[Closed] House Renovations - how to get internet everywhere!?

If you're ripping everything out then you'll need:

1. Where your Fibre terminates in your house you'll need your converter that converts it from Fibre to Ethernet.

2. A switch (and power) where all your cabled outlets are connected in the same place works best

3. Cables to every room you possibly can - you might as well do as many as you can for the incremental cost.

That means you can plug in whatever you want, if you need Wifi you can plug in access points and/or repeaters in those areas from any one of those end points.

Just save yourself a lot of bother and buy an Orbi.
http://amzn.eu/dxby9sT

We have wired cat6 everywhere and it's rubbish. It seems to have been installed by cowboys as gigabit at one end turns into 30mb at the other.

We have wired cat6 everywhere and it’s rubbish. It seems to have been installed by cowboys as gigabit at one end turns into 30mb at the other.

Just do it properly

CAT6 installed properly will give you a solid signal and speed all over the house. I'd rather have TV and other devices like that on wired rather than taking up the wifi bandwidth.

Basically what NZCol said

taking up the wifi bandwidth.

There's more than enough bandwidth to go round with any mesh system, especially with only two people in the house.

Also, I suspect a mesh system will be cheaper than chasing cables through walls.

Also, I suspect a mesh system will be cheaper than chasing cables through walls.

Unless

The place needs some electrical work doing, and is going to be turned upside down for central heating, so now seems like the only time to do it.

As for bandwidth what do you get through each of those? Having a solid backbone for anything heavy like TV, gaming etc makes a lot of sense and at CAT6 is massively future proof, I've worked in offices where the kit and cables cost peanuts and just lasts

As for bandwidth what do you get through each of those? Having a solid backbone for anything heavy like TV, gaming etc makes a lot of sense and at CAT6 is massively future proof, I’ve worked in offices where the kit and cables cost peanuts and just lasts

It's enough backhaul that I don't need to worry about it. I can be streaming 4k Netflix in the family room (wifi connection to satellite) and have a xbox playing battlefield in the lounge (wifi connected to main router).

In theory, you could use ethernet backhaul in a mesh system, just a couple of cables with well placed satellites.  That would make it a lot easier for your sparks to route the cables away from power cables etc which will affect performance.

Cheers all,

Should this be a job that the electrician doing the rewiring work could do (not sure if he’s an internet cable sort of guy) or should be just pay a bit more and get another specialists in?

Oooh.,.can someone tell me about 'orbi' please...

We've many dead spots in our house - router in the lounge fails to reach edges of the house...

I've tried wifi extenders - theyseem to just make '2 wifi zones' and the net drops out..

Orbi seems the fix? NO?

DrP

Sparky will be able to run CAT cable and terminate into sockets. Also have a think about TV as well, if you have Sky and want to share signals to other TVs via HDMI then either run long cable or take one of the twisted pair and put then in a separate socket (ethernet doesn't need them all). Then you can use converters at each end.

You will have a fibre modem that converts the fibre to copper and then some kind of router, they do not have to be in the same location if you have a copper connections elsewhere.

This is my fibre setup. In a hall cupboard. We haven't got structured cabling in here yet as its a flat and didn't come wired for it.

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Having some wired points is never a bad thing, in out house we have 8 in out TV area, 4 in the office and 4 in the bedrooms. All wired back to the loft where the phone line comes in and our router, switch and backup NAS drives are.

You have to decide the central point where they all wire back to, an office, broom / under stair cupboard, loft? This is where your router and switch will generally live.

If you have issues with wifi connectivity in other areas of the house, then you'll need to look at 'Meshed' wifi solutions, I believe Netgear, Linksys andGoogle and BT all have offerings in this space now.

Oooh.,.can someone tell me about ‘orbi’ please…

Fairly recent review:  https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/05/netgear-orbi-wifi-mesh-router-review/

In practice, our experience is very similar. We have a base station in a cupboard, a satellite on the first floor which has our Arlo and Hue hubs wired into it and we have a satellite in the garage.

The garage occasionally drops out but recovers very quickly.

The main selling point for me was the same wifi connection SSID throughout the house, garden & garage with no loss in signal as you hop from router to satellite.

Other flavours (Linksys, etc) are available.

I'm with Mike, you have the opportunity to do it once and do it well. Anyone who tells you wifi is better than CAT6 is frankly talking bollocks. It's quite likely in the next decade that most media will be at least 4K and will be consumed over the internet. As you already have a connection with the theoretical capacity to meet any reasonable future data demands and you have a sparky in rewiring anyway, just do it. Though you say you don't have kids now, you've also not written them off. 3-4 4k steams at once is an awful lot of data for wifi to handle, and as anyone with an old laptop will attest to: hardware demands are always increasing, even if all you do is browse the internet. Try using Facebook or STW on a 10 year old laptop and see what I mean. Even if you don't envisage your data use to increase much, you likely won't have much choice.

For the record, we have the Google wifi mesh system in our house. It's pretty good for light-medium use and suits us for now as we've just moved in and don't have an immediate need to be poking holes in walls for other purposes. Only place for the router was in a place that seems to have two external walls and a chimney breast between that location and the rest of the house, so no chance with just the router. But, if we have to get any other wiring done, we'll sure as hell be getting CAT6 installed at the same time. The great thing about the Google system is that you can wire each hotspot with CAT5/6 too so backhaul isn't limited by the shared data issues on the mesh network.

Crikey - all this seems so much hassle! We have Virgin fibre and their latest dual band router and it does the whole house (4 bed detached) without problems (one TV hard-wired as it is next to the router, another two using wifi and the kids have Kindles that they use to stream too. Never encountered any more than the occasional blip.

