Quote:
Originally Posted by corn18
My wife is taking care of those bits. Not skimping there, for sure.
I think 2 x cat6 and 1 x coax in key areas would be good. It's a ranch with basement and good access in the attic so I think a 2" conduit is a good idea as well.
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You really should think about running Cat6a. The cost differential between 6 and 6a shouldn't be that big all things considered. That said, I have some Cat6 and Cat5e from when I first had the house built. I didn't do Cat6a and did Cat6 later because I was stupid and got wrapped up with other things pertaining to some renovations I was doing to my house at the time. By the time I realized I needed Cat6a cabling, I had run out of time to get the cabling before my GC was closing up the walls. So off I went to Lowes to get what they had which was Cat6 and paid too much for it.
It still worked out as the length of runs I needed for this new run of cabling was within the distance for Cat6 to support 10Gig Ethernet. Yes, I am running 2 10Gig connections from my server room to a 10Gig switch in my home office. Cat6 will support 10GigE up to about 55 meters. Cat6a will support 10GigE to the full Ethernet spec of 100 meters. The reason why I say pull Cat6a even though your cabling runs may not exceed 55 meters is for some potential future proofing. We don't know what the future holds in regards to the next speed step on twisted pair copper Category wiring. The next speed up from 10Gig is 25Gig. Currently, that's supported via short run Twinax/DACs and optics. If 25GBaseT becomes a thing in the future, the max bandwidth of Cat6a may be able to support 25GbaseT up to a certain distance similar to how Cat6 supports 10GigE up to 55 meters. Or there may be some variant of speed between 10 and 25Gig which will be created. Not many people are aware but there are speeds between 1GigE and 10GigE. These fall under multigig Ethernet. The speeds are 2GigE and 5GigE. These were created by Cisco and then ratified as a standard by IEEE. The reason why these speeds were created was because of the ever increasing speeds being offered by wireless access points. The wiring also needed to keep pace with the faster wireless speeds without having to depend on doing things such as LAGs/Etherchannels. So multigig was created to be able to run 2GigE and 5GigE over existing Cat5e cabling. The only catch with multigig is you need a switch which supports this protocol and of course a device attaching to said network to support it. So far I've only seen wireless access points as having support for multigig.