Home networking and Insulated Walls
I was all excited about wiring my house with CAT5 when I first moved in, and stayed motivated up through getting my first run installed. After that the love affair was over.
Soon after getting the first run installed, I realized that there is no clear or easy path to run the rest of the wire through out the rest of the house. All of the walls that I can reach are insulated, and all of the interior walls that are not insulated are impossible to reach with out pulling out sheet rock and insulation. What to do?
[tangent]Every time I mention this to anyone the first and obvious answer is wireless. Believe me I thought of that already and as a matter of fact that is already capart of the grand scheme. However wireless alone will not be enough. I need more throughput than wireless offers. Not much more but the paltry 10Mbits that 802.11b offers will choke when I’m backing up data or streaming video across the network from say a file server, and/or moving various large files
around such as CD/DVD ISOs. 802.11g would be sufficient @ ~50Mbit, but should an 802.11b device connect to the access point then everything slows down to 10Mbits. I want the network to be as accessible as possible. In order to keep my primary throughput from hitting the floor when an 802.11b device enters the picture, I have decided to get a second access point to serve 802.11b/g and then set the existing access point to only allow 802.11g. Since this helps us avoid a network wide slowdown when an 802.11b device is introduced we have partially solved our problem.[/tangent]
Ok, now that that’s over with lets get back to the original post; running CAT5 through the insulated exterior walls. Ultimately the only major issue with running the cable is getting a run through a single point from the top floor to the bottom floor. Once that is done, I can easily run cable to any point on the first floor via the crawl space under the house. I was thinking that I could use some sort of tube, and feed that down from an accessible point on the top floor down to the an accessible point on the bottom floor. But I’m still not completely convinced that this will work as well as it sounds. I’m also concerned about the network cable running past electrical wires that might cause interference. I suppose I could probably find an insulated tube. In any case it ultimately feels like a hacked up solution. But supposing that this works, and I get the first floor run I still have the top floor to deal with.
Since some of the rooms have zero accessible space around them on all side, and the other rooms have zero accessible space on the walls where I would like to install the cable. Short of re-sheet rocking the offending walls in these rooms and their respective ceilings how would you attack this problem?
