Home (Network) Improvement

Summer is (un)officially here and with that, home improvement season has begun too. Do you want to upgrade your home network? Do you want better performance out of LAN? Is your wireless letting you down? While wireless networks’ improved speed, reliability and reduced cost are their ultimate selling point, they still cannot compare in many cases in performance with a wired network.

There are a few things to consider when designing a wired network for your home. There are several different network cable classes with distinct purposes. In a home network capacity, you’ll most likely choose a Category 5e or Category 6 cable. These cables are for high performance networking; they support both can support 1000BASE-T (gigabit) ethernet. The 4 twisted pair unshielded cables are usually 24 to 26 gauge for Cat-5 and 22 to 24 gauge for Cat 6.

Things to consider when building your network are the infrastructure type, Vertical Wiring and Structured Networking. Are you going to pay for a high performance backbone to connect segments of the network from floor to floor? When connecting the smaller LANs, will there be local routing at each level or will there be multiple runs from one main router or switch at your Bridge to the WAN?

When physically building the network, you should also think about sources of interference that the cables route by. Electrical motors, central vacuums and air conditioners may cause interference with your wired network. Can you route the cable in a manner that will reduce their effect on your network? Other physical considerations may include: How hard do you have to pull the cable? What type of bends and curves will there be? The basic guidelines say that a pull force of 25lbs should not be exceeded. When routing your Category 5 and 6 cable around a bend, the radius of the curve should never be less than 4x the diameter of the cable. If your Cat 6 cable is 3/8” in diameter, the radius of the curve should be greater than 1.5”; a 90 degree corner with a radius of 1.5” would be a segment length of 1.77” (safely 2”).

Cable installation is always cheaper when done the first time too. Will you need added capacity in the future? How many more connections might you need to add? How much extra cable should you use? What is the distance of your longest cable segment?

Building a high performance network is as much about the components as the physical wiring itself. If you install high quality cables but use mediocre or slow routers and switches, you won’t see the performance benefit you anticipated.