I’m running some Cat 6 wire from the big house to the carriage house, about 80′ of conduit, plus another 60 to 80′ inside the house and carriage house.
The telephone, cable, and router are in the big house, 3rd floor at the end of the run. But in the carriage house I first come in the garage portion (downstairs) and I’ll eventually connect to something in the apt. upstairs. I’m considering just terminating at a punch down block, so I can get it done and figure out what to do later, but I’m not sure about that. It is a garage, so dusty and bigger temperature swings. Plus I’m not sure what the impact is of losing the twists in the twisted pairs, regarding the gigabyte LAN.
What do people think?
Replies
anytime ethernet leaves a building it should go to fiber .
a couple of media converters and 175' of pre connectorized fiber wouldnt be that much .
put a switch in the carrige house
phone wire needs to be bounded and grounded with primary and secondary lightning protection .
If you do end up punching down, use an enclosure that houses the punch down blocks.
Honeywell, OnQ, Leviton are a few brands. You can get at least Honewell at your local ADI Branch.
Ed
No, I would just run extra lines with 50+ feet extra coiled at the garage end so that you have enough for a home run eventually to the apt. If for some reason you can't do more than one line, keep an extra 50+ feet at the end of it to the garage so that eventually your home run will be to the most distant point in the apt which is probably where you'll want it. You can terminate the end of the coil in the garage anytime to test the line.
Hi Bryan,
I would say that poster brian555's advice about running fiber sounds good to me. The fiber would be less susceptible to all of the nasty things you might run across in a conduit. Cat 5/5e/6 without twists is nothing more than expensive bell wire, I believe that the spec says you can have 1/4 inch of untwisted wire at the termination point.
Good luck
Fiber is fine but breaks very easy. I've run cable all over the world including Iraq and believe me that IF you put fiber in it will solve all your connection problems BUT it is very fragile and finiky in nature to deal with in the beginning. Once you have it in place the right way then your set for life. Consider weather problems in your equations ie rain, snow, high winds and yes even lightning. While fiber is not susepatable to EMP it can get fried by high voltage and melt or have a micro crack in it then your stuck finding the crack or replacing the whole run. Cat6 is cheap and hence the connection quality but you won't notice it unless your downloading big files or playing online games. If you are just checking email then Cat6 in conduit will be fine if you are connecting the TV/xbox/computer go with fiber the investment is well worth it.
Fiber is faster than cat 5e or cat 6, BUT, either one is good for 1GB/sec, a speed which no personal computer or internet connection is capable of even coming close to...3 megabytes per second - or .003GB/sec - is about the fastest internet available today. Sounds like plenty of headroom to me. Hard drives aren't even close to that 1GB/sec speed either, so there is really no such thing as being limited in file transfers by cat5e or cat6
Fiber is for companies with multiple T1 or T3 lines, and/or HUGE networks connecting to a common server.
Bottom line, Cat5e or cat6 isn't gonna get you killed online, tho your ISP might ;D