I don't understand the need for multiple ethernet cable runs to each room any more.

[tdhcsc]

I've been looking everywhere and can't find the answer. Everywhere I look I see pages of articles that express the need to have multiple ethernet cable runs from the router's ethernet ports to (lets say) a media room. I don't understand the need for that. Can someone explain or direct me to the answer.

My house is simple and I'm not looking for 'state of the art' or 'future needs' wiring, just something that will work well. I have my cable modem on the main floor in a vented cabinet. The cable modem is wired to a Netgear Gigabit router a few inches away. The Netgear has the standard 4 ethernet wire out ports and at present I have 1 port on a short cat5e cable going to the Sinology server (again in the same cabinet). The second port goes to a backup hard drive with cat5e in the same area. The third port takes 1 cat5e cable (40 feet) to the office where a smart gigabit 4 port switcher is setup for 4 machines. The forth ethernet port takes a cat5e cable to the media room on a different floor where I have a 10 port Netgear gigabit smart switcher which is connected to all the media room stuff via cat5e cables.

What I don't understand is, somewhere along the line there will be a bottleneck. I could put a short cat5e cable to the 10 port smart switcher, put it in the cabinet and run 10 cables across the house to each device in the media room or, run the 1 wire the 60 feet directly from the Netgear router to the media room and put the smart switcher there.

I don't understand the difference as it still must go to 1 cat5e wire somewhere (wither near the router of at the end of a long foot run . So,, why run so many wires from the Netgear router if at some place they all need to converge? My reasoning tells me that it's no longer necessary to run multiple wires as new technology (smart switchers) have replaced the need but then I have no idea

Thanks for any help.

 

[Master Kittens]

In your situation, your decision probably will have minimal impact, but it all depends on the details, and a lot of the time it comes down to money.

In a business setting where money is often a primary decision maker on hardware and cable runs, you would probably see the difference more easily.

For example, in your situation, you have the decision between 1 and 10 cable runs across the site. That can be a huge difference in cost for a business owner, so they'll want to shoot for 1 cable run. But, depending on the equipment being used in that media room, you may need dedicated cable runs for certain devices, though, it is unlikely all devices would need their own run.

In general, devices that will be used for real time communication (and want to/must avoid some quality loss, such as choppy audio/video) should get their own cable runs back to the main switch, so they share as little bandwidth with other network devices as possible. Other devices that don't care about some small (really small) increases in network communication times, such as regular computers used for day to day activities, or smart tvs, can handle sharing cable runs no problem. (And honestly, in a home setting, you probably don't have enough network traffic to really cause much quality loss, but again, I don't know the details so that may be incorrect for you.)

If I was working on my own home, and trying to get it cabled for networking, I would do a single cable run to each room with my cabling of choice (I don't know cabling as well I ought to, I'd say Cat 6 but I'd do more research before really making a decision).

As far as there always being a bottleneck in your scenario, the hardware at either end could be upgraded so that even though eventually all the device's traffic passes through one cable, they do so on a higher bandwidth connection, allowing for less congestion than if they had converged at a cheap piece of hardware with more ports.

Hope this helps.

 

[USAFRet]

A single run of Cat5e to each room, with a 10/100/1000 switch as needed, will work fine in a residential situation.

The multiple cable thing is because it costs little more to run two cables vs just one.

 

[BuddhaSkoota]

I've been looking everywhere and can't find the answer. Everywhere I look I see pages of articles that express the need to have multiple ethernet cable runs from the router's ethernet ports to (lets say) a media room. I don't understand the need for that. Can someone explain or direct me to the answer.

In new construction, Cat 5 cable is also used for telephone., so you will often see recommendations for multiple cable runs from the central cable management or patch panel.

When rewiring an existing home, it's done according to the owner's requirements. One cable is fine if that's all you'll need.

 

[indsup]

Video takes up a lot of bandwidth as opposed to normal network traffic. I would have a dedicated run for each video recording and playing device. The rest of your office can deal with a little lag and not be noticed. The video on the other hand will definitely notice if there's lag. But in general you will not have to run dedicated runs if you only have one or two streams of video at a time and that's usually only if its high def.

 

[tdhcsc]

Thanks everyone,

I believe I have the answer to my needs although the question itself may not have been answered.

In my case, 1 run to each room will be fine. It was suggested by the media guy at our yacht club that I run 2 but in reality only for redundancy as , you never know if one will fail. A couple of others on this site said 1 run in my situation would be fine as well. I'm going to go with 2 for redundancy even if 1 cat5e (or cat6) is connected.

I'm still don't understand the difference between taking 1 port out of the router and hooking it to a 2 foot ethernet cable that connects to a fast switcher immediately running multiple wires the 60 feet to the components or using 1 port out of the router and running the single wire 60 feet to a fast switcher and distributing it through multiple shorter wires to the components.at that location. The signal still must go through 1 cat5e, 6, or the internal router switching. Since there's only 4 outputs on the router it's impossible to run all wires separately.

