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    New wiring   
    Monday, May 25 2009 @ 10:09 PM CDT
    By David L. Farquhar

    Gatermann and I spent most of the day pulling CAT5e through the house. It's long overdue. The guy who wired the phones in the house broke every single rule I could find about running voice/data cable, and it wasn't good stuff to begin with. Plus, I was really tired of the lack of reliability of 802.11g in this house. Why I can see all of my neighbors' networks but not my own is beyond me.

    Running a single CAT5e line from where the phone network comes in over to the center of the house made a huge difference. The phones sound clearer, the DSL is much faster (consistently 630K now--it used to dip to 300K frequently) and running lines is much easier when you're away from the circuit breaker box and not surrounded by power cables everywhere.

    At present I only have two rooms networked, but it'll be easy enough to add to that as needed now.

    Wireless is convenient, but 100-meg is very nice. It's reliable and fast. Gigabit is even nicer. Now it would actually be practical to upgrade to gigabit. At gigabit, network resources run nearly as fast as local ones.

    I wish I'd done this years ago.

      [ Views: 723 ]  


    New wiring | 2 comments | Create New Account
    The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
    New wiring
    Authored by: robohara on Thursday, May 28 2009 @ 10:52 AM CDT
    I really had hoped wireless was going to solve all my
    networking problems. Really, it only solved one
    problem -- me climbing around in the attic running
    cables. Wireless allowed me to add a machine in the
    kitchen and one on the living room without running
    cables and cutting holes in walls, but the
    performance has been lackluster. I upgraded my
    wireless router from b/g to n but to be honest I never
    upgraded any of my cards ... I just ended up running
    wires to my more critical boxes. The kids' computer
    in the dining room is still wireless which is good
    enough for surfing the web, but my PVR and main
    workstations are now running physical cable. I never
    lose signal or drop connection, things are faster, and
    once I got off my ass and ran the cables it went
    much quicker than I thought it would.

    Wireless is okay for checking e-mail and surfing the
    web on laptops, but my "critical infrastructure" (if you
    can refer to machines at home as such), it's all cat5
    (or better) for me.

    [ Reply to This ]

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