The trimmers on decent IDCs are fine - my two are 20 years old and still going strong. They were, in those days, around £20-25 each although the company provided mine!

In reply to a post by MHC:

The trimmers on decent IDCs are fine - my two are 20 years old and still going strong. They were, in those days, around £20-25 each although the company provided mine!

I cautioned the use of the built-in trimmers because if you have the punchdown tool the wrong way around, you can punch down and end up cutting your connection, then you gotta start again

OK. Still got a couple of rooms to terminate in but the panel is done and switch installed.
Once I have the rooms finished I'll move the router up into the cabinet.
Got one PC connected which is reporting 1Gbps connection so looking good so far!

Had a bit of a scare with the first test with my tester. I've run 12 cables so far and put red tape on each end with numbers so I could keep track.
Tester showed no lights at all. Seems I managed to end up with two number 5 cables

Thanks to you both for the tips and advice.

Link to pic

Looking good ... you can also get bolt in shelves for 19" racks - use one to stand the router on, inside the cabinet.

Very smart and tidy

I'm sure it's been mentioned already, but you can patch your router's RJ11 WAN cable over the cat5 cabling.

What switch is that?

In reply to a post by joconnell:

Very smart and tidy

I'm sure it's been mentioned already, but you can patch your router's RJ11 WAN cable over the cat5 cabling.

What switch is that?

Running the WAN over cat5e was mentioned before when I suggested putting two cables to each.

The switch looks like Cisco Small Business SG 100-16 - unmanaged and possibly the old Linksys repackaged and rebadged,

Yep. Got it from here after looking at MHC's earlier link.

I went with it over the Zyxel that was mentioned as I could see that it came with mounting/extension brackets for the rack.

Re the router I am taking the advice given
I ran 4 cables down to the modem so will link the cat5 modem output into one of the ports, through the patch panel and to the router WAN port, then router LAN back to switch.
I've run at least 2 cables to each room.

Thanks

Got all the gear (apart from switch) from Kenable by the way.
Very impressed with their service and delivery updates.
Got a 1 hour delivery slot mail on the morning of delivery.

Hi,
I am going through the same process as the current forum discussion with a house renovation. Have run CAT6 through the house and am currently installing the patch panels, Zyxel switches and have just bought a Linksys E4200 router. My question is around the modem, I have been running a 3COM 11g modem / router until now, but I am unsure whether this would need to be upgraded as I don't want it to become the bottleneck in the system. If using the 3COM then I would need to disable the wireless router part of it but suspect it would be better to get a dedicated modem?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks Adam

If the broadband you receive is slower than what the modem can handle then can continue to use that.

The utility of gigabit in the home comes when you start streaming video between machines on your own network.

To avoid the modem being a bottleneck, just take one port from it to connect to a Gigabit switch.

Wireless - best bet is to situate a G/N wireless access point in the room where you will be using wireless, to give the best possible speeds.

With the kit you have now - you have two routers, which may complicate things for people who are encountering networks for the first time, hence why I suggest to add faster wireless buy a wireless access point.