Wiring House for Ethernet & Coaxial Cable
Hi, a house is currently being gut renovated and I’d like to run telephone, ethernet and coaxial cables through the walls. Can anyone point me in the direction as to who I would need to contact to get cost estimates and who can do this type of work? Is it possible I can have the…
Hi, a house is currently being gut renovated and I’d like to run telephone, ethernet and coaxial cables through the walls.
Can anyone point me in the direction as to who I would need to contact to get cost estimates and who can do this type of work? Is it possible I can have the telephone company and cable company do the coaxial and telephone wiring and I can find someone else to do the ethernet wiring? If you can provide your experiences with this type of work, that would be great.
We wired our house for phone (2 lines and backup), ethernet (1 + backup), and cable. We also installed wifi. GC did the wiring and the electrician terminated the ends. As others have said, The wired ethernet worked very well for the TV (DVR), BlueRay, and other video devices. The wireless worked well for our computer network and our wireless phones, I’m glad I did both. For the cable TV boxes (3) we needed to add a booster to amplify the signal. Time-Warner acted like they didn’t know what we were talking about, so we bought our own. When it failed a year later, Time-Warner replaced it with their own at no cost.
We wired a similar but separate system for our ground floor tenant. When his High-Speed Online Internet Service failed recently, we let him onto our wireless system. He commented that this was really nice perk, and thanked us profusely. That’s one of the ways we keep a good tenant.
I buried lines for audio many years ago. be sure to put in redundancy – run at least 2 for every one you want.
Like diego, I had this done in my place (5 years ago). Only thing we ever used was 1 cable for TV. The rest is horse and buggy stuff. Get a wi-fi router and wireless phone.
Who ever you choose to install cables should also test them before walls are closed up and then test them again once all work is complete.
As an IT person, I have to agree with Bruce, you should have a network architect design your wiring.
We did this 2 years ago and have never used it. We have a wireless router for our computer and mobile phones. I suggest saving your money/time.
We did this. As many have said, architect included the network / phone / co-ax jacks on our plans the GC’s electrician ran the wiring. It’s not that much more money to add an extra location, so we pretty much thought of every location we might want a TV, phone, or networked thingie, even though we didn’t really plan on having TV’s in half the locations. So coax jacks in kitchen and parlor on main floor, master BR and guest room in study. Only using one of these now. Ethernet jacks in parlor near TV, kitchen near a little desk, study upstairs, and maybe master BR – I forget. Using them in study and by the TV. Don’t forget to include an ethernet jack by your TV! Wired works so much better for internet-based video than wifi. You can get a cheap splitter at this location that will allow you to share this single wire with multiple devices (we have a networked DVD player and a networked audio device, and have extra capacity for a game system down the road.)Phone is the easiest to think through because wireless phone technology is perfectly adequate, much more so than wi-fi or broadcast TV. We put lots of phone jacks in the house, and only use 1 of them for a cordless phone system that works perfectly everwhere in the house and fairly well outside as well. Finally, you need to remember some kind of patch location for both cable and ethernet. For cable, this is where Time Warner or whomever will come in from the street (prob basement) and split their signal, and for ethernet it’s where you put your router. This second location will need co-ax as well for your modem, and some ventilation. We have a small utility closet where we have our model, router, hard-drive, and then send 3 or 4 other ethernet jumpers to the patch panel in the wall. Our architect forgot to include this patch closet in the plans – but our electrician was smart enough to figure it out. You can go a little nuts future-proofing if you like, with in-wall fiber optic, etc., but that way lies madness. Hope this is useful. Oh, you might want to think through in-wall speakers as well: nice to get rear speakers set up without stringing wires around the house, and also run satellite speakers from, say, LR to kitchen. Good luck!
Running the cables is the easy part and your electrician ought to be able to do it. Deciding where you want the jacks is the hard part. One of the difficulties of gut renovating is the need to make so many decisions about how you plan to live before you actually live there. Are you certain you know where each tv and each computer is going? How wireless do you plan to be? I think that is what brucef is trying to say although you may not need to pay a consultant to figure it out.
I am a network engineer and an old house restorer.
You are confusing two issues.
Running cabling while walls are open is not too hard, as long as some guidelines are followed. Typically electricians or lesser contractors haven’t a clue regarding interference etc., but usually systems work OK regardless. I say usually, because so often a later trade severs cabling they don’t realize is in the wall.
The bigger question is planning a solution, which is tech parlance for uderstanding the ultimate usage, and working back to the best plan to accomplish it. No conventional architect would be expected to grasp the concepts. In fact those of us who design networks are called… “network architects”.
In data infrastructure, the cost of the cable is minimal, but if run un-intelligently (not sure if that is a word), it is a forever compromise or head ache.
Bruce
Bruce Freilich, pres. MCSE
Jersey Data Management
We Listen, We Think, We Build
bruce@jerseydata.net
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