Does anyone know about these, I have heard a bit about them but not sure of the application or benefits. We are doing a major renovation so an optimum time to put something in, but I find we can stream to multiple devices in hD without cables, so not sue what I would do with them.

Networking can very quickly become complicated…. But….

From personal experience, I rewired my old house during extension work by putting an ethernet socket(s) beside every TV outlets in every room and ran all cables to a cheapish gigabit switch in the attic. The broadband router was then connected to the switch so all sockets had direct access to other devices on the network and to the Internet. It was a great setup and worked very well especially with the apple TV streaming stuff from the pc whilst the sky box downloaded catchup from the net. It freed up the wireless network for the ipads and phones etc.

I’ve since moved and don’t have a wired network in the house. It all runs through wireless and at times becomes choppy when multiple devices are fighting for data.

I’m going to go down the powering route, but ideally I would have ethernet wired networks is I could.

Cat5e is fine for gigabit speeds too.

I’d run cables above wifi given the opportunity although it sure does look to get pretty complicated when you are dealing with video transmission and not just internet (on a large scale).
Being that HD video over wifi can run upwards of 300gb/hr of em exposure that’s banned in schools.. I opted out.

I’ve worked in a bunch of unfinished high end homes that have been pre wired for hdmi over cat5 as well as Ethernet etc.. 2-4 cat5 cables per room all run to the basement/server room.
The cost must be significant once you add all the adapters not just the cable cost. One of the biggest installs the owner ran out of money and the wired install never got finished. They threw in a wifi solution for full house connectivity and it was super unreliable.

Anyway, my 70’s home that I’ve renovated over the last 5 years has had cat5 run whenever I’ve had the opportunity. I can run hdmi over cat5 from my living room to bedroom if I wish, but +30quid an end for the adapters means I haven’t finished that off.. but no real need for me as yet.

I run CAT5 cable whenever I have the floor boards up. Most isn’t terminated, but where I don’t get good Wifi coverage, I’ve put a socket on the end of the cable and use that.

I’ve just done what fisha described to my house but in cat 6 cable as it doesn’t cost much more than 5e and provides a bit more future proofing. Mines a 30s house with solid walls so the WiFi coverage isn’t very good (stuttery streaams and so on) so having TV’s ect on wired connections works well

When we did our house renovation we ran 2 x cat5e cables from each room to the home hub/router thing.
Our TV is hard-wired (rather than WIFI) and we have faultless HD Streaming via a 80mb Virgin broadband connection.
I try to use cabled connections where possible, to keep the WIFI free for mobile devices.

thanks, I think I will put some in to wire up to TVs then etc

Ta

While you’re at it, consider wiring for a couple of extra access points if your wifi coverage isn’t great. Most decent APs can be powered over ethernet so you just have a box at the far end, no power brick needed. Same goes for security cameras.

I’d also stick in wiring for an alarm system if you have the chance.

and a self destruct system…

I’ve just done what fisha described to my house but in cat 6 cable as it doesn’t cost much more than 5e and provides a bit more future proofing.

Sure I’ve read it somewhere, can’t remember the details but sure it was something like running cat6 cables into a cat5 sockets was actually worse performer than straight cat5 thoughout.

Can’t imagine why. The sockets look identical, the punchdown is identical. The difference between Cat5 and 6 is that 6 has a central plastic cross piece that maintains the separation between the twisted pairs.

We’ve retrofitted a cat5e “network” into our place. It looks a bit scrappy as it’s external. But we now have 100% uptime on all the hardwired devices (server, NAS, couple of Desktops, Playstation) and three well spaced, wired wifi access points using the same ID/password.
So all the wireless devices (phones, tablets, laptops, Wii, pi, chromecast) have almost 100% uptime as well, with very good speed as well. (Wife’s phone is the only thing that has noticeable issues, nothing else drops signal for more than a fraction of a second).
We can stream anything anywhere in the house. Full HD and surround sound.

If the place ever needs rewiring i will have no hesitation in paying the extra to have a 5e (or 6) network put in.