atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Need professional advice fast

Rather than chastise someone with 40 years' experience, in every facet of the industry, I would respectfully recommend that you take one thing into consideration (and then I promise never to offer any more advice to you or any other member):

In the case of one Cat3 and one Cat5 to a location, tell me how to get either two LAN devices (PC's, peripherals. printers, scanners) installed where there was only one device originally spec'd, or how to provide maintenance (read: immediate remediation) redundancy in the event that the one Cat5e fails? (Please exclude adding a switch as one of your answers.)

People a lot smarter than I, from the maligned TIA to the venerated Bell Laboratories, have determined what various minimum standards should be. I don't argue with them, I just do what they suggest, within reason and ability. It is a policy that has served me well as I enter my fifth decade of customer service.

no problem at all , start with a 5 port swich and add as much as you like

I missed the dictum of no switch

why would you not use a switch , its a perfectly acceptable way to add devices

(Please exclude adding a switch as one of your answers.)

Why? That's exactly what is often done. I've installed single network jacks for large format printer/plotter/scanners only too find that they require two connections and the installer simply provided a mini-hub. Unless you are doing heavy duty data transfer it works fine.

Heck, ask Ed, he'll tell you how CAT3 works just fine for most data applications if you must. This is only a house and the usual use for a network is only to access the internet. Nothing tough about that.


I've seen houses where the owner got sucked into running fiber to every room. That was 6 or 7 years ago and it's still sitting there unused today.

-Hal


Been in the business for nearly 40 years too and that why...

When I bought my house (28 years ago) I ran 25 pair to .......some of the locations I needed it at. (Long story, fights with wife, etc., etc)

Anyway, there was no such thing as data in those days. So when I want to network my 106 year old monstrosity I picked pairs out of the 25 pair cable.

Considering I've got Cat2 and Cat 3 cable going to 25 pair cans I'm maybe getting 5-10MBS out of my wiring.

Well, my DSL runs at 3 MBS so that's not a problem and my data transfers take 5 minutes instead of 2 minutes.

I think I can live with it.

If I had to do it now I would home run a Cat 3, a Cat 5E/Cat6 and a quad shielded coax to every location. The Cat 3 of course would be 25 pair to handle my 1A2. I ain't giving that up.

Sam

Why would I exclude adding a switch?? it is a very reasonable answer. the cost of a switch is less then what I would charge for a cat5 drop in some cases.

Now to go a bit further...this is a house..not an office...if you have an office area in the house..sure run two cat5..heck run 3. I have cat5 to every room of my house...and I use..get ready..My wireless access point 90% of the time. So I now have a 12 port patch panel fully loaded and 2 lines plugged into it.Sure you can use cat5 for both voice and date, nothing wrong with it at all. For me it is a personal preference cat3 for voice, cat5 for data. have I used cat5 for voice...sure, and I have run data over cat3 in some cases?...you bet(thanks ED!). Guess what, it all works.

By the way the only place I ever needed more then 1 network connection was in my office..One for my PC and one for my print server....guess I am lucky that print server also has a 4 port switch built into it.

Skip also brought up a great point..if you can run conduit I would definitely do it, the you can add whatever you want, whenever you want.

Alina one more thing to think about..are you going to be installing flat panel TV's?

If so, where Are you going to put your cable/sat. box's..you may want to consider pre-wiring from that location to the tv locations as well.

Aline this should have been said earlier..

Welcome to the board


Feel free to PM me with any question you may have.

In home applications, I don't think extra switches would be a big problem. But there are issues to consider, when you have to:

1. More points-of-failure
2. Power provisioning for the switches (including backup and grounding)
3. Switch latency

For the above reassons, I generally prefer not to chain/cascade switches when I can. Ofcourse I'm speaking of business applications.

On a (slightly) different tack: what do you think about running video (cctv/catv/broadcast) over cat5e and using baluns? Never had to do this, is this a viable thing to offer a customer?

Perry

On a (slightly) different tack: what do you think about running video (cctv/catv/broadcast) over cat5e and using baluns? Never had to do this, is this a viable thing to offer a customer?

No. It could never be as good as using the proper coax. In a pinch where you couldn't run a new cable and you only had UTP give it a try. But it's definately not something I would use in an original installation.

Keep in mind though that there are network CCTV cameras that are made to work with CAT5. There are also converters (not baluns) that will put HDMI on two runs of CAT5e and is supposed to work very well to overcome the short distance limitation of HDMI.

-Hal

Yep installed a set about a week ago, they worked great

There is one problem that you can run into with adding chained switches/hubs to a network, probably is not an issue here. It occurs when on large networks where the time (including latency of the chained devices) for a packet to move end to end exceeds the retransmission delay for a collision. Stations on opposite ends of the cable will not see the collision and thus both transmit at the same time. The fix is a real router in the middle and proper sub-netting to define the collision domain to be each segment.

Also, even though it was written in the mid 90's do a seach for an article called "It's the Latency Stupid", since the principles still apply to all network devices and is one more reason for network performance issues.