CAT5e at home

McDonkey

Hi folks.
If this is the wrong forum for this question, my apologies - I couldn't decide between here and Nets and Comms.
I'm having a structured wiring network installed in my home while renovating (2 Cat5e and 2 Coax to each location). I've noticed that the electrician (a normal electrician) is running the network and power cables through some joists together and is not putting much effort into separating the cables under the floors and in the ceiling spaces. There is also a long pipe of network cables being buried under the kitchen floor to get to the central wiring panel and I think the power cable will be fed through that pipe too.
From doing a bit of research on home networking, running the high and low voltage side-by-side seems to be a bit of a no-no.
How big a deal is this going to be?
I plan to stream music and video around the house. Not HD at the moment, but I wouldn't like to rule it out in future.
Do I need to kick up a big fuss???
If any of you are professional home networking types or have had experience of bad interference because of a similar set-up, I'd love to get your advice.
Thanks...

MAJJ

I have more questions than answers for you and am no expert in this area.

You mentioned coax cable and your electrician doing it. You might be better served checking the type of cable used and ensure it's up to scratch for satellite or HD broadcasts.

Lots of comments about this point in the satelitte and terrestial forums here on boards.

Good luck with the renovating.

Stoner

McDOnkey.
I hope this is not too late.

The real worry with data cables is sharp turns, this really kills the "speed" and "quality of the signal.

Running along side power cables is not great, but very difficult to avoid in a house. The thing to do is to keep the distance between them consistant and do not cross over the cabling, if you have to cross over do so at 90 degrees, its the whole sin cos and Tan rules electric and magnetic interference can be kept as low as possible if you take care in the installation.
also Shielded cabling is a good choice for your installation, but it increases the material and labour cost, but it is designed to reduce interference.

Cat5E is fine for streaming normal music and TV (and as you say not HD, Cat 6 or Cat6e/Cat6a/Cat7 still can't handle a HD signal and maintain the original quality.

If i was you I'd opt for Cat6 cabling. but note faster the speed of the data results in higher electro/magnetic interference

We have supplied and installed a number of different systems for streaming TV all from central locations, Lexicom, Thorsman etc. TBH I did not put one in my place, I think they are good for pubs etc, but I am happy with my computer network, my NAS drive and the stuff I record and watch later on, if I wanted to see the TV/NTL box I'd guess I'd get a MS media sender box and hardwire it.

Some people have lovely systems, but I'm very happy with mine

SouperComputer

stoner wrote:

Cat5E is fine for streaming normal music and TV (and as you say not HD, Cat 6 or Cat6e/Cat6a/Cat7 still can't handle a HD signal and maintain the original quality.

Stoner, where are you getting your information from? I think you are getting your OSI layers mixed up. For a start the category of cabling has no influence on the quality of your digital video. Its digital, you either get it from A to B or you don't. This leads to to "jumping" video or total loss of signal. If there is a loss of quality its elsewhere I'm afraid.

I've setup networks using CAT5e GB LAN and MythTV. The video is captured in 1080i (Call it 1080p for data purposes) in MPEG2 unmolested using IEEE1394 from a Motorola DCT6200's and is forwarded to any of 5 clients in the home without any issues or loss of quality (its technically impossible) whatsoever. What I'm saying is that this is a worst case scenario in terms of bandwidth and it does not suffer from any issues.

Even a 1080p stream encoded with MPEG2 uses about 15Mb/s of bandwidth. This is far less than that of 100Mb LAN (Real-world throughput around 40Mb/s) and of course 1Gb LAN, BOTH of which can be done reliably with CAT5e in most reasonable circumstances. HD-DVD (average 34Mb/s), without transcoding will be borderline on 100Mb but GB will be fine.

McDonkey, to answer your question. CAT 6 is preferable so as to help support possible future copper ethernet advances. As remaked above, try to keep the cables as far away from each other and avoid sharp turns, you may also consider shielded CAT6.

If the electrician wont work with you, find another one

To be honest, as long as you can get a 1GB link on all cables without packet loss, you can call it good.

Stoner

I'm getting my information from researching (correctly or incorrectly) the products available for packaged TV distribution systems and not the broader options. In my business I deal with these distribution systems on a large scale form 20 to 400 units at a time, PCs and MythTV never ever come into the equation as they are not user friendly over the size of development I typically deal with, so my advice was hampered sorry.
I agree with all you have said supercomputer relating to digital signals.
I was wrong to make such a sweeping statement. I have gotten my def of HD standards wrong before, sorry if it was misleading, but my advice on installing cables, using screened cables and going for Cat 6 stands. I should not have used the word quality, I understand that now I am ashamed of myself, please forgive me:)

BTW I know the difference between a digital and analogue signal, but thank you for reminding me in such a nice way, even though I was only correctly addressing the OPs 3 week old post about how to have his cable installed in the very same way you did, afterwords. I just threw in a loose remark that had nothing to do with his question.

FYI The are a number of available systems that distribute TV music etc around a house.
Last time I checked (7 months ago) none could distribute Sky HD around the house at the same quality that a direct box to TV signal could. They all required that the Sky HD box was installed beside the HD TV and the HDMI cable was used to get the HD picture from the box to the TV, there was a digital TV quality back feed from the box to the TV distribution system, this digital signal is HD quality, but not Sky HD quality as I was referring to.
Smart home systems don't offer Sky HD around a house, only at one place, (a least that is what their MD told me the last time he called to see me)they will offer a range of combi cables to carry a lesser quality HD signal from A to B.
If this is no longer the case then please ignore my post, I will stand corrected as an out of date waffler.

BigEejit

I was talking to a structured cabling guy before and he told me that the sharpest angle you should make with a cable (cat 5 or 6) that is expected to be gigabit is about the angle you would get if you looped it around a can of coke (nice handy easy to remember analogy).

Apart from that, keep power and ethernet cable runs at least 6 inches away from each other if possible. Finally, when putting the connectors on, make sure that the twisted pair is kept twisted as far as possible, pain in the arse but I believe you are only supposed to straighten a maximum of 1cm of the twisted pairs.

mossym

Stoner wrote:

I'm getting my information from researching (correctly or incorrectly) the products available for packaged TV distribution systems and not the broader options. In my business I deal with these distribution systems on a large scale form 20 to 400 units at a time, PCs and MythTV never ever come into the equation as they are not user friendly over the size of development I typically deal with, so my advice was hampered sorry.
I agree with all you have said supercomputer relating to digital signals.
I was wrong to make such a sweeping statement. I have gotten my def of HD standards wrong before, sorry if it was misleading, but my advice on installing cables, using screened cables and going for Cat 6 stands. I should not have used the word quality, I understand that now I am ashamed of myself, please forgive me:)

BTW I know the difference between a digital and analogue signal, but thank you for reminding me in such a nice way, even though I was only correctly addressing the OPs 3 week old post about how to have his cable installed in the very same way you did, afterwords. I just threw in a loose remark that had nothing to do with his question.

FYI The are a number of available systems that distribute TV music etc around a house.
Last time I checked (7 months ago) none could distribute Sky HD around the house at the same quality that a direct box to TV signal could. They all required that the Sky HD box was installed beside the HD TV and the HDMI cable was used to get the HD picture from the box to the TV, there was a digital TV quality back feed from the box to the TV distribution system, this digital signal is HD quality, but not Sky HD quality as I was referring to.
Smart home systems don't offer Sky HD around a house, only at one place, (a least that is what their MD told me the last time he called to see me)they will offer a range of combi cables to carry a lesser quality HD signal from A to B.
If this is no longer the case then please ignore my post, I will stand corrected as an out of date waffler.

i think you are discussing two different things. You thinking of using the cat5/cat6 as the actual transport for the uncompressed video. The original user is talking about( or i think he is) using the cat5 to install a home network, which means he'll be sending compressed data around his network for decoding by the end box in whatever room he wants. two very differnt things. Cat5e has plenty of bandwidth for HD if the second scenario is the case

Stoner

your right, as discussed I was only thinking of the distribution side of things, and not streaming HD as per the OPs intention

Calibos

I've been investigating structured cabling for a Full house renovation and rewire next year. I was hoping to distribute SkyHD around the house and found that while it is possible it is prohibitavely expensive.

You need at least 2 runs of Cat6 to each location.....thats the cheap bit. You need a HDMI to CAT6 Balun on each end of each dual run. These are about €400 a pop. You then need a HDMI Matrix switcher at the head end. These are about €4000+ atm!! You also need an IR dongle at each end too though I don't know how much they cost. Anyway that set up assuming the cable running is to 'Code' as described by the lads above is capable of 1080P up to 500ft IIRC.

In my case wanting to share SKYHD to 6 rooms I would need:

SKYHD box €500??
200m Cat6 €300??
12 x HDMI/Cat6 Baluns €4800
1 x HDMI Matrix Switcher €4000
12 x IR/Cat6 Remote Dongles(6 if the headend dongle can be hub shared with the 6 IR Cat6 cable runs) €500

The component versions of the above are about half the price but you run the risk of having to upgrade the whole lot to HDMI anyway if or when SKY and the HD/BluRay lads decide to implement "Image Constraint Token" where all non HDMI/HDCP enrypted HiDef video is downscaled to SD resolution. While Sky may never implement this it looks like the HD/Bluray camps might implement it in as soon as 3 years from now in 2011.

Anyway I soon gave up in that idea.

It will be cheaper in the short to medium term just to run Sat Coax to each location from an Octo LNB. And get 2 SKY HD boxes for the PJ and 50in Plasma locations and if any of the other locations want Sky then just standard SD boxes there.

ie.

200m Coax €200
2 x SkyHD Boxes €1000
4 x SD SKY Boxes €400???
5 x Mirror Subs €65/month (Everyone pays their own Mirror Sub)

I'll still run 4 or 5 Cat6 runs to each location though regardless. Need 1 for Network anyway. the other 3 or 4 for future proofing. Who knows in a year or 2 the baluns and HDMI Matrix switchers might have dropped to a more realistic price. The Technology commands a price premium atm. Then I'd get rid of the SD boxes and their mirror Subs and share the two SkyHD boxes(Might as well keep the second one after paying for it)across the 6 TV locations.

In that time HD/BluRay will have probably dropped to a realistic enough level too so that each Plasma/PJ will have its own Player/s so I'll probably never end up having to share a single player across the house anyway.

SouperComputer

definately continue with your plan for CAT6. By the time the HDMI switches are half-reasonable, a much more flexible PVR-based setup will be a viable option.