I just moved into a 100 year old house and my first home project was wiring the whole thing for ethernet, resulting in a funny situation where my house has gigabit ethernet cables running past the original knob and tube wiring in the attic.
In this realm, something I’m going to be doing some time soon is running ethernet through to the various rooms of my home, because it lacks this wiring despite being built in the 00s with a fiber connection being part of the original plan.
While I don’t yet have a professional’s opinion, this is likely to be somewhat involved and expensive as it seems that walls will need to be cut open and in one place, floorboards pulled up. It could turn out that some of the existing wiring has conduits that could be used but I’m not betting on it.
When I had work done in my house I just made sure that they knew that before they boarded up a particular ceiling I needed to run a cable. In the end we all ran the cable together, and now I have a 1Gb/s Ethernet connection to my office.
I live in a house nearing 20 years old, and was incredibly pleased when I moved in and realized that all the phone jacks in this house were backed by CAT5, and if I was willing to invest the time (which I am), I could have at least one Ethernet jack in each room, and a pair channeled up to the attic as well. My only regret was they stripped way more than needed and didn't leave a lot of wire available, but enough that I could terminate and add a keystone jack that will last past my needs. Or so I thought until I learned that my ISP offers 2.5GBps to the house.
> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous
How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
Back in 99 my mom was building a new townhouse. I had them run cat-5 everywhere. I also had them run a 3" stack down the utility wall.
The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots.
We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived.
I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
I suspect the biggest barrier to most homeowners running Ethernet besides not knowing that it’s not that difficult is insulated walls. Running some cables through walls without insulation to the attic and making some drops is not problem, but if you have insulation in the way the job is a lot more difficult.
I'm so glad that in my country we build houses with ducts for cables, with two separate duct networks (one for AC power, and one for "telephony"), when it comes time to change technology we just push those spring-tipped cable guides through the ducts and then pull the new wire (or even just use the old outdated wire as a guide to pull the new one). I've installed Ethernet cables and even replaced AC wire (to a wider gouge or more phases) on rentals with no need for any McGyver shenanigans.
Dont try to future proof you house with ethernet, fiber or any other cable. Install pull tubes, plastic pipes and passthroughs for pulling whatever cable is the new standard of the time. A house with a crawlspace and some riser tubes to upstairs rooms, or one big tube to an attic space, is far easier to upgrade than one with cat-9 outlets permanently baked into the walls.
Was going to post the same thing. I had a new construction townhouse in the Bay Area that had Ethernet. The max speed was either 10 or 100 Mbps depending on which jack was used. Opened up the jacks to discover that the cables were stripped of the jacket for at least 6 inches, the twisted pairs were untwisted and this mess was jammed into the wall behind the jack. At every single location. The worst offender wouldn't connect at all. That had a foot of jacket stripped off. Re-crimping all the jacks made everything work at 1 gigabit.
In summary, general tradespeople don't know how to install Ethernet.
I recently did some renovation work and the house had unused telephone (and COAX cable) wiring running to most rooms. Decided they would probably remain unused forever, so I replaced everything with cat6. You can usually use the old cables to pull through the new one. It's a bit of a chore and may require some specialised tooling for certain outlet brands/types, but it's so nice to just have ethernet outlets everywhere.
OG Cat 5 (non-e) I take it? That is such a pain to redo, I rewired some of that myself and it was a drag. If my job weren't being the literal network guy I probably would have stuck with just using Wi-Fi too!
I'm moving into my new home (which was built in 1962) in the next month or two. My plan is to run cat 6 throughout, before I get the bulk of my stuff/furniture in. Hopefully I won't need to smash into too many walls but there will be a few. Definitely worth it in the long run though.
I have a fairly modern house (built mid 2000's) but for some reason wasn't built with ethernet; what was there was phone and coax cable lines, going through these yellow PVC tubes embedded in the wall.
In theory it would be a matter of tying an ethernet cable to an existing coax cable and pull through, but in practice, eek. I don't believe those lines are continuous, or there may be debris or kinks in it somewhere in the wall. In the end it took an electrician half an hour and an improvised cable pump to get it through.
My thoughts exactly. I could have used this article when I was researching to wire my whole house for CAT5 25 years ago. I moved house last month and put in a mesh network. It felt far too easy!
A living legend. Ethernet was groundbreaking...I have memories of helping my dad wire our house, we bought like 400ft of cable, a wire stripper, and a ton of RJ45 plugs and customized them to the perfect length. Hardwired high speed gaming, video production, on stage audio monitors, so many things benefited and are still used today. RIP.
It's not that simple everywhere, We have brick walls, replacing cables means lot of dust and repairing those opened walls... provided you don't damage anything already there.
So here I'm feeling adventurous for pushing 10 GbE over a run of Cat5E for the next decade or more.
Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!
OP could almost be describing my house. New construction, coax to every room, no ethernet. And the builder specifically warned me not to try to use the existing coax to pull a new drop because it's all filled with fireproof foam/insulation stuff.
I just moved into a 100 year old house and my first home project was wiring the whole thing for ethernet, resulting in a funny situation where my house has gigabit ethernet cables running past the original knob and tube wiring in the attic.
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