Guide to Home Network Wiring

Wire Your Home with Network Cable - Complements of Home PC Network

Home PC networking vendors are working hard on network technologies that eliminate the need for basic Ethernet cabling in your home. Most of the major new technologies -- AC-wire, wireless and phone wire -- are all focused on using some means other than standard Ethernet cables (also known as twisted pair, UTP or 10Base-T cable for Ethernet and 100Base-T for Fast Ethernet) to carry network data through your house. (By the way, as some of you may know, there are other types of cables that you can use for Ethernet networks, namely thin coax. Although coax can certainly work just fine in many applications, throughout this "how to" and elsewhere on the site, we stick to UTP since it typically offers more versatility and value.)

Frankly, we think some of the new technologies are promising, but still not mature and stable enough to lead us to throw out our twisted pair cables. If you think about it, all of the effort seems a bit strange. Yes, running cables through the house is a hassle, but how many of us have spent more than a weekend or two running TV cable through the house. In some ways, we have always wondered...what's the big deal? Run some Ethernet cables into a few rooms in the house and you have better stability and maturity (meaning top network performance and lowest price for that performance) than any of the other technologies.

To prove the point, we've developed this "how to" on wiring a home with Ethernet cable. We'll provide detailed, step-by-step instructions with plenty of images to illustrate our points. For this example, we're running cable from our home office to a sun room on the back of the house and one floor down, and to a bedroom on the same floor but several rooms away.

In Step 1, we'll review some of the basics on wiring, detail the materials we selected, and provide a few handy tips. In Step 2, we'll review the basic layout that we used in our example. Obviously, your layout will not be the same. However, you may learn some things from our layout that will help develop your own setup. In Step 3, we'll start the installation by cutting into the wall, running the cables and installing our outlet boxes. In Step 4, we'll install the cables into our wall jacks using special tools and install the wall jacks into the outlet boxes. And, finally, in Step 5, we'll complete the installation by connecting our computers and hubs to the wall jacks, and test the connection. That's it.