[thechat] Building a New House

[William Anderson]

Martin Burns wrote:
> On 7 Jun 2006, at 16:14, Canfield, Joel wrote:
> 
>>> Never heard of Mike King nor CAT5. I believe I've heard of London,
>>> however. :)
>> CAT5 is the obsolete ethernet cabling. You can still find CATegory 5e
>> (Extended) some places but most cabling sold now in the US is CAT6.
> 
> 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".  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!).

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 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.  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.

-- 
_ __/|  William Anderson      |  Tim: Your cheese game is strong.
\`O_o'  neuro at well dot com | Zane: My cheese game. It's all about the
=(_ _)= http://neuro.me.uk/   |       cheese platter.
   U  - Thhbt! GPG 0xFA5F1100 | -- Tim Westwood, Zane Lowe, R1, Dec 2005