Wiring one's home for computer network

[thaimite]

If you use 3mp IP dual channel cameras, and run them at the best quality, even at variable bit rate transmission using h.264 compression, each camera can put up to 10mb load onto the network, especially if both sound and video are recorded and simultaneously viewed in real-time. This is based on my actual experience, not a theoretical calculation. 4 dual channel cameras in total, 2 at 3mp and 2 at 1.3mp, maximum quality video, no sound, occupied just over 40mb bandwidth.

Of course if the cameras are higher spec, more bandwidth will be required. A higher spec. means using 3 or 4 channels cameras at 3mp, or using higher than 3mp cameras.

I broadly agree with these figures.

My reasons for hard wiring IP cameras are as follows

1. The cameras are fixed and a hard wired connection should be more stable.
2. The cameras will require power and using power over Ethernet is easier and better than wiring individual power supplies for each camera and also shas the advantage of uppling a good network connection as above.
3. Many comments are made about encryption and the signal being secure. To me this is a non issue, what is more likely to happen is interference from other devices (microwaves electrical tools etc) may cause loss of signal.
4. The cameras will be sharing bandwidth with other wireless devices using the same acc3ess point and thus heavy traffic (file sharing beween devices) may impact on the recorded / viewed picture

Finally in the wired / wireless debate, it should not be an either /or. There is room for both. You 60" 4K HD intelligent TV will consume a lot of data when streaming a blue-ray movie from your NAS. As you are unlikely to be moving fhe TV on a regular basis a wired connection makes sense. Your Laptop PC, phone or or Tab should normally be used wireless but there are times (backing up data to the NAS etc when a wired conection will provide better service. Finally any home automation (IoT} low power devices that are unlikely to be moved and can be powered via the Ethernet are probably better wired for the same reason as the cameras.

Discussions that state the limiting facor for your required internal bandwidth is the size of the ISP connection do not take in to account internal house traffic and are irrelevant in the discussion

[billphillips]

It sounds by the comments that someone will be looking at the hi res IP cameras in real time. Maybe not, because I can think of nothing more boring at the moment. I use a DVR / control unit and either glance at the stream on my smartphone when I'm out, or replay the (loop) recording at home in the event of needing to. The replay uses no local network resources and the smartphone use is minimal, mainly due to the limitations of receiving data via 3G or "free wifi" while away from the home. This system works well and the cameras produce good images. The recording is of good quality and perfectly sufficient within the home environment. My opinion is that cctv is not a deterrent, it only makes the serious bad guys cover their faces, therefore all of my cameras are concealed. It's not wifi, a combined power/ av cable goes from each camera to the control box and then a single LAN cable to the wifi / router. Power cuts? No problem I use ups back up for the security and Internet. I believe though that a wifi system is available these days.

High internal traffic and file sharing! I didn't realise so many people with PCs and possibly a server were involved in the home.

I would be interested to hear of the ISP connection speed, that you either have now, or plan to have in the near future although I do understand though that nearly all of your traffic will be internal.

I question that a few cameras would use around 40mbs as mentioned above by one poster. Quite simply on the basis that they would be virtually unusable by the majority and therefor be unsalable in sufficient numbers to be viable. Also quite unnecessary in the home environment. Perhaps the poster is thinking of a comercial setup, regardless, it sounds way too high.

[NeverSure]

I built a large 2 story home more than 10 years ago and tediously wired everything for ethernet. I no longer use any of it.

Why ? Why did you wire your house 10 years ago ? Any specific project or just because it was the trend ? Do you mind giving us a short description of your network at the time, what was attached to it and what you thought will be the evolution of your network ?

It is not a tricky question. I have the support of a number of knowledgeable people in this project but you seem to have done it before and clearly you think it was useless. I just try to understand what you wanted to achieve because as I said I've the feeling we are not talking about the same thing.

Ten years ago there weren't as many wireless nodes available, and wireless wasn't as fast as it is now. I forget what the standard was then. I actually felt I needed cabling through the house.

The cable company dictated where their line came into the house and it was in the garage which was on the first of two floors. They put the gooseneck on the roof in a corner of the house that was closest to their pole. This was done in the rough framing stage (stick built wood house.) So we just kept track of that cable and didn't let it get buried but rather made sure it was always outside of the wall.

About the time the house was finished I put a wall hung cabinet with the back cut way out of it. This was a typical upper kitchen type cabinet. Then in that cabinet I put a router. Oops, forgot I had the electrician wire so that there would be an outlet in that cabinet too. This was a strictly wired router.