Just stick cat6 cable everywhere.

I'm sure some media installation company could quote you a kings ransom to install the longest words possible "mesh network with gigabit backhaul" but the reality is cat6 cable is so cheap we bin it after temporary jobs rather than bother coiling it up, terminals are pennies, and a cheap crimping tool is £12 (yes a nice one is £300+ but you're probably only going to put 20 ends on).

If it were me, I'd put cat6 to anywhere with a TV point, or likely to have a TV in the near future. I'd also put cable into any accessible cubby holes (airing cupboards, loft spaces, shoe cupboards, WC's) where you could conceivably hide wireless point in the future.

For the switch, get one that does PoE (power over ethernet), that way when you want to stick a wireless access point in the loft space above a room, or in a cupboard you can get a PoE one and not have to run seperate mains to it.

And accept that in 10 years when your future kids are old enough to question such things, that the ethernet connections in their rooms will look as outdated as wired multi room speaker systems fed from an enormous hi-fi in the living room!

Crikey – all this seems so much hassle! We have Virgin fibre and their latest dual band router and it does the whole house (4 bed detached) without problems (one TV hard-wired as it is next to the router, another two using wifi and the kids have Kindles that they use to stream too. Never encountered any more than the occasional blip.

Depends on your house construction, ours was built in the 70's by a builder who obviously didn't trust wood and/or want to pay for a carpenter.  Every internal wall is blockwork, and wi-fi of any frequency struggles to make it across the hall from study to livingroom!

As an IT bod, +1 on running Cat6 while you are renovating. You may find that new wireless is perfectly adiquate, but if it isn't, you'll be kicking yourself when you can't stream while someone else plays games, or you really want to put your home office desk where there's a wireless blackspot.

I’ve tried a load of different kit over the years including Apple Airport Extremes, BT Wi-fi homeplugs etc. but installed a BT mesh system last year - it’s called “BT whole home”.

Everything I tried before was a bit buggy - and the power line Wi-fi solution from BT slowed down the overall speed a lot.

The whole home system comprises a series of discs - I installed them in the roof space pointing “down” into the rooms below - zip tied to the roof joists.

To install them like this the OP just needs one decent Ethernet connection to the roof space and a few power points, or put one disc near the router and daisy chain the roof mounted discs from there.

This solution has worked extremely well for us - no loss of “speed” even with 3 discs in use. The whole set up cost £180 care of some cash back at Robert Dyas.

The BT whole home discs can also be connected via Ethernet and organise themselves that way too.

I've just clicked 'buy' on the Orbi...
I'm fed up of my kids winging about not getting Wifi in their rooms, and TBH out house has been extended and has brick walls - hopefully this'll fill my brain cells with lovely Wifi energy...

DrP

I stuck ethernet cables in when I had a major renovation must be nearly ten years ago now (1930s house with little wiring or plumbing).  The cable was cheap, switches not a great expense and it just works so I haven't given it another thought.  I can disconnect it or use wireless anytime I like but suspect the cable will be working faultlessly for a while yet

So get a sparky to install Cat6 yeah?

Funny how not one "IT bod" so far has even mentioned proper installation standards even in passing. Cat6 is more than just a cable and will never work properly unless it meets a lot of fairly exacting standards (probably the source of jimdublyou's problems). I was going to install it but decided it was a waste of time and I was better off with gigabit over Cat5 for the small amount I actually needed.

Frankly I doubt your average spark knows anything about Cat6, that's like asking the window cleaner to install your double glazing, they might both work with windows (or wires for the case in point) but they perform very different jobs.

So assuming I am too inept to do it myself, and sqirrelking thinks the sparky will make a fudge of things, does anyone have any recommendations of people/companies to ring in the Lancaster/Kendal area?

Thanks for the advise so far too, you’ve justified my insisting to Mrs BD that paying more to run cable about is a wise move!

Thanks

Here’s an idea, why not ask the sparkie if he’s done this before it will be cheaper....

‘we had our sparks do ours no bother.

As for SK he thinks cat 6 is beaning used on jimdublyou’s issue when it’s a WiFi back bone so take a pinch of salt...

As for SK he thinks cat 6 is beaning used on jimdublyou’s issue when it’s a WiFi back bone so take a pinch of salt…

We have wired cat6 everywhere and it’s rubbish. It seems to have been installed by cowboys as gigabit at one end turns into 30mb at the other.

Nah, he's right - It's an old (ish) house, it's difficult to install cat6 properly and the guys that did it have made a lot of mistakes.

Here’s an idea, why not ask the sparkie if he’s done this before it will be cheaper….

Or, ask him if he knows how to terminate each cable properly, if he's got the right equipment for testing it and if he actually bothers.

If you're not happy with his answers then maybe get a specialist in, otherwise you'll be paying for somebody to do a crap job.

Ah appolages I thought SK was referencing the WiFi drop outs. My error.

+1 for what @squirrelking said, he beat me to it.  I keep seeing people recommending CAT6 and CAT7 for this sort of job and it's daft.

There's very little point in running CAT6 in a domestic installation.  It's more expensive, more difficult to work with, and won't be a CAT6 installation anyway unless a) all your networking components are also CAT6 and b) it's installed by a professional structured cabling installation engineer.  You'd be better off spending the money on ducting.

Your average spark could probably terminate Ethernet cabling, or you could do it yourself even.  It's not a difficult job, it's something I'd cheerfully give to an apprentice after 30 seconds' training.  Doing it to CAT6 standard is an altogether different barrel of whelks.