements in tolerance to bending and in performance at extreme bandwidths far, far in excess of anything in your house.)
Single mode fiber transceivers are now cheap and use less power than 10GigE copper, but until recently they were expensive.
Multimode fiber comes in OM1, OM2, OM3, OM4, and OM5, and the older variants don’t get amazing speeds by modern standards.
Copper takes quite a bit of power at faster speeds.
Depends on what you're comparing it to - if you're looking for 10 Gbit, then copper is probably going to be worse, at least on power
CAT8: $0.55 / foot
Max speed; 40 Gbit
Max length: 30m
(https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=42957):
---
2 strand OS2 single-mode fiber: $0.09 / foot
Max speed: 800 Gbit (today; theoretical max speed is much higher)
Max length: >10km
(https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/bulk-cable/fiber-opt...):
OS2 has been around for decades, and will be more than good enough for the next several decades.
You'll also need either fiber interfaces or media converters, which besides cost is an installation complexity. It'll add another thing you need power for and more equipment to conceal (or leave visible...) at each AP. Even assuming all of your devices are all full-on desktop computers I think the higher price of fiber NICs will eat much of your savings.
I just ran a couple runs to an in-wall AP + 2 1gbe port(w/ one PoE) and it's so awesome to have that all done with one cable.
Also- I am a big fan of PoE. My ceiling mounted aps depend on that for power. With fiber now I need to also run power to access points, whereas I only have one cat6 cable for power plus data.
We're about to remodel and this has me thinking I should go to Cat8.2. Maybe a thousand bucks in cable? If that? I'll also add fiber for the furthest reach of the house for "future-proofing" but fiber is the tech that keeps being promised Real Soon Like Now but nobody's using it for their devices.
I'm not sure that cat5e will work beyond 10G, but 10G seems likely to be good enough for a long time. As of right now, used 10g fiber equipment is significantly less expensive than used 10GbaseT equipment, and there's power/heat savings too, 40GbaseT is going to run really hot.
I object to this number. I would say that "normal" here should mean plain old one bit at a time, 125 million times per second. This would make the maximum frequency 62.5Mhz, when it transmits 101010, or more specifically alternating between positive and negative voltage.
10Mbit Ethernet requires 10MHz specifically because it doesn't do the simplest thing. It transmits 20 million times per second.
> but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is MLT-3 (Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz.
I would clarify that MLT-3 has four steps in the cycle. +1v, 0v, -1v, 0v again. So that way it cuts 62.5 in half to 31.25.
> can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring
It assumes flawless wiring if you go for maximum distance, which is not particularly common.
Not that it matters, this was a 5 m cable between my fiber box and my new wireless router. So the cable will not be the bottleneck in any of this.
https://youtu.be/4ZtFk2dtqv0
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