An out port on the router went to a 16 port switch because at that time a 16 port router was expensive. From the switch we began to pull wires through the house to ethernet outlets where I wanted them. Of course we pulled the wires first, put ends on them, tested them and then put then into the switch but you get the idea.

Now in what was my office I needed a lot of ethernet cables. I had a lab with several computers. One was Server and the others were XP Pro clients. I was messing with possibilities for Server and Active directory. I also had my main squeeze desktop and a printer. So I put another 16 port switch in that room so one wire could become many. My printer was wired to my main desktop and only the desktop had the driver. I didn't care about the others.

The house had what we call a great room which is the kitchen and living room combined. It was big so I put several outlets around it including one in the floor between what I knew would be two recliners. This was for me or guests to use laptop, and the recliners were basically out in the middle of the room and that's why the floor outlet.

I put one wire in each bedroom opposite of where I believed a bed would go so there could be a desk and computer, maybe a guest's computer.

Technically it isn't hard to think through but it's a LOT of work for something that became, just for me, obsolete. I'll try to attach a pic of the great room to show you why wireless would be so much more convenient than wired. You could sit down anywhere with a laptop or even put one on the kitchen counter.

Remember. You and your guests, more and more will have smartphones and tablets and other devices which will want a wireless signal anyway. IMHO you either need wireless, or you need both today.

Pics maybe if I can find them. You can see the beauty of wireless if you have company or just want to plop down anywhere.

[NeverSure]

High internal traffic and file sharing! I didn't realise so many people with PCs and possibly a server were involved in the home.

I would be interested to hear of the ISP connection speed, that you either have now, or plan to have in the near future although I do understand though that nearly all of your traffic will be internal.

I think I already said it but for most people their home wireless will be faster than what they get from the ISP so there is no loss in speed.

I have 30MBps (Megabytes) down and 10 up. Obviously the ISP is trying to limit using a household account to host a busy domain. I do pay $10 per month extra for a static IP. The real life is slower than 30 down, and wireless N is rated at 37.5MBps but again in real life it's slower. Still it seems blazing fast especially compared to dial up going to DSL and going to 10MBps down with the first cable. This was all years ago. I'm completely happy.

[IMHO]

Remember. You and your guests, more and more will have smartphones and tablets and other devices which will want a wireless signal anyway. IMHO you either need wireless, or you need both today.

At no time has the OP, or any other contributor to this thread suggested that he should not have WiFi. It appears the only arguments being presented are ones suggesting he should not have ethernet.

[billphillips]

Quote .....

I think I already said it but for most people their home wireless will be faster than what they get from the ISP so there is no loss in speed.

I have 30MBps (Megabytes) down and 10 up. Obviously the ISP is trying to limit using a household account to host a busy domain. I do pay $10 per month extra for a static IP. The real life is slower than 30 down, and wireless N is rated at 37.5MBps but again in real life it's slower. Still it seems blazing fast especially compared to dial up going to DSL and going to 10MBps down with the first cable. This was all years ago. I'm completely happy.

Actually my wireless n router is around 54 mbs and that's the industry standard now. You may be interested to hear that UK based BT have developed and released a 600 mbs, with greater range for use with its adsl 2. Future release will be a 1.2tbs wifi router for use on the same system.

I'm sure copies and even improvements will follow as they did when BT in Martlesham, Suffolk. Invented the original ADSL.

[JohnnyJazz]

Discussions that state the limiting facor for your required internal bandwidth is the size of the ISP connection do not take in to account internal house traffic and are irrelevant in the discussion

Couldn't agree more

Remember. You and your guests, more and more will have smartphones and tablets and other devices which will want a wireless signal anyway. IMHO you either need wireless, or you need both today.

At no time has the OP, or any other contributor to this thread suggested that he should not have WiFi. It appears the only arguments being presented are ones suggesting he should not have ethernet.

1/ It's better to have a cable installed and not using it that realizing once the last worker has left the house that an additional ethernet socket would have been very useful.

2/ WiFi is not the ideal standard for home automation due to the (relatively) high power consumption but that's a debate for an other thread

[IMHO]

Actually my wireless n router is around 54 mbs and that's the industry standard now. You may be interested to hear that UK based BT have developed and released a 600 mbs, with greater range for use with its adsl 2. Future release will be a 1.2tbs wifi router for use on the same system.

I'm sure copies and even improvements will follow as they did when BT in Martlesham, Suffolk. Invented the original ADSL.

