In article ,
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2010-07-07, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2010-07-07, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
"J. Clarke" wrote:

[ ... ]

[snip]

Granted, I have a friend with an old house where it does not
work well at all. The walls are not drywall, but rather real plaster
over metal mesh. But I can't imagine an electrician knowing enough
about that to even diagnose the problem. :-)

Eight or nine years ago, I paid an electrician to install the CAT5e cable
from
basement to my wife's office on the second floor, and I will say that the
electrician and his helper earned their pay on that one. It's an old
house,
with wood lath plaster and strategically-placed bricks as fire-stops. It
took
hours, and they were working all the while.

Sounds like you are thankful that *you* did not try to do it
yourself. :-)

Absolutely. I've pulled my share of wire over the years, and old houses are the
worst.


I then terminated and connected the installed cable. It works just fine.

Of course.

Installing that wire probably cost what a full WiFi setup would have cost,
but
once installed the wire just works, needs no sysadmin effort, has no
security
drama, and has far greater data capacity than the WiFi of the day. Only
recently have wireless LANs even approached the theoretical datarate of a
CAT5e
wire. In practice, wireless LANs rarely achieve anything like the capacity
of a
cable.

Of course. I've got a wireless bridge running to a friend's
house across the street and down one house -- using circular waveguide
antennas which I machined up. Encryption enabled, good aggressive
firewall on each end, and all logins from one side to the other via ssh.

I'm assuming that you added the waveguide antennas to standard wireless LAN
equipment.


If I ran cable today, it would be CAT7, which supports gigabit datarates,
far
exceeding any likely wireless LAN technology. The CAT7 wire is expensive
to be
sure, but installation costs will swamp the wire cost.

But the current 100 megabits per second is more than sufficient.

Certainly. I'm running my home directories from a server on
another machine, and the speed is quite adequate for most things. If I
want to run find(1) on the home directory, I do that on the server
itself, of course.

Actually, the best thing to install is plastic conduit, if one has the
opportunity to do it reasonably easily, like if the walls are already open
for
some other reason.

Hmm ... specifically plastic? Is there a problem running
twisted-pair ethernet in close proximity to a metal surround? I know
that some of the network wiring we installed at work was shielded
four twisted pair cable. Or is plastic conduit simply less expensive?

CAT5 and CAT5e are not shielded, so running in steel conduit may cause
unexpected losses and reflections. But I have not tried this. CAT7 is
shielded, so running in steel conduit would have no effect. I don't recall if
CAT6 is shielded, but I think it is unshielded. J.Clarke may know more.

But my reason for plastic was economic, not technical.

Joe Gwinn