I posted last year about the home network that I had built. It was actually a fair bit of work and somewhat expensive to get the base network and the initial set of drops setup. It also required a fair bit of thinking and up-front design to get the network structured in such a way that it would work for my up-front needs, and then would scale for new scenarios that I could imagine. It may seem like the task is really simple, and it kind of is on the face of it.

The difficulty is that you need to think through how many CAT5e/6 cables that you string between major areas of your house. For example, my cable modem and HDHR devices are in my garage (where my cable comes into the house), my gigE switch, a bunch of machines and my VOIP box are in my basement, and my wifi AP is in my attic. That may sound horribly bizarre, but each device is really in the best location for its purpose, and I needed to ensure that I had enough cable going between locations to handle the neccessary connectivity.

That also doesn't count that I am running voice (voice originating from my VOIP box) throughout the house over some of these lines, which means that I have to add another line for analog voice between the major areas of house beyond what I need for the IP network.

My point in this post is that after nearly a year, I decided to add three more drops on the top floor of the house. Other than the requirement to crawl into the corners of my attic for one of the drops, it was really, really easy to tie into the base network that I'd setup months ago. It was very clear what I needed to do to tie into the network, and it all worked the first time.

In addition, I decided to hook up all three of the new drops for data for now, but it will take me just a few mins to 'downgrade' one of them to voice should I want to. It is really nice to have that degree of freedom w/o having to re-wire or otherwise re-do any of the work that I've done. 

I finally decided that it was time to get a real network setup in my house. I had some one-off network segments around the house for particular purposes, but not a real whole-house network w/a set of primary interconnect points, in addition to CAT5e drops around the house.

This project really started this summer when we had the house painted. I ripped off (imagine a violent action) all the coax and phone cords off the side of the house prior to the painting, both to ensure that the paint got under the wires, and to remove them permanently. I bought an HDHR at the same time to enable a new cable connection to my TV, over one of the network segments that I mentioned earlier. That worked out nicely. Still, I wanted to be able to use my HDHR on any PC in the house, and that's kinda difficult to reliably over 'g' wireless. Others may argue the fact, but try viewing HD content, and you'll see that 'g' falls on its face for that application, particularly if you have multiple streams going at once. I could have gone 'n' and will, but I really wanted to get a gigE network up and running, since it is fast and reliable.

I also should note that my existing phone network had already proven to be pretty bad. So, I already had an existing need to fix that.

Off to Home Depot, which is pretty much the answer to all issues relating to the home. Come back with 1000ft of riser CAT5e, 50 RJ45 connectors, a Ideal crimper and and Ideal LinkMaster CAT5 line tester. I also bought 8 large pieces of drywall, wood, some insulation and a whole ton of other odds and sods, but that is indeed another project.

I'm finding that cutting (to length) and crimping CAT5 is something of a challenge. It is conceptually simple, but I appear to be still mastering this task. I've made a bunch of mistakes, such as not following a wiring standard at first (even though I've used them before for my earlier network segments), mistaking the pin order of the connectors, and then incorrectly ordering the pins once I'd chosen T568A as the standard to use. The test tool is kinda neat since it tells you exactly where and how you've messed up. This is pretty useful if you've got a 50ft segment from your basement to your attic that isn't able to create a connection.

When I'm done, I'll have both a new phone network (over CAT5) and data network. The phone network actually only uses 1/4 of a CAT5 line, but that's OK. The 'backbone' is two CAT5 (one data, one phone) lines and one additional CAT5 line that I may need later for some unknown reason. Every drop (phone or data) connects to this backbone at one of three interconnect points (garage, attic and wiring closet in the basement). This allows me to easily add machines, NAS, APs and pretty much any other kinda IP appliance (like the HDHR) at any point in the network.

My neighbor, who is in his 70s, keeps making references to me being able to "run Microsoft on this network". It is pretty funny to hear that viewpoint. I'm sure that there is more XBox Live traffic during the day on the internal MSFT network than my wee network would ever be able to handle, except maybe on Christmas day ;)