Actually, the current standard is multi-channel wireless AC - which at distances of a few centimetres (don't believe the marketing BS) can do 2.3+gbps on some models - Wireless N is old hat

I have a slightly slower Linksys WRT1900AC, which should be able to theoretically do 1.9gbps to my 3 month old Macbook Pro Retina (which also has Wireless AC), but of course, it doesn't. Time machine backups over wireless AC take hours vs minutes over "only" 1gbps ethernet.

[RichCor]

I always thought I could 'future proof' one of my network installations if I ran fiber optic.

But the damn industry hasn't produced the low-cost Optical Media Converters or adopted Optical Ports as an option on equipment the same way they've adopted 10/100 or 100/1000 Etherthnet. "Damn you, industry. This isn't Betamax we're talking about. It's Fiber. It's the future. Why must you be dragged kicking and screaming?"

But as for 'future proofing', both UTP copper and Fiber Optic have rapidly evolved over the last 25-30 years, with each design iteration obsoleting the previous every 5 years or so.

"Can't I future-proof my network?"

"At the desktop -no. Flatly, no.
You have no guarantee that anything you install for cabling today, Category "whatever" copper or multimode fiber, will be useful in another few years. That's why manufacturers offer 15-25 year warranties - they know you will not be using that cabling more than another few years! A lifetime warranty is the only one that makes sense, since its lifetime is very short! Maybe you could install multimode and singlemode fiber, but you would be the first!"

"In the backbone, maybe, if you install a large fiber count optical fiber cable with lots of spare singlemode fibers, you probably have a good chance of supporting your network for ten or twenty years. The backbone is easier to deal with since it changes a lot less than the desktop connection."

Also, I love these Ethernet stats:

... as much as 80-90% of all Cat 5 cabling was improperly installed and would not provide the rated performance.

... contractors have told us that 40% of their Cat 6 installations pass certification tests

... untwist utp wires too much at a connection or remove too much jacket and the cable may fail crosstalk testing.

... pull utp too hard (only 25 pounds tension allowed!) or kink it and loss the cat-x performance you paid for

... according to the installers, 1-5% of all Ethernet connections will not be correct first time around

Been there, done that.

[billphillips]

So many discrepancies over figures here ! Nonetheless, I hope that we can all continue and follow the progress of this thread. Perhaps all of us can learn from the op in his project of hardwiring his home.

[IMHO]

I always thought I could 'future proof' one of my network installations if I ran fiber optic.

But the damn industry hasn't produced the low-cost Optical Media Converters or adopted Optical Ports as an option on equipment the same way they've adopted 10/100 or 100/1000 Etherthnet. "Damn you, industry. This isn't Betamax we're talking about. It's Fiber. It's the future. Why must you be dragged kicking and screaming?"

The reasons fiber remains the something only used in enterprise is because 10gbe is able to run over copper, and upstream appliances like routers, firewalls, spam/virus filters are already uber expensive at 10gbe speeds, let alone even faster.

Outside of some mega-datacenters where 1tbps has a use-case, the main use-case/benefit of fiber is it's ability to provide high bandwidth over very long runs, e.g. FTTx ISP networks.

I hope that comment of yours was a study, not an implementation

[JohnnyJazz]

Maybe the wireless "apologists" can contribute to this forum that didn't go very far at the time : http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/768369-zigbee/

[jcisco]

Since most everything else has been covered, when you buy your cabling. For the tiny bit extra, get the cable that is rated for risers or if not too far expensive, plenum rated cable. Its a grade above the general purpose cabling you come accross and is more fire resistant. Furthermore you can legally penetrate structural floors and ceilings legally. Now the code here may not define this at all so may not matter. As I said usually doesn't cost much more.

[JohnnyJazz]

Three month later, phase one completed !

Up to five (my office, TV room) lan sockets have been installed in each room of the house. Cables all end up in a patch panel in a "technical room" in the ground floor. Each connection has been tested and working fine so far. Tomorrow I'm off to Hong Kong for the April electronic fair. When I come back I'll start installing the routers, switches, NAS, etc ... The real fun will begin

[JohnnyJazz]

An other very useful thing we installed during the renovation is the USB sockets. My wife loves it, she wants me to install them everywhere so she can always charge her iPad when chatting on Facebook (her main activity ) but at 900 Bahts a piece it's not that cheap But I've to admit it's very useful, here on the picture side by side with an international plug, very useful too, we can finally get rid of our adapters, and a LAN socket.