Home network pics

After posting quite a few times in this forum and getting loads of advice and help from you guys, I've decided to post a few pics and provide a few details of my experience setting it all up.

Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3

I've got 7 pairs of cat5e cabled in each of 3 bedrooms, one pair in each of two larger bedrooms near the TV point, and 2 pairs in the smallest bedroom-cum-office, one pair beside the BT phone point and 2 pairs in the lounge either side of the fireplace, one side where the TV lives. That hopefully covers most eventualities. The cabling node-zero is in the garage where they're all terminated at a patch panel as you can see in the pics.

My wife wasn't keen on having the ADSL router next to the telephone so I cut a small length off one end of the RJ11 cable and fitted an RJ45 plug at the other end, and did the same with the remaining piece of the ADSL router cable. You can see from the first pic (bit blurry I know) that I've connected the filtered ADSL signal directly into an RJ45 socket, then at the patch panel end, I've patched that to one of the sockets in the office into which I've plugged the other RJ11-RJ45 cable and then plugged that into the router. There's a slight drop in broadband speed, but the router is now out of the way and I can site it anywhere there's an RJ45 socket. You can see in the patch panel pic where port 3 is patched straight into port 10. All the other ports are patched into a 5 port Netgear switch which I'll probably replace with an 8 or 16 port switch as needs dictate in future.

I haven't yet tested the network throughput but Windows reports it as gigabit.

I did wonder about leaving plenty of slack cable in case the position of the patch panel needs to change when we get work done in the house (knocking through into the garage possibly) so I've left a few metres on each cable and coiled them up as neat as possible before terminating on the patch panel. There's cable routed in trunking coming from above the garage and through the wall near ground-level from the downstairs rooms.

As I said, I had lots of advice from other's in this forum but the one piece of advice I can give is that when terminting the cables at either end, get a decent quality IDC punchdown tool and a decent cable stripper - it'll make life much eaiser. Also, the IDC terminals on the patch panel are at right angles and the panel is mounted in a hinged case to make life easier when working on the terminations.

The backboxes I specified for the RJ45 faceplates are 35mm deep - if you;re getting an electrician to fit those, make sure they use a shorter screw to fix it to the brickwork (if solid wall), otherwise the screw might blow the plaster on the wall in the adjoining room (as happened to me). The RJ45 modules I used were low profile that were easier to work with compared with other modules, and they were fairly cheap and good quality.

All in all I'm pleased with it, especially as I did the planning and termination myself, but my thanks to all those who offered advice and feedback, hopefully I'll be able to do the same for any future home network builders.

All good advice and you have found that perennial problem drilling right through a brick into plaster!

These days if the installation is not load bearing and for back boxes it is not, and hopefully the hole cut was exactly teh tight size anyway rather than use screws there is a better option:

UniBond/Henkel - No More Nails
Evo-Stick - Sticks Like Sh*t

Select the right version - give it time to cure and job done, no trying to drill holes in the right place or fiddling to get the box square. The adhesives remain workable and will also remove unevenness.

In reply to a post by MHC:

All good advice and you have found that perennial problem drilling right through a brick into plaster!

These days if the installation is not load bearing and for back boxes it is not, and hopefully the hole cut was exactly teh tight size anyway rather than use screws there is a better option:

UniBond/Henkel - No More Nails
Evo-Stick - Sticks Like Sh*t

Select the right version - give it time to cure and job done, no trying to drill holes in the right place or fiddling to get the box square. The adhesives remain workable and will also remove unevenness.

But if for some reason you need to remove the backbox, you'll have the glue to contend with rather than just a screw or two.

Congratulations! That installation is (almost) perfect apart from;

In reply to a post by joconnell:

You can see from the first pic (bit blurry I know) that I've connected the filtered ADSL signal directly into an RJ45 socket, then at the patch panel end, I've patched that to one of the sockets in the office into which I've plugged the other RJ11-RJ45 cable and then plugged that into the router.

