[thechat] Building a New House

[Martin Burns]

On 8 Jun 2006, at 07:59, William Anderson wrote:

>> Nah, that's hype that is. Unless you're running a data centre in your
>> house
>> (in which case, up the requirement for aircon), CAT5 is plenty. Its
>> capacity
>> and packet loss is way better than anything WiFi will deliver.
>
> Crap.  That's like saying "yeah, there's no need for this  
> newfangled digital
> telly nonsense, I'm quite happy with an analogue aerial and TV,  
> I'll never
> need anything more, it'll last for ages".

Well exempting situations where the old stuff will be actually  
disabled (as
per analogue TV), that statement is actually valid. For the vast  
majority
of purposes, analogue TV *is* fine. Same with analogue Radio - I  
currently
see no need to go for DAB when I get FM reception just fine thanks.

> Future proofing is very easy to
> do when you're doing an initial fit-out, and there's no real merit to
> rolling out old technology unless you're a cheapskate (not pointing  
> at you,
> Martin!).

Yeah, but you know I am one :-p

While you're right if there's no significant cost difference, that's  
not at all the
same as "Don't touch the existing stuff, it's crap"

After all, we're none of us using IPv6, are we..? No, because IPv4 is  
fine for
all practical purposes. And no matter how often my PFY at work sings the
praises of his sooperdooper phone, my 2.5yo Nokia makes calls just fine.

> Go for Cat 5e or 6 up front, and you'll save yourself pain in the  
> future if
> you decide to go GigE.  You may not initially want this per host or  
> device
> (GigE is still rare in devices outside laptops, servers and top-line
> desktops), but trunking with GigE makes a lot of sense, especially  
> if you
> have a lot of different 100 meg devices in different rooms and have  
> switches
> on either end.

And the actual qualitative difference you'll notice is..?  
Particularly when the
most common network activity depends on the bottleneck of *DSL.

> And since when did wifi have packet loss greater than that over  
> copper?
> I've been using 802.11b in here for years and nary had problems.

That's *exactly my point*. 802.11b has a significantly lower  
bandwidth than
copper, even when reception is perfect. And yet, for most practical  
purposes,
it's *good enough* that you don't really notice.

> A couple
> of well-placed 802.11g bridges can be very useful in providing trunks
> between points in a home where cable just can't go, and it's easily
> upgradable to 802.11n when it becomes ratified.

And more importantly, gives you vast flexibility in placing of  
network enabled
devices.

Cheers
Martin

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