Questions about home network cabinet/patch panel

peter_h1979

So I work in IT and would consider myself confident enough in terms of configuring a home network however running cables and setting up cabinets and patch panels would not be an are I would be comfortable with.

However next moth I'm doing an extension on my house, there will be some electrical work done as part of this so I though as I will have an electrician on site I would take the opportunity to ask him to run cat 6.

My initial thoughts are fairly simple. The internet comes into the hall (FTTH, ONT connection). Directly above the hall is my home office so my initial thought was ask the electrician to run 1 cable directly up to the office and just have a wall panel on each end. Run a patch cable from the router to the hall wall panel and have a small switch in the office connected to the wall panel. Now I haven't talked to the electrician yet that wont happen until near the end of the build (we are getting s new open plan kitchen living area). I mentioned this to our builder and he said they should be able to run the cable (from hall to office anyway) but he said depending on the electricians they use they might not be able to terminate. I have used crimpers before to terminate RJ45 cables so I could probably do that if necessary.

However no I'm thinking I should think a bit bigger and ask him about the possibility of running cables into multiple rooms and having a small patch panel into the office. Anyway a lot depends on what the electrician can do. I was looking online for cabinets and patch panels and found the following

https://www.cablemonkey.ie/home-network-cabinets/9510-8u-connectix-slim-line-home-cabinet.html

Are these guys, any recommendations or thoughts?

Sorry for the rambling vagueness.

Dr_Colossus

How big is your home office, if you've the space go as big as possible as it makes things so much easier. Above cabinet is 10" but the more common sizing is 19" for which equipment such as patch panels, switches, routers or anything else would offer greater selection.

Cabinets are surprisingly expensive especially for sturdy ones so if not in a rush check the likes of Adverts and Donedeal. In my case I bought quite a large 15U, 19" cabinet on Adverts and am in the process of setting that up. Have a 24 port patch panel with 21 Cat6 cables terminated thus far and have a 24 port switch arriving next week with an access point for improved wifi.

Planning your network port locations and running cables is by far the most difficult task, punching down the terminations is easy enough if a little tedious. Not sure I'd trust an electrician to do that work though, some horror stories on here where electricians have pulled network cable in a daisy chain formation.

theintern

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058306530/questions-about-home-network-cabinet-patch-panel

Run two from the ONT to the office if that's going to be your hub. Just in case one cable fails. I forget to do this, and now it means I have a single point of failure between my internet connection and my rack. Ethernet cables don't often fail, but better to have piece of mind.

Even better would be to ask him to run conduit and run the cables through that. That way if in the future you want to run something else (fiber perhaps?) you can easily chase a new cable.

As the previous poster mentions, best to terminate the cables yourself. I'd recommend a keystone patch panel, and a bunch of keystones instead of a 'normal' patch panel.

'Normal' patch panel - https://www.freetv.ie/24-port-patch-panel/

Keystone patch panel - https://www.freetv.ie/unloaded-patch-panel/ + keystones - https://www.freetv.ie/cat6-keystone/

The reason for this is that if you have an issue or want to change something, you can just pull one keystone from the patch panel, rather than having to try and move the entire panel, which could lead to some of your cables getting pulled out, leading to you having to pull the entire panel again, and so on.

I initially did a normal panel for my runs, and now I'm likely going to replace it with a keystone one and redo each cable. I've had a couple of cables that I wanted to change around and it's been a complete pain with an normal panel.

Glaceon

I have a 10" panel here myself but the biggest problem I had was sourcing a switch to fit it. I could only find 10" rackmount switches from Digitus.

Yellow_Fern

Will you need power in the hall? Will you have a POE from the home office?

BTW there is a big trade off between having a tidy compact set up in say a recess and a set up that can be easily accessed for changing settings.