Building A Home Network: Wires Rule

Wireless networking is the current hot topic. It's no surprise, because Wi-Fi promises wonderful benefits. Be connected anywhere! No pesky wires needed! It's certainly useful when you have a mobile PC, and are moving from meeting to meeting, or wanting to grab a latte' at your local Starbucks.

Wireless, however, is not problem-free. First, there's the whole poorly-understood security issue. Put up an unsecured access point in your home, and suddenly the entire neighborhood is sharing your cable modem connection. Or, as Dave Salvator discovered recently, you can encounter some interesting conflicts with your neighbors. But to me, the most pressing matter is one of performance.

Now, this isn't really a diatribe against wireless. I think the various flavors of 802.11 certainly have their place. But in my own case, wireless networking is a less-than-perfect solution. First, I move a lot of big files and directories around, because of the kind of work I do. Just moving the standard benchmarks around my network takes a good ten minutes over 100 mb/sec Ethernet.

Wireless Performance Problems Then there's my house. The way my house is laid out turns out to be something of a nightmare for wireless.

The problem is that my office, which is where the cable modem connection lives, is in the daylight basement. An 802.11b or 802.11a router or access point located there is actually invisible to any wirelessly enabled system in my upstairs bedroom. I could place a bunch of repeaters around the house, I suppose, but that gets expensive and still wouldn't solve my performance problem. So my solution was to wire the house.

As it turned out, wiring up the house was an opportunistic event, brought about by bugs. I'm not talking software bugs, but literal ones: termites had invaded the front wood siding. I was forced to replace the front siding – which meant the entire front wall of the house was removed temporarily. That offered a golden opportunity to wire the rest of the house.

In fact, I'd had a crude 100mb/sec network in my basement office for years, but it mostly consisted of CAT5e wiring strung along the baseboards. In fact, that's still the case down there, because of the flexibility it offers me, particularly when testing products. On the other hand, my wife's office was adjacent to mine, and she was quite clear about the whole issue of wiring her office: no visible wires.

Additionally, I have two daughters with bedrooms upstairs. Eventually, they'll have PCs in their rooms, and I wanted to make sure that they had easy connectivity to the Internet. At some point, as they approached the dreaded teenage years, they'd also need their own phones. My wife expressed a desire to occasionally work in the dining room as well, through her company-provided DSL link. Finally, I wanted a clean way to manage all that wiring.

In the end, the parameters looked like this: CAT5e connections to each of the kids room, the dining room and the office POTS (plain old telephone service) dial-tone to those locations Some type of wire/cable management system Easy connections to multiple Internet connections (one cable modem and one private DSL connection) Co-ax cable support for video (satellite or cable TV)

The key to all this was the independent contractor who was replacing the siding on my house. Cameron was just the right guy -- one of the most flexible and knowledgeable contractors I'd ever met. He was pretty familiar with the issues of wiring a house, having done quite a few, and came up with some great ideas.

The first one was the use of a pre-built wiring bundle, designed specifically for home use. The wiring bundle consists of a phone, fiber, dual coax cable (RG6, offering 2.2GHz bandwidth) and Cat5e Ethernet in a single bundle wrapped with orange insulation. It's made by General Cable and goes under the HomeLinx brand. At roughly $1 - $1.50 per foot, it seems expensive, until you realize you're getting five different cables in one bundled price. We needed about 200 feet for our project.

The next piece of the puzzle was the cable management system. Leviton makes a line of cable management products for wired home applications. We chose the Leviton SMC-280 Structured Media Center as the main management box. In addition to having multiple punch-outs for cable runs, a number of mounting holes are drilled into the back of the box, which allow you to either mount Leviton patch panels or other gear.

Leviton makes a host of accessories for the box, and sorting through the various patch panels would have been tedious at best. The good news is that Leviton has some pre-built modules, making the choices much easier. We chose their Advanced Small Office Unit (part number A7603-ASO), which sports a pair of combination CAT5e voice/data modules, a POTS distribution panel and a six-way coax video splitter.