Miles of coax and Cat5e ran, what next?

986s

Hi folks!

A while back a friend of mine suggested running plenty of Cat5e and coax cable around my new build house which I have done as follows-
each tv point has 3x good quality coax cables plus one Cat5e cable,
some important light switches have Cat5e cable running from them,
all phone points are all Cat5e cabled and important rooms have various Cat5e points dotted around. All the above is directed back to my study which has a mass of labelled cables flowing from it which the girlfriend is not too happy about.

My questions are as follows, I am living in the countryside and would like to get sky HD or NTL digital, how do I tell the installers to set up the satellite so that I can make full use of the existing cabling I have in place i.e watch digital content in all rooms- have heard about magic eyes etc?

As regards broadband how do I set it up for multiroom use using the above set-up, Ive heard about patch panels but havent a clue as regards the logistics of such. Can u recommend anyone who could get the above all up and running for me? Im based just outside Galway city and would pay a pro to get this properly set up.

So in conclusion what would people do with the cabling that I have in place?

As always any help much appreciated.

iplogger1

Hi there,

I'm about to embark on a similar setup as our electrician is about to
chase walls for first fix.

You have done all the right things in terms of running cables back to
a single room. As you have installed cat5e rather than cat6 it is my
understanding that crimping cable ends and terminating them is much
more straightforward for an enthusiast to do rather than cat6 which
requires much more expertise. Typically what you will have in that
study (node0 in jargon terms) is a 19" 18,24 or 48 port patch panel
there is a special punchdown tool which is not much more than 20Euro
for placement of the twisted pairs onto blocks on the patch panel.
You (or a network cable savvy friend) will need to purchase and use
a crimping tool and probably some cable testers. The other extras
you will need to purchase are modular wall plates with the required
outlets and a bunch of colour coded short cat5e patch cables for
your wiring room as well as a 10/100Mbps ethernet switch.
You may also consider bringing the main incoming phone line to
the wiring room and this will allow you the flexibility of easy
re-assignment of phone sockets to any location you have a cat5e
drop as your network evolves and your room purposes change
over time.

You can also do exciting things with streaming of video from PC
server or network attached storage via something like a modded
xBox or something more purpose built. A lot of options open up
once you have the cat5e infrastructure in. The home automation
possibilities are good too but I am shying away from going down
that route. Someone called Padrido on the DIY forum is very
knowledgeable in that space.

I've sent a PM with further links

~ipl

mathew

pm sent with details of a company

986s

Cheers folks for your replies, sorry for the slow reply but I was away from my pc for a while. Is there anything I can do as regards sky/Ntl digital installation that would make it easy to have multiroom viewing with my existing cable set-up?

Again thanks a million for all the help

wexfordman

Have a look at these two websites. The first is more for information, the second is a good place (in my opinion) to source hardware.

Regards,
Eamon

www.automatedhome.co.uk
www.letsautomate.com