Run cables or go wireless?
FormFactor
At the core of forgotten
Well Formfactor is finally a home owner, and is all moved in to his humble abode. Now to get my network distributed throughout the house. The house is 3 floors including basement and upstairs, and I will need network access in at least 1 room per floor. The house is rather old, and large so running cables and keeping them neat and clean would be a HUGE job so I am considering going with 108 mbps dual 802.11G bridges throughout the house.
I use modded xboxes as media centers that pull media from a file server that will be upstairs. I also transfer large ammounts of data (~5GB at a time) to and from these xboxen.
I do not plan on going with Gigabit ethernet anytime soon. 100Mb is fine for me.
What would you do if you were in my situation? Is the 108mbps wirless actually as fast as a 100mbps ethernet?
Can anyone suggest a good, affordable 108mbps wireless solution?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give!
I use modded xboxes as media centers that pull media from a file server that will be upstairs. I also transfer large ammounts of data (~5GB at a time) to and from these xboxen.
I do not plan on going with Gigabit ethernet anytime soon. 100Mb is fine for me.
What would you do if you were in my situation? Is the 108mbps wirless actually as fast as a 100mbps ethernet?
Can anyone suggest a good, affordable 108mbps wireless solution?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give!
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Comments
On 108mbps wireless, you should expect a practical maximum 5 megs/second, which is half that of the practical BASE100.
Wired is way faster and also more reliable than wireless.
Thanks for the info guys.
Time to move to plan B…
Just as soon as I formulate it.
Im thinking ill just run them along the baseboards, and over the doors. Ittl be fugly, and I'll have to hear a LOT of nagging from the girlfriend, but Im used to the nagging, and it will be worth it in the end im sure.
Find some good bulk CAT-6 cabling, having a dedicated cableshop nearby is ideal, but not likely, unless you're near the New Britain Turnpike in Connecticut. Buy a 500' or 1000' spool-less box of cable. Or take the risk with over-specced Cat-5e, which may be able to run gigbit over copper... but I'd reccomend just jumping at the tighter twisted Cat-6.
Buy a crimp tool, if you don't have one already, and some RJ-45 connectors. Once you've got all this, it's easy to walk you through the crimp, but it's (from looking at the contacts, left to right: White/Orange, Orange, White/Green, Blue, White/Blue, Green, White/Brown, Brown)(T-568B).
Now you've got yourself up to $100 of wired networking supplies, head over to CDW.com and buy the appropriate Gigabit over Copper switch, if you're just doing home networking, get an unmanaged 8-port for ~$80. ($10/port unmanaged, $20/port managed seems to be the standard of late).
Now you're up to $200, and we'll assume you've already got your WAN connection taken care of, at least through the router (if not, I'm reccomending a Netgear FVS318 Cable/DSL VPN Firewall Router ($100 from CDW)). Just connect that to the switch (make sure the switch you got was 10/100/1000 autosensing).
Take some time to practice making both straight-through and cross-over cables, and test the connection with some gigabit NICs. (I think $45/each maximum).
So, you've got up to $400 in total costs, and a network that can grow like mad, handle fibre-to-the-curb and more. Also, spend the $20 in drillbits, and the few hours in time, and drill through the walls, hide your cables, and make the whole setup nice & neat... remember, it's easier to do this before you're done unpacking. (Leave enough cable to go around the perimiter of the room you're leaving it in, just in case)
Badda-Bing Badda-Boom Badda-Bam.
Wireless is cool, and your X-Boxes will still be limited to their NIC speed, but now you're flexible.
My $0.02
Unless you've got the worst Cat-5 ever, in which case, you'll need a repeater there... and that just gets bad.
400$ is a tad over my budget currently, but I have a couple 100mbps routers to use for now. Gigabit would be SWEET, but overkill for me right now.
My only concern is the walls in the house are plaster (with wooden planks) not drywall, and they are not hollow at all. So the drilling could be a major chore. On top of that the celings are like curved, so having holes drilled in them would look ugly....Maybe I could run the cables outside the house. Like drill the hole from my main computer room upstairs. Run the cable outside to the ground floor, and back in that way.
I dont know... a lot of work ahead of me I guess.
Thanks for the suggestions!
It was originally believed that CAT6 is required for gig-e over copper, however category 5 is all that is required. CAT6 is good if you need really long lengths, and the increased number of twists/inch help to reduce attenuation and loss.
I beleive the use of the additional free pairs in the ethernet cable allows for increased data bit rate, without the need for much higher frequency transmission.
Cat-6 is a minimum spec, if your cable is made by a company that follows only the minimum spec, Cat-6 is required for gigabit over copper (from here on GoC). However, most cable manufacturers make their cable a good chunk above specs. This means that "typical" Cat-5 can run GoC for short runs. Typical Cat-5e (a higher spec) can run GoC over practical distances (up to around 50m). Cat-6 is guarenteed to run GoC up to around 100m. If you're looking at this from a price performance curve, buy Cat-5e, there's a chance it won't do GoC, but it probably will.
As to plaster walls, yeah, they are a major chore, I've done a few houses with them before. As you've already got your router, I'd still reccomend a $80 10/100/1000 8-Port Unmanaged GoC switch. Given that 8 port 10/100 would be ~$40, you're not paying too much more, and it can't hurt past that extra $40.
One thing I would do, before I setup 802.11g would be to check the signal strengths for 802.11b, or any 2.4GHz Spread Sectrum wireless. I can't recall ever having put in wireless in a plaster-walled house, I know drywall attenuates the singal pretty rapidly, but can generally be managed.
Now, I've also never heard of dual 802.11g, but unless it's a manufacturer spec, I'm not sure how the IEEE 802.11g spec allows for it. 802.11g uses the entire frequency range of 802.11b, all at once. So instead of the 14 802.11b channels (11 usable in the US), you get one big mish-mash of a 802.11g channel.
I'd check the propigation of something in the 2.4 range in your house, even just subjective tests with two laptops, or a 2.4GHz phone... Because you might want to try 802.11a. I realize it's an older spec, but it runs up at the 5.8GHz range, and might be a very good fit for a plaster-walled house. The plus side to being in the 5.8GHz band is that there are (at least, I can't recall right now) 3 non-overlapping channels, which can each run 56mbps. (802.11g's speed). This leaves you with expansion options.
So, check and see, if 2.4 runs nice and clear, like it would out on your driveway or such, go with g, it's a well known widely used spec. I'm a big proponent of 802.11a, because the signal dies very quickly with exterior walls, and 5.8GHz equipment is a bit more expensive than 2.4GHz equipment, and I'm a data privacy freak on my wireless.
Give it a try, you can do any of these options, even drilling through the plaster isn't horrible, just time consuming, and messy (having a shopvac ON near the drill-hole as you drill is a *good* idea). Also, I do advocate having the gigabit switch anyway, it's a plus side for bringing to LANs, or for when you're doing large file copies, just bring your terminals to the switch.
Can you tell I'm on my 4th year of study @ http://it.rit.edu in the Applied Networking and Systems Administration major?
Plenum, if you're not familiar with it, is a different jacket on the cable than normal PVC, it just means that when it burns, it doesn't give off toxic fumes, and should (should) hold up better to a fire. It also holds up better to temperatures and UV exposure most of the time.
The only time I would use wireless is for casual internet browsing.
i'm sure 20 years from now, wireless technology will not be the same as of today.