I’ve finally started cabling my house (by alaric)
In our house, the telephone sockets are downstairs, at one end of the building, while my office (where my office telephone and computers sit) is upstairs and at the opposite end of the building.
So to get working quickly amongst the hubbub of moving in, I ran Ethernet and telephone cables from the phone sockets (the ADSL router that provides our Internet connection sits rights by the phone sockets, since the DSL signal quality is so bad anyway I wanted to maximise signal strength by not putting the ADSL router on the end of a cheap telephone extension cable) up to the office. The longest Ethernet cables I had were ten metres long, so I put the core router in the airing cupboard, more or less exactly between the phone sockets and my desk, and also conveniently having a power outlet to run it - then ran a ten-metre cable to it from the ADSL router and another one from my desk.
And so we had phone and ethernet cables hanging from nails in the beams and running up the stairs and so on. It was temporary, but it worked, and there were other things to worry about, so it stayed like that for nearly three years, with a few changes when I moved over to using VLANs and was then able to just have a switch at the midpoint and move the router to the office, had problems with large file transfers, experimented with the network, experimented some more, then eliminated them as an issue and used them to fix the problem in a better way - until this weekend when, taking advantage of downstairs not being full of furniture yet and Sarah's father around to help me, I started properly cabling the house.
Proper cabling, in this context, meaning an unshielded twisted pair structured cabling system. The principle is that there should be sockets about the house into which computer network cables or (via an adapter) telephones can be plugged, with all the sockets being connected by neatly installed twisted pair cables to central patch panels, which are basically just giant strips of 24 or so sockets. At the patch panels, each circuit is connected to a network switch, telephone line, or other piece of central communications equipment - or just connected by a short cable to another socket on the patch panel, thus connecting two circuits together and making it possible to connect any socket in the building to any other.
Now, our house has some properties that will make this very easy, and some that will make this very hard.
The good news is that downstairs is one large room, with half of upstairs above it (the other half of upstairs, the office, extends over the stable, which is the same building as us but not reachable without going outside). Downstairs has exposed beams, meaning that one can run cables discreetly along the beams and just drill upwards to reach floor level upstairs to mount sockets, or run trunking down the walls to mount sockets downstairs. So cabling downstairs and the portion of upstairs that's above it isn't a problem.
The bad news is that the office was originally a hayloft above the stable, and entirely isolated from the house by a stone wall about two feet thick. When the hayloft was turned into a room in the 1960s, they cut a hole through this wall upstairs and fitted a door in. That hole, full of door, is the only aperture between the two halves of the building, apart from a channel somewhere that power cables go through, that I can't find since it's all hidden in the plaster.
Luckily, I own a foot long drill bit - and above the door is a triangular bit of wall that's only about a foot thick. I measured it, and the thickness of the wall is pretty much exactly the length of my drill bit. Which is lucky!
Building Maintenance, Sci/Tech | alaric | 
Sun 1st Jun 2008 11:55 pm
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By duncan, Mon 2nd Jun 2008 @ 8:56 am
good luck, i laid cat6 throughout my house when the central heating was upgraded - as the plumber had the floorboards up i thought it wise to lay cables. so i decided to put two cables into every room, from the "data cabinet" - where a hot water tank was in the annex. in the end needed rather a large hole to fit 10 cables through - but luckily my plumber had all the required drillbits to hand.
still almost a year on, and ive only wired up 2 of the cables - the patch panel is still in its box awaiting a rainy day when im motivated enough to do the trunking, fix the boxes and test everything.