All About Cats, and What Ethernet Classifications Mean
hackaday.com
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I couldn’t find anyone local who would install any kind of cable tubing after spending a fair amount of time searching.
Nobody does it except possibly between floors, as fish tape and other things aren’t terribly complicated, and the cost is way higher than naked runs.
Commercial installers wouldn’t give me the time of day, and anyone who did residential work just looked at me like I was insane when I asked about smurf tube.
Only place I'd see it as necessary are exterior walls that are full of insulation. Or if I was building a custom house or something.
Stuff like this:
https://usabesco.com/devices/pass-through-devices-cable-fire...
My general contractor had no idea what I was even talking about, and all of the installers who did residential work thought I was crazy.
I’m sure if I was willing to do it pay someone stupid amounts of money I could have done something.
Or if I’d been willing to hold up construction and do it myself, but then I’d probably have been out even more money because at the time mortgage rates were skyrocketing.
Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I say this, and for some reason no one has seen such installations, nor heard of anyone doing them. Am I crazy or what?
(And yes, if I ever build a house, I'll make sure to add Jefferies tubes!)
Plus, this does not solve the problem of the starting and ending segments of cables, that just go vertically through tight holes bored in the wall.
So that works like you suggested, but is a bit ugly.
More generally I'd like modern houses to have more 'wet walls' like they had in the Matrix, where there's a space big enough for a worker to actually maneuver between rooms. Problem is that's also a space pests and fire can move.
If You have never used Panduit, choose wisely the room where it initially is installed. Start off with the lab or workshop or under kitchen cupboards (ie, places where the other half isn't going to get bothered by it). Also, it helps if the area has many semi-permanent cable runs ("this extension will only be here for a few days..." - unintentional fib). Personally, every time I install a new rack or mounting board (think 1m x 2.5m board on a wall to hold tools or "temporary" power strip/network equipment/test fixtures), I put in a length of F2x3 "narrow slotted duct". I use much smaller under the cabinets. The larger ducts are good for hiding the extra cable length so only what is needed escapes the enclosure.
Initially, it is often ugly. I would not want to live without it. Bonus points for creative mounting (the other half still has not noticed the piece across the lower back of the upright piano but has noticed the lack of cables).
Uh, what? Why are you telling people to violate the NEC? Do not use strut as a raceway, why would you suggest that? It’s way more expensive than a UL listed raceway, and not suited for raceway purposes anyway.
For surface mounting, use a listed surface mount raceway: https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...
Legrand makes many different sizes of surface raceway.
If you want pathways inside a wall, use a listed conduit (PVC or EMT), if you’re fishing into existing walls you can make sleeves out of EMT or PVC (drill a hole and slap bushings on both ends)
That looks rather OK for my tastes. And is simple to implement, up to 1Gbit/s. Not because of the limitations of the cables, they go up to 40Gbit/s in flat form factor, but for the small switches, or SBCs which could be 'abused' as such.
Anyways, Nanoleaf or any others don't come ready for POE, so have to be modded, but not by much. Controlling them over ethernet requires more modding, but not that much either. One could also use the remote, and just give power over POE.
A lot of equipment you can buy today still only goes up to 100Mb/s, and a lot of houses still don't get even that from their ISPs.
Even if you have a gigabit connection, most of the time the computer at the other end isn't going to be sending you data at gigabit speed.
You might want gigabit speed to support multiple devices. But most houses don't have that many devices consuming high bandwidth at once, and when they do, you can feed them with multiple wires and/or access points.
All of this is to say, for almost every house, the standard cable from 1995 is still perfectly adequate. Cat5e will probably still be fine, by the time you sell your house.
Another issue is in high density situations, like in apartment buildings where everyone has their own wifi, or typical flats or condos in European cities. There just aren't that many wifi channels, and if you have multiple people on the same channel say goodbye to your speed
And bought two 100gb/s omnipath NICs for a point to point link…
I suspect a badly installed or wrong choice of keystone.
And you really have like 25 devices on the 2.4Ghz spectrum, because your neighbors exist and everyone maxes out their WiFi router transmission power in a feeble attempt to yell/take over the frequency for themselves.
