I don't understand the need for multiple ethernet cable runs to each room any more.

In your situation, your decision probably will have minimal impact, but it all depends on the details, and a lot of the time it comes down to money.

In a business setting where money is often a primary decision maker on hardware and cable runs, you would probably see the difference more easily.

For example, in your situation, you have the decision between 1 and 10 cable runs across the site. That can be a huge difference in cost for a business owner, so they'll want to shoot for 1 cable run. But, depending on the equipment being used in that media room, you may need dedicated cable runs for certain devices, though, it is unlikely all devices would need their own run.

In general, devices that will be used for real time communication (and want to/must avoid some quality loss, such as choppy audio/video) should get their own cable runs back to the main switch, so they share as little bandwidth with other network devices as possible. Other devices that don't care about some small (really small) increases in network communication times, such as regular computers used for day to day activities, or smart tvs, can handle sharing cable runs no problem. (And honestly, in a home setting, you probably don't have enough network traffic to really cause much quality loss, but again, I don't know the details so that may be incorrect for you.)

If I was working on my own home, and trying to get it cabled for networking, I would do a single cable run to each room with my cabling of choice (I don't know cabling as well I ought to, I'd say Cat 6 but I'd do more research before really making a decision).

As far as there always being a bottleneck in your scenario, the hardware at either end could be upgraded so that even though eventually all the device's traffic passes through one cable, they do so on a higher bandwidth connection, allowing for less congestion than if they had converged at a cheap piece of hardware with more ports.

Hope this helps.

A single run of Cat5e to each room, with a 10/100/1000 switch as needed, will work fine in a residential situation.

The multiple cable thing is because it costs little more to run two cables vs just one.

In new construction, Cat 5 cable is also used for telephone., so you will often see recommendations for multiple cable runs from the central cable management or patch panel.

When rewiring an existing home, it's done according to the owner's requirements. One cable is fine if that's all you'll need.

Video takes up a lot of bandwidth as opposed to normal network traffic. I would have a dedicated run for each video recording and playing device. The rest of your office can deal with a little lag and not be noticed. The video on the other hand will definitely notice if there's lag. But in general you will not have to run dedicated runs if you only have one or two streams of video at a time and that's usually only if its high def.

You are basically correct it depends on how much bandwidth you need in the remote location. If a application can use the majority of the bandwidth it should have its own dedicated connection.

This is all good in theory but in reality you will never exceed the bandwidth. You normal consumer grade equipment can easily provide up to 1gig of bandwidth using cat5e cable. So lets assume you had some central video server plugged directly into the router. All your remote users would have to share a 1g connection to the server.

That is not as bad as it sounds since even if you stream 4k hd video you might need 30m each. So you could run more than 20 users all watching 4k video and not exceed a shared 1g cable.

Now if say you wanted to run 100 users remotely then you would exceed the capacity of the 1g common cable. But more importantly you would also exceed the capacity of the 1g cable going into the server.

Most these capacity issues are silly to even think about in a home environment. You will never even get close to 1g and that is assuming you have dedicated media servers, internet use will be limited by the ISP. Even so the solution even in commercial installs is not to run more cable you just run cat6a and buy equipment that can run 10g.

There is no difference. And anyone who says there is doesn't understand wiring.

What you describe is the ideal topology for local networking. The switch handles all the traffic on the LAN and is designed to do that job well. It sends only that traffic destined for the WAN to the router, which also has a switch built-in but is usually not as capable as a stand-alone switch. Speed to and from the WAN is limited by the ISP service generally and is much less than LAN speed unless you have fiber ISP service.

You could use a switch with gigabit ports to have gigabit LAN and feed a router that has 100 Mbps ports and not notice an impact on WAN speeds since they are usually less than 100 Mbps. If your WAN is faster than 100 Mbps then you need a router with gigabit ports, too.

I am waaaay late to this thread, but I am building a new home and running all my own drops so I thought I would toss out a reply.

@colecaz is correct in his answer. @tdhcsc there will be absolutely no difference in your network in terms of speed or bottle necks if you go with 1 drop and use a switch in each room, or run a bunch of cables were each device has its own port in the wall.

The only benefit/downfall to multiple runs to your centralized switch is a single point of failure. Say you have a 24 port switch in the basement that is wired to your ISP router. You can then run 23 of these ports to wall ports or devices in your house. Going this route, you can hook up your ISP router and your 24-port switch to a UPS and you only need to worry about the ISP router or your 24 port switch failing.

If you run a switch in each room and just have 1 run per room, all the small switches in each room now add a point of failure. If they aren't hooked up to an additional UPS and you lose power, the devices hooked to these switches will not have a connection to the network. Also if you find a device in a room not connecting, you now have to trouble shoot at least 2 switches and a router, instead of 1 switch.

In a home, it doesn't matter which way you go. In terms of furniture layout it easier to run 1 drop and use a switch in each room. This way you can slide a desk/couch/whatever right up close to the wall and just have 1 cable to your switch, and then branch out. If you have 4-6 cables going to a wall plate you won’t be able to get furniture as close to the wall, because of how tight the cables are. Then if you bend a cable over 90 degrees you can have degradation of the data flow.

I would just look at cost. What is cheaper? 1 face plate, 1 port, and a cheap 4 port switch per room OR 1 faceplate and multiple ports per room. Remember each cable needs to be terminated and tested which is a pain sometimes. Cable caps and ports cost money.

IMO it’s easier to test 1 wire per room and run a switch with some small patch cables to your devices than running 23 cables across your house and having to test all those cables. However, 23 ports lets you manage your whole network in 1 network cabinet in your basement/garage/wherever. Going with 1 cable also eliminates you having to pull extra cable through a packed conduit, or worse, a non-conduit run. If for some reason the cable ever goes bad, you can just pull the 1 cable out and then you have lots of space in the conduit to pull through just 1 new cable.

Cheers.

It depends on data flow/bandwidth requirements.

I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that multiple runs allow you to use HDMI extenders or HDBaseT devices. These allow you to relocate all of your source devices (STBs, DVD/Blu-ray players, computers, etc.) to somewhere away from your TV and control them remotely.