I cleaned up some wiring in my house this weekend as part of my quest to eliminate all 802.11g devices. The only 802.11g devices I had were my old PowerBook which serves as a media server, my iPhone and an old Linksys WRT54G serving as a wireless bridge for everything in my office (Tandberg T150, workstation and printer).
I wire everything to the T56B standard because as any professional will tell you, T56A is so ghetto and outdated. Also that was the first one I memorized. I use the modular Leviton Quickport for all my wiring because they match all of the other plates in my house (I have an odd obsession with Leviton), and the modular system is awesome. You can get plugs for just about anything including RCA, BNC, 6-wire RJ-11, RJ-45, F-connectors, etc.
All of my networking gear is slowly moving to a shelf beneath my basement staircase, which is where I started to run into problems. I was running from a RJ-45 modular connector (female) in different rooms down to my router, where I'd terminate it with a RJ-45 plug (male). I started running into some weird networking issues; my upstairs ReplayTV worked fine and could see the downstairs one, but the downstairs ReplayTV couldn't retrieve the guide from the upstairs one. My cable testers were also complaining about the connection between upstairs and downstairs, but it wasn't clear why.
It turns out that you shouldn't have a cable run with a 110-type (punch down) connection on one end, and a modular RJ-45 plug on the other. The 110 Punchdown guide on CablesToGo claims this violates the EIA Cat 5 wiring standards, but there's no way in hell I'm going to read those so I can't confirm this is true. I threw together a few short patch cables, punched down some connectors and my networking problems went away.
The new wiring was also a success. I've got 1Gbit running everywhere I need it, both ReplayTV's work and the WRT54G can eventually become a dedicated 802.11g access point. Right now things look like this:
Tags: wiring
November 24th, 2009 at 4:51 am
In this day and age, it’s cheap enough and reasonable enough to wire your house wirelessly. The need to run cables is pointless.
If your house has already been wired that’s one thing but almost everything has a USB port making it feasible to make your whole house 802.11 something.
Hopefully someone never needs this information.