Whether you’re wiring a new structure
or rewiring an existing room you should always use Cat 5e UTP (unshielded twisted pair) cable and components for both voice
and data. Today’s home networks run at 100Mbps and require Cat 5 UTP cable. It’s rated for wire speeds of up to
100Mbps (Fast Ethernet). Cat 5e is “Cat 5 extended” which means it’s rated for use up to 1000Mbps (Gigabit
Ethernet). It’s a little more expensive but if you’re going to pull new cable, it’s a good rule of thumb
to pull something that will work today and handle the next generation of equipment. Same is true for the jacks and wiring
blocks. Look for the Cat 5e designator on them.
There's Cat 6 wire also, which is rated
for speeds up to 10 gigabit. It's a larger diameter wire, has a rigid center insulator to seperate the pairs and doesn't
punch in cleanly on Cat 5 components, so it's not a good choice if you're adding to existing wiring. It's also a much less
forgiving wire while pulling and terminating. Anything less than a perfect job will result in transmission problems.
Note: Voice or plain old telephone
service (POTS) only requires Cat 3 UTP cable and components, but runs just fine on Cat 5e. Don’t worry that the Cat
5e jacks are RJ45, not the smaller RJ11 you’re used to using. Your phone cords will fit fine and the contacts will line
up correctly. This allows you the flