House conversion - cable question

Ros Man

Hi,
Am currently in the process of getting the house done up and I have an opportunity to run tv cable around the house before new floors are put down. My existing setup is a Humax 5400 (Soon to be upgraded for db) a 90cm dish with motor 30e to 30w. Seperatly a sky box and dish with a quad lnb and 3 cables running to 3 locations. Also an analogue aerial with a splitter and cables running to 3 different locations. With the extension I am planning to run 3 more cables directly to 3 more rooms from the sky dish giving a total of 6 (so an octo lnb needed). I may also run a 7th to the main tv to future proof for sky+. What I am wondering is do I need to run cables for 3 new anologue points to connect into the existing distribution point for the analogue aerial. With this to be changed in a few years time to a digital platform is there any point as the 7 cables to the dish should sufice. Have I missed anything or am I planning to go overboard completly with 7 cables.

byte

Yeah, I think you should put in the 3 cables for the aerial also. It'd be handy when the analogue signals are replaced with digital.

bk

Also it might be an idea to run some Cat5e/6 cables from each room to a central location. Cat5e/6 cables can be used for:

- Phone lines (you can run up to 4 phone lines across a single ethernet cable)
- Ethernet network
- You can run HDMI over cat5e/6 for interesting applications.

Also it mightn't be a bad idea to first wire all the coax cables to the same central location (study, under stairs, etc.) before wiring them up to the aerial and sat dishs, it can give you more flexibility if you want to take the output of the Sky box in the main room and send it to the other rooms, etc.

Ros Man

Got the cat 6 in already to all phone points and tv locations, just for future proofing. Was thinking about cat 7 but too costly. Anyhow, I will run double TX100 from each tv point. One set of cables will go out to the dish and the other set to a central area for distribution off an aerial.

bk

Ros Man wrote: »

Got the cat 6 in already to all phone points and tv locations, just for future proofing. Was thinking about cat 7 but too costly. Anyhow, I will run double TX100 from each tv point. One set of cables will go out to the dish and the other set to a central area for distribution off an aerial.

Sounds good, Cat7 is unnecessary overkill IMO. Personally I'd run all cables to the central location for slightly more flexibility, but yours sounds fine.

BTW how many Cat6 are you running to the TV point, I'd run at least two, maybe even three?

Ros Man

Only running 1 cat6 to the tv points. Why would I need more and can I not put a splitter on the end. Just curious?

bk

Ros Man wrote: »

Only running 1 cat6 to the tv points. Why would I need more and can I not put a splitter on the end. Just curious?

It depends on what you want to do with it. I've only one cat5e cable running to each location and I definitely regret not having more.

1) For a telephone line for Sky multiroom
2) For a gigabit ethernet network, streaming TV shows around the house, etc.
3) Run a HDMI over cat5 setup.

The last one is the most interesting and perhaps a little far out, you could have your Sky HD box in your living room and then take HDMI out from it and send it over cat to your bedroom TV to watch in perfect HD quality.

Or as I'm planning to do in the future, have all my boxes (Sky HD, PS3, Amp, etc.) in the study and distrbute the HDMI over cat cable to the front room and bedroom, so everything is hidden away and you jsut have nice wall mounted TV's in the bedroom.

Yes, you can split a cat6 cable so that it can carry two phone lines and a 100mb/s network at the same time, but then you lose the ability to do gigabit ethernet over it.

Ros Man

ok, I may never use them but I may drop a few more cables around and blank them off for now. Thanks for the advise.