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If you have 8x 100Mbit wires in your house, that's closer to 1600Mbit true bandwidth (100Mbit per direction across 8 devices).
But in any case, fiber remains impractical, expensive, and power-hungry.
Depends on what you're comparing it to - if you're looking for 10 Gbit, then copper is probably going to be worse, at least on power
Single mode fiber is cheap, it’s been around for a long time, and as far as I know, even old single mode fiber supports modern standards just fine. (There have been improvements in tolerance to bending and in performance at extreme bandwidths far, far in excess of anything in your house.)
Single mode fiber transceivers are now cheap and use less power than 10GigE copper, but until recently they were expensive.
Multimode fiber comes in OM1, OM2, OM3, OM4, and OM5, and the older variants don’t get amazing speeds by modern standards.
Copper takes quite a bit of power at faster speeds.
Interesting. I was helping a friend wire his small business with 10 Gbit fiber, and the fiber patch cables from 10gtek ("the cheapest thing on amazon") were surprisingly resilient - we were yanking them through the false ceiling, getting caught on things, etc, no worries at all.
The fiber coming in from the ISP, OTOH, felt like the most delicate thing on the planet.
Older houses have plastic or metal pipes for running cables, ensuring that you can repair or upgrade the wiring. New house nope, forget it, costs to much.
CAT8: $0.55 / foot
Max speed; 40 Gbit
Max length: 30m
(https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=42957):
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2 strand OS2 single-mode fiber: $0.09 / foot
Max speed: 800 Gbit (today; theoretical max speed is much higher)
Max length: >10km
(https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/bulk-cable/fiber-opt...):
OS2 has been around for decades, and will be more than good enough for the next several decades.
We're about to remodel and this has me thinking I should go to Cat8.2. Maybe a thousand bucks in cable? If that? I'll also add fiber for the furthest reach of the house for "future-proofing" but fiber is the tech that keeps being promised Real Soon Like Now but nobody's using it for their devices.
I'm not sure that cat5e will work beyond 10G, but 10G seems likely to be good enough for a long time. As of right now, used 10g fiber equipment is significantly less expensive than used 10GbaseT equipment, and there's power/heat savings too, 40GbaseT is going to run really hot.
Running fiber across the house to my office at the far corner gives me the option of future-proofing a potentially higher speed link then offloading to usable copper closer to the point of usage.
Depending on details that I don't know, you may not be able to use a cat5 patch panel or cat5 wall jacks with cat8.2 cable, if the wire sizes changed or the insulation won't be cut properly, and using underspeced terminations may mean your install doesn't test as cat8, but you can reterminate later if it matters.
Mikrotik makes an SFP module that's super reliable and supports 1/2.5/5/10. It's $53/unit.
You'll also need either fiber interfaces or media converters, which besides cost is an installation complexity. It'll add another thing you need power for and more equipment to conceal (or leave visible...) at each AP. Even assuming all of your devices are all full-on desktop computers I think the higher price of fiber NICs will eat much of your savings.
I just ran a couple runs to an in-wall AP + 2 1gbe port(w/ one PoE) and it's so awesome to have that all done with one cable.
Also- I am a big fan of PoE. My ceiling mounted aps depend on that for power. With fiber now I need to also run power to access points, whereas I only have one cat6 cable for power plus data.
I object to this number. I would say that "normal" here should mean plain old one bit at a time, 125 million times per second. This would make the maximum frequency 62.5Mhz, when it transmits 101010, or more specifically alternating between positive and negative voltage.
10Mbit Ethernet requires 10MHz specifically because it doesn't do the simplest thing. It transmits 20 million times per second.
> but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is MLT-3 (Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz.
I would clarify that MLT-3 has four steps in the cycle. +1v, 0v, -1v, 0v again. So that way it cuts 62.5 in half to 31.25.
> can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring
It assumes flawless wiring if you go for maximum distance, which is not particularly common.
Not that it matters, this was a 5 m cable between my fiber box and my new wireless router. So the cable will not be the bottleneck in any of this.