Just had a load of building work done on my house, and while everything was ripped about I've laid cat5e cable all over the place.
Phone line terminates on wall in garage. I've run network cable in pairs from this point to sockets around the house.
At the moment I want to connect up my Humax Freesat box (for Iplayer), link xbox360 to PC, internet radio. Don't understand what I can and can't do, streaming music and video would be great.
From the research I've done I'm thinking I need to connect my O2 wireless box (has 4 wired ethernet ports) to a switch like this:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/50859
This then gives me 11 (assuming 8 port switch) free ports: connect PC to one and others to sockets around the house to use for internet radio, xbox etc.
This right?
Any good advice? Things to avoid? Or links to idiot's guides: a trawl of t'interent has left my head spinning!!
Dave
Sockets around house are cabled back to a central point, right? So at that point you havea load of sockets. And remote sockets have numbers that correspomd to the central collection. So if you plug something into point 1, you know where that is cabled to?
if so, yes, connect the corresponding poit tot switch and you have local networking.
O2 box is broadband router? If so cable from the blue box to the O2 box - blue (Netgear) box may well have Uplink port clearly marked, that's fror switch-switch connectivity. Doing this costs a port on both boxes, so an 8 port switch and 4 port router connected have a total of 10 free ports, but the remaining devices can go pretty much anywhere in terms of connectivity
make sense?
Yep, you will need one of those, yes it will give you 11 ports (4+8-1(uplink)).
Keep it in a place that has some ventilation, switches/routers don't like getting too hot.. Well mine slows down when over 32°C and then grinds to a halt.
Couple of tips; When laying cables:
do not run them parallel to power cables, if so, make sure they are over 3" away.
do not run them anywhere near any flourescent lights, they create a lot of interference
cross over at 90° to any power cables to avoid interference
label everything (not too much of a problem as the switch lights up when a device is connected)
I've just finished, well about a month ago, fitting network cables all across the house, worked out at about 800m of network cables!
A patch bay would also be good, would make re-routing things a lot easier, but its not essential.
Phone line terminates on wall in garage. I've run network cable in pairs from this point to sockets around the house.
d'oh - missed that sorry.
as long as the cables are labelled, you'll be fine
Thanks guys.
Yep: sockets around the house all connect back to the garage wall.
Bringing it back to bikes its a hub and spoke layout. All numbered up so I know what goes where. O2 box is a broadband router (AFAIK!)
One more question: is it worth getting a gigabit switch: would cost about £75 more for a 16 port switch: will I get any benefits?
Dave
Hi Dave
I personally would go for gigabit. The benefits will be for device-to-device transfer as opposed (at the mo) to device-to-internet. This would be useful for streaming films, filesharing etc.
Obviously the devices you connect to must also have gigabit ports to get the full benefit (most PCs do these days, the PS3 does, dunno about X-box).
Adam
You're on the right track. To greatly reduce the amount of cable I needed I used a spoke arrangement downstairs into a simple 8 port switch, a single calbe running upstairs into the broadband router (6 ports) in another spoke arrangement upstairs.
It's worth putting your broadband router as close as possible to the BT Master socket (where the phone line comes into your house) rather than on an extension - it's not clear from your description whether this is what you are connecting to in your garage or not. The quality/speed of your Internet connection can degrade significantly if you're running the phone line across internal cabling. To run the output of the router (network cable) across the same distance (if necessary to reach your switch) should have a much smaller impact.
-m- food for thought.
Main BT cable terminates ion our loft: connected up to 'extension' telephone cable there (builder just wrapped the individual wires round each other) which runs down to the BT Master socket very near my garage.
I'd hoped to move the Master socket to the garage (am I not supposed to??).
Guess I'm going to be losing some strength in the extension cable: what's the best way of making the connection between the loft and garage?
Dave
I would have used small patch panel in garage, screwfix sell them