It looks as though you have a NTE5 with a dangly filter. YUK!!

If that is a NTE5, and it's where the telephone line enters the premises, you should have a filtered faceplate.

Apart from looking more aesthetically pleasing than a dangly filter, it has the added benefit of isolating your extension wiring (if any) from the ADSL signal, thus obviating the requirement for dangly filters at telephone extension sockets.

Before you purchase a filtered faceplate, read this (especially the link provided by Tacitus).
There is more than 1 filtered faceplate. Active components and cheap Chinese electrolytic capacitors are sources of premature failure. Only 1 filtered faceplate contains neither... Choose wisely!

In reply to a post by joconnell:

All in all I'm pleased with it, especially as I did the planning and termination myself...

You should be well-chuffed. It looks great (apart from the dangly filter).

JC

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

...Only 1 filtered faceplate contains neither...

**** CORRECTION ****
Apart from the Pressac, and despite its external appearance resembling a faceplate with active components and cheap Chinese electrolytic capacitors, it appears that the Austin Taylor faceplate also contains neither...

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

If that is a NTE5, and it's where the telephone line enters the premises, you should have a filtered faceplate.

Apart from looking more aesthetically pleasing than a dangly filter, it has the added benefit of isolating your extension wiring (if any) from the ADSL signal, thus obviating the requirement for dangly filters at telephone extension sockets.

Before you purchase a filtered faceplate, read this (especially the link provided by Tacitus).
There is more than 1 filtered faceplate. Active components and cheap Chinese electrolytic capacitors are sources of premature failure. Only 1 filtered faceplate contains neither... Choose wisely!

Thanks for the very useful info about the faceplates. Yes, I will be getting a faceplate, in fact I tried fitting a BT one that I brought with me from my last house but it wouldn't tighten, but then I think the threads on the screws were stripped from fitting it in an old-style BT faceplate in my previous house.

I'll take a look at the Pressac and Austin Taylor/Solwise faceplates

Someone linked to this thread from a recent thread so I'm taking the opportunity to update it.

I did end up replacing the master socket faceplate with an Austin-Taylor one which made the ADSL connection much tidier, but towards the end of last year I noticed a shiny new green cabinet had popped up opposite my local BT cabinet - FTTC had finally arrived at my local exchange so I upgraded my Plusnet service and the BT OR guy fitted a rather fat VDSL faceplate (I kept the Austin-Taylor ADSL plate) which connects to a BT Openreach modem and then from that to my Billion 7800N router via the patch panel as previously.

As usual my wife moaned about the ugly-white-box-with-green-blinking-lights stuck near the telephone socket so I moved it to the office and connected it to the router over the cat5 cabling via the patch panel. There's no noticeable performance difference in doing this, the only drag is that it uses up valuable RJ45 sockets.

For any future network cabling work, I'll be installing 4 sockets in certain parts of the house for the purpose of routing broadband and/or any other type of non-network signal.

In reply to a post by joconnell:

I've got 7 pairs of cat5e cabled in each of 3 bedrooms, one pair in each of two larger bedrooms near the TV point, and 2 pairs in the smallest bedroom-cum-office, one pair beside the BT phone point and 2 pairs in the lounge either side of the fireplace, one side where the TV lives. That hopefully covers most eventualities.

Pah, only CAT5?

I'm running CAT6.

Nice setup though.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

In reply to a post by joconnell:

I've got 7 pairs of cat5e cabled in each of 3 bedrooms, one pair in each of two larger bedrooms near the TV point, and 2 pairs in the smallest bedroom-cum-office, one pair beside the BT phone point and 2 pairs in the lounge either side of the fireplace, one side where the TV lives. That hopefully covers most eventualities.

Pah, only CAT5?

I'm running CAT6.

Nice setup though.

When I can justify paying the extra premium for cat6 and put up with it being more difficult to work with, then I'll use cat6

Heavy-Duty VELCRO!