Wiring a Cabin

[chadbunderwood]

I am building a new cabin. Now the point of cabin time is not for everyone to log on and surf the web for hours. But we are winterizing it and will be spending much more time up there and my wife loves being connected.

So my question is would be the best way to wire it be to have a small mechanical room, and just run cat 5 wire from that mech. room to all the rooms I want wired? Then to hook those wires to a wireless router (making sure it is a gigabit router)?

I figure that should have my covered for several years to come.

Any thoughts?

 

[riser]

Depends - If everyone has wireless, go with a wireless router. A gigabit router is not required. A gigabit router is only good for transferring files between your own computers and even then, at wireless speeds this is pointless. Unless you have computers wired together.. and transferring a large amount of data. Save the money, go with a standard 10/100 wireless router like the Linksys ES1000 I think it is.

If you wanted to hard wire your cabin and have the cables enclosed, you would need to use plenum cabling which will cost more. This is to code.

If you need wired, you would be better off using a wireless router and running a few cables out to locations within the cabin. If you wanted to do it right, you would have a punch down rack where the wall cables terminate. The other end would terminate into a wall jack. From the punch down, these would connect into the router. That would again be over kill and cost too much.

 

[chadbunderwood]

Well my thought was to push internet access to things like a Roku box or even straight to a TV in case we go with netflix or something like that.

I have always heard that as fast as wireless connections are, wired will always be faster. And if things get to the point to where you can stream 1080, then wouldnt a wired connection be the only way?

 

[hang-the-9]

Well my thought was to push internet access to things like a Roku box or even straight to a TV in case we go with netflix or something like that.

I have always heard that as fast as wireless connections are, wired will always be faster. And if things get to the point to where you can stream 1080, then wouldnt a wired connection be the only way?

If you want 1080 streaming, then I suggest wired, or get a very good wireless router with N, but riser's suggestion was to cable and use wireless at the same time. Make sure you check cable specs for distance as well, 300ft is generally a max run from switch to port. Keep in mind riser also said "plenum cabling" that is pretty much needed for interal wiring due to the way it burns.