I missed that page

It's not bad really for custom cables, but if you could arrange things to use their standard lengths it becomes quite attractive for outside buildings... no worries about putting the network and mains cables down the same duct for one thing!

Before I retired, all our buildings at AWE were flood-wired with fibre, and I remembered that we bypassed wired Ethernet completely and used fibre NICs in the PCs:

http://www.universalnetworks.co.uk/product.htm?produ...

Depending what you wanted to do, might well be worth considering.

Yeap that is more the price, and experience suggests that you have to make sure you use matched pairs i.e. same converter at each end

Where it starts to make sense is when pushing uncompressed video around over fibre, and can piggyback ethernet on top of this

I missed this post first time around. I'd guess the fibre would be indifferent to the speed (in other words I don't know) so why not install the fibre and upgrade speeds as price falls.

Because the tools\skills needed to terminate fibre and the difficulty and cost of media converters\fibre NICs is beyond the average joe? CAT5 is, by comparison, a doddle and 100Mbps is more than enough for the vast majority of people.

At the moment, the average person can put together a network that's good enough for their needs using a bunch of patchleads into their ISP-supplied router, and use wireless \powerline for the rest. It's a very small group of people that go to the expense and upheaval of installing any structured cabling.

So can I just confirm: cat5e is enough to handle gigabit ethernet which is as much as I'm likely to need for home networking and media streaming, even hi-def video?

Should be fine with cat5e

Cat6 can be harder to work with, due to central core, which helps to space pairs, and gives it the ability to manage 10Gbps.

Unless you're doing something truly special there, yes.

Bluray is 1920�1080 (1080p) - 40.0Mbps
DVD is 720�480/720�576 (480i/576i) - 9.8Mbps

(http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/)

To add, HD video is likely to be at most 30Mbps even if streaming off of a home video server.

The raw HD footage used in TV edit suites is pretty much a maximum of ~220Mbps. If you were trying to push around totally raw and uncompressed 1080p video then at 1.6Gbps fibre would make sense.

If the plan is to send HDMI video over the Ethernet, then you can get converters that will do this.

I have large quantities of cat5e around my house, some in bundles, some going near power circuits or alarm cables. I have gigabit managed switch and I can manage to transfer data from my laptop via the switch to a desktop through around 40m of cable. They indicate a Gigabit connection and I achieve well over 700Mbps for data transfer.