My parents are building a new house and I have advised them to get a wired network throughout the house. Needless to say, it’s my responsibility to plan the network now
The network will mostly be used for
file transfers / backups to the NAS
video on demand streaming
IP cameras
whatever the botnet commands once the IP cameras have inevitably been taken over
Questions in my mind right now are
What Cat cable should we use? 1Gbit would be plenty for now but since this is a permanent installation I’d like to be prepared for the future
There will be some IoT devices in the network. What’s the best way to isolate the other devices from them?
Any thoughts / ideas / pitfalls to avoid are greatly appreciated!
I’d recommend getting the cable in bulk from a supplier that deals specifically in cabling or networking equipment. You should be able to find a couple in your country with a quick search. I wouldn’t recommend getting the cable on somewhere like Amazon as they tend to be sellers with really poor quality cable and you don’t want to have to rerun the entire house because of faulty cabling when its done.
You might be right, I haven’t personally bought cables from Amazon, but a product with lots of good reviews usually yield good results in my experience.
CAT6 UTP for your in wall cable runs. Make sure your runs are a reasonable distance from electrical cabling in the walls and a managed switch that supports VLAN’s would be the best solution for isolating your IoT devices.
Gigabit may sound plenty but my Gigabit router, switch and NICs are already severely limiting the transfer speeds whenever I copy large files over to/from my NAS. Upgrading Switches etc is expensive right now, but it will become cheaper as 10Gb becomes more common.
It’s a hassle having to re-run your cables though, so make sure they can handle a lot more than you think you’ll ever need.
Personally I avoid IoT devices as if my life depends on it, but if I were to get some I’d put them on a separated network. Gibson’s “3 dumb routers” approach should work.
A Pfsense router could also do the trick, but then you’re relying on the software rather than making sure there’s a hardware-based separation which is a lot harder to overcome.
If it was me I would check the local building codes In your area. Apparently, there are several different types Ethernet cables some are designed to be installed inside walls, some are designed to be buried in the ground, some are designed to be installed in the wall but have special shielding to protect against electrical interference. Whatever your local building codes are is going to decide what options you are going to have. For example, in most local cities in the United States, When we install Ethernet cabling in our walls we have to install Plenum which is a special Ethernet cable that has a covering to protect against toxic gases if a short should every develope in the wiring of the Ethernet cable.
Nice work suggesting a full wired installation with the new house. In the US that’s the only way to do it these days unless you want to wire everything yourself and potentially replace a lot of drywall. Most ISP installers will only install 1 run into an existing house and will not do much between rooms. Have you located a company to run all the cable during the build?
Networking is getting more and more important as streaming and cloud services take over. So the choice is really between running LAN cables now or a world of pain in ten years, trying to push enough bandwidth over WiFi.
The installation will be done by a company, yes. My dad takes care of the construction details, I’m only doing the planning.
Cat 6 structured wiring, back to a central closet that has an air conditioning duct.
Quad or more outlets per wall plate
Conduit with sweeps from the closet to the MPOE or equivelent. Also conduit with sweeps from the closet to the computer room.
Additional drops everywhere.
If you don’t need at least a 48 port patch panel in your closet, you’re doing it wrong, and by wrong, I mean too small.
+1 to a full wired house. i strongly recommend shielded cat 6E or cat 7 for your wires. and try to place the switch and routing gear in a central location so the runs dont have to be horribly long on one side or another. managed switches are the best idea as stated above so you can segregate the LOT botnet that you have and choke its speed to next to nothing. cant avoid it so take steps to make it weak sauce is my 2 cents.
and finally +1 to @NetBandit great advice for what kind of equipment to use you beat me too it bub. 40 amp breakers are a minimum i would have on the circuit that you are using as well.
First, Cat 6e isn’t a standard.
Second cat 7 is absurdly overpriced for the needs of a home.
Don’t listen to @looming-hawk. He clearly has no idea what he is talking about.
Cat 6 is more than adequate. Run conduit and sweeps if you are paranoid about future proofing.
