CAT 5, wiring question.

[scmhogg]

I have finally had enough with interference on my wifi. I have decided to hard wire the desktops and only use the wifi for laptops. Two of the desktops are in adjacent rooms. The run to those two rooms is 70-80'.

My question is: Will a run of 80' result in a loss of signal? And, can I use one long run and a splitter to the two adjacent rooms, without loss? Or, should I run separate cables from the router to each desktop?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Steve

[Tom Miller]

You need to run separate cables to each computer from the router so that the router can do its routing.

I don't think 70-80' of cable will yield appreciable signal degradation -- I think the majority of degradation will still come from the connectors.

That's my uneducated $0.02, anyway.

Regards,
Tom

[scmhogg]

Tom,

Thanks for your quick response. Is there a better grade of connectors, that will minimize loss?

Steve

[Bruce Cohen]

Steve,

Firstly, you need to use Cat 5E, not plain Cat 5. Also, dont let them sell you Cat 6, unless you're running a network with NC cards and routers that can carry gigabit thruput. Also, you'll find wireing in two flavors, plain (vinyl) insulation and Plenum, is is required in commercial installations (its fire resistant and costs way more then the vinyl type.

What you have to do is to "home-run" your machines and printers (if they're ethernet compatable, although you probably only have a USB attachment for your printer.

Ethernet (no matter what wireing you use will give you a much stronger and faster thruput than wi-fi, along with no interference.

Again, you cannot "daisy chain" an ethernet network configuration. All connections must either be home runed to one router or to an additional secondary router which still has to connect to your central hub.

I'll get you some links to ease the transition and clarify what I just said, now that I possibly confused the heck out of you.

Bruce

[Bruce Cohen]

Steve,

Here's the links I mentioned, these will probably give you more info than you really wanted.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u.../getsetup.mspx

http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5e.aspx

http://www.connectworld.net/syscon/support.htm

http://www.connectworld.net/syscon/support.htm

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ub...6&m=5760980942

The last one answers the question on length of a run.

Have fun,

Bruce

[Esteban]

Basically you can run up to 300 feet with out problems.

[Holbren]

A few things to add and maybe clarify.

1. Ethernet is a digital signal. As long as the computer can understand if it's a 1 or 0 signal degredation is not relevant. WiFi is an analog signal where signal strenght has relevance.

2. If I were going through the pain of running wire, I would set myself up or gigabit with the cat6. I do a lot of file sharing and gigabit is in my future.

3. I don't see why you can't run one wire to a central local and use a switch. From the switch you can run wires to each computer if it's easier. An example would be to run one wire from downstairs to an upstair switch then branch out from there. You can even put the switch in the attic if you have one and an outlet, whatever is easiest.

Plan for the future, you don't want to do this again.

[JR]

Good suggestions so far.

WRT to cat 5 vs cat 6: If you're running new cable use cat 6 if it's not cost prohibitive. If you've got cat 5 it will work just fine, even at gigabit speeds. I have personal experience with the influence of the cable vendors on the IEEE 802.3 commitee - it's not pretty, but they would very much like for the world to buy new cable each time there is a new Ethernet standard.

The switch Brian refers to is of the electronic variety, not the mechanical. As he says, it's not necessar that it be located at your "computer center". Any place in the house that's convenient from a wiring standpoint will do. The switch can be any inexpensive ethernet switch with the numbe of ports supporting your application. If it's the be the same device connecting you to the Internet, then make sure you've got firewall functionality in it. Otherwise go for cheap.

As Estaban implied the standard is for 100 meters on Cat. 6. You might get diminished range with Cat 5, but not enough to worry about in the typical faux-Spanish tract home.

JR

[vanguard]

100 meters is fine for Cat 5 as well. Since it's for home, I'd actually recommend Cat5 rather than 5e. Cat 5 will be easier to work with since normally it justs 4 twisted pairs of wires. The 5e or Cat 6 typically will have 4 pairs of bonded wires rather than just simply twisted. The bonding reduces the potential for 'un-twist' but it makes it more difficult to work with.

FWIW, I was in Office Depot yesterday and they had a 5 port 100Mbps (Cat5) switch on sale for $15.

HTH.

[parnelli]

You've probably enough information already- but I'll throw my .02 anyhow.

If you're going to just buy patch cables, you could probably just get 5e- it often can run gigabit speeds- but if you don't mind the extra money and/or the cable run is hard to get to, you may choose just to go with the cat6.

For reference, a 75ft 5e should be ~$10 and a cat6 about double that.

If you should decide to make your own, I have yet to see a cat5e cable with cat6 connectors that didn't have speeds just as good at actual cat6. If it's commercial use that's one thing, but for residential it will be more than fine.

[Holbren]

I bought a 5 port D-Link switch at CompUSA two weeks ago for $10. May have been a rebate, don't remember. I guess I better check.

I just pulled out the new D-Link MIMO wireless stuff thinking I would get better coverage, still a pain. Nothing like a wire but painful to run.

[TheRic]

Steve,

Ok by this point you are over whelmed with the data. Here are a few simple things that you need to keep in mind (that most people overlook).

1. The twists in the wires are very important, if you make your own connection you will lose bandwidth the more they are separated. Normally you don’t want to untwist the wires more then ¼” from the connection.

2. The biggest bottle neck that I normally see is not in the connection, or the wire but in the speed of the computer and the outside network speed.

2A. You can have the fastest network connection in the world, but it won’t mean much if you are using a 15 year old computer. The computer itself will be the bottle neck.

2B. If you have a broadband connection coming to your house you are probably getting something like a 300 KB – 1500 KB (1.5 MB, T1) connection. The internal network is at least 10 MB (can run on Cat 3, phone wire). To compare numbers your internet connection is .3 MB to 1.5 MB, your internal (computer to computer) is 10MB / 100MB / 1000MB. The bottle neck is with your ISP.

2B. If you are looking at computer to computer speed in your house, AND you have new computers then you can worry about the wire. If all these computers are going to do it connect to the internet then the real bottle neck will be your ISP connection.

[LinuxRandal]

I wired my brothers new house, my Lawyers office and a few other places (still haven't had time to do my own, ).
In my parents old house, we changed the network wiring over the years, several times. The first was null modem cables from one room to another, then thicknet, and finally cat 5. At the old house, since walls didn't line up, we ran it through the duct work, (and even used some store bought cables, in two rooms). That could be a option in worse case scenario's (run them to a switching hub, which most are anymore).
National code (which isn't really enforced, as a lot of areas like smaller towns, don't even know how to read the codes off the wires) requires plenum in all open area's that could transfer fire via the cable. Plenum is supposed to be more fire resistant.
How old is the house? Some homes have used cat 3 (10 baseT) or cat 5/5E (10/100/ pre spec 1000) as phone wires (one friend had that, and converted the jacks to network jacks).
Overall, you may spend more in the tools, then you do to find out what is interfering with the wireless (normally location) and changing things.
Just some more info and options.

[LCHIEN]

My .02 cents -

Someone suggested using existing house phone wiring which in recent homes is likely to be Cat 3 or Cat 5 - Problem is that the phone wires are daisey chained from room to room, not star-wired as a network requires.

As noted, If your primary traffic is multiple computers to internet rather than computer to computer or computer to local server then you are limited by the .5 to 1.5 Mbit/sec of your WAN connection (DSL or cable) and 10/100/1G ethernet is mootish. If you do a lot of computer-computer or computer-server transfers of really big files (or maybe just want to be prepared for the future) then I'd consider 1GB ethernet and Cat6 cables. Otherwise 100 MBit ethernet over Cat 5e cables should be plenty fast and 50-100 times as fast as your internet connection. Nonethless I can remember once thinking 10 mb/s would be plenty but now I have all 100mb/s wired or 54mb/s wireless.

Some mention was made of hubs/router/switches.

The basic difference is (from least sophisticated to most)

hubs are the most stupid, they route all requests from one port to all other ports increasing the amount of traffic a particular port must pass.

routers are much better, they route requests based on where they think the recipients are. they have to keep track of what hosts are where, but in return they route requests and data from one port to the appropriate port where the host lies, and don't burden oll the other ports with this traffic.

The switch is more sophisticated still. While routers can only route traffic from one port to another at one time, the switch can route traffic from one port to second port at the same time it's routing traffic from a third port to a fourth. This is obviously of benefit in high traffic networks and the advantage is it will allow say allow say 3 100 mb/s transfers between 6 ports for an aggregate 300 mbit transfer rate whereas the router will allow only a 100 mbit/sec total at any given time and the other two paths will have to wait. Basically serial handling of a single data path vs. parallel paths.

Hubs are hardly found anymore. Home user networks can probably benefit from routers. Switches are better but of little benefit to home users unless you have two users watching streaming HiDef video on two computers each getting its data from two other separate computers or servers on the local network - although $10 switches are very cheap, it makes it moot, too.

[Scottydont]

Definately a seperate cable from the router for each room. My company "supports" cable runs up to 300 ft. I have seen some of my customers going way beyond that without any issues.