Only guessing here but think that each streaming video feed (taking up a lot of bandwidth) would be better as a single run to the specific equipment. The rest of the stuff taking up less bandwidth can be all run through 1 wire to a switcher. No reason to mix that with hi-def streaming video. Since it's only the wife and I streaming 1, possibly 2 videos at a time we should be fine.

At least thats what I'm assuming.

Thanks for the help.

Dan

 

[bill001g]

You are basically correct it depends on how much bandwidth you need in the remote location. If a application can use the majority of the bandwidth it should have its own dedicated connection.

This is all good in theory but in reality you will never exceed the bandwidth. You normal consumer grade equipment can easily provide up to 1gig of bandwidth using cat5e cable. So lets assume you had some central video server plugged directly into the router. All your remote users would have to share a 1g connection to the server.

That is not as bad as it sounds since even if you stream 4k hd video you might need 30m each. So you could run more than 20 users all watching 4k video and not exceed a shared 1g cable.

Now if say you wanted to run 100 users remotely then you would exceed the capacity of the 1g common cable. But more importantly you would also exceed the capacity of the 1g cable going into the server.

Most these capacity issues are silly to even think about in a home environment. You will never even get close to 1g and that is assuming you have dedicated media servers, internet use will be limited by the ISP. Even so the solution even in commercial installs is not to run more cable you just run cat6a and buy equipment that can run 10g.

 

[colecaz]

I'm still don't understand the difference between taking 1 port out of the router and hooking it to a 2 foot ethernet cable that connects to a fast switcher immediately running multiple wires the 60 feet to the components or using 1 port out of the router and running the single wire 60 feet to a fast switcher and distributing it through multiple shorter wires to the components.at that location.

There is no difference. And anyone who says there is doesn't understand wiring.

What you describe is the ideal topology for local networking. The switch handles all the traffic on the LAN and is designed to do that job well. It sends only that traffic destined for the WAN to the router, which also has a switch built-in but is usually not as capable as a stand-alone switch. Speed to and from the WAN is limited by the ISP service generally and is much less than LAN speed unless you have fiber ISP service.

You could use a switch with gigabit ports to have gigabit LAN and feed a router that has 100 Mbps ports and not notice an impact on WAN speeds since they are usually less than 100 Mbps. If your WAN is faster than 100 Mbps then you need a router with gigabit ports, too.

 

[JSweens1323]

I am waaaay late to this thread, but I am building a new home and running all my own drops so I thought I would toss out a reply.

@colecaz is correct in his answer. @tdhcsc there will be absolutely no difference in your network in terms of speed or bottle necks if you go with 1 drop and use a switch in each room, or run a bunch of cables were each device has its own port in the wall.

The only benefit/downfall to multiple runs to your centralized switch is a single point of failure. Say you have a 24 port switch in the basement that is wired to your ISP router. You can then run 23 of these ports to wall ports or devices in your house. Going this route, you can hook up your ISP router and your 24-port switch to a UPS and you only need to worry about the ISP router or your 24 port switch failing.

If you run a switch in each room and just have 1 run per room, all the small switches in each room now add a point of failure. If they aren't hooked up to an additional UPS and you lose power, the devices hooked to these switches will not have a connection to the network. Also if you find a device in a room not connecting, you now have to trouble shoot at least 2 switches and a router, instead of 1 switch.

In a home, it doesn't matter which way you go. In terms of furniture layout it easier to run 1 drop and use a switch in each room. This way you can slide a desk/couch/whatever right up close to the wall and just have 1 cable to your switch, and then branch out. If you have 4-6 cables going to a wall plate you won’t be able to get furniture as close to the wall, because of how tight the cables are. Then if you bend a cable over 90 degrees you can have degradation of the data flow.

I would just look at cost. What is cheaper? 1 face plate, 1 port, and a cheap 4 port switch per room OR 1 faceplate and multiple ports per room. Remember each cable needs to be terminated and tested which is a pain sometimes. Cable caps and ports cost money.

IMO it’s easier to test 1 wire per room and run a switch with some small patch cables to your devices than running 23 cables across your house and having to test all those cables. However, 23 ports lets you manage your whole network in 1 network cabinet in your basement/garage/wherever. Going with 1 cable also eliminates you having to pull extra cable through a packed conduit, or worse, a non-conduit run. If for some reason the cable ever goes bad, you can just pull the 1 cable out and then you have lots of space in the conduit to pull through just 1 new cable.

Cheers.

 

[nigelivey]

It depends on data flow/bandwidth requirements.

 

[walkur1]

I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that multiple runs allow you to use HDMI extenders or HDBaseT devices. These allow you to relocate all of your source devices (STBs, DVD/Blu-ray players, computers, etc.) to somewhere away from your TV and control them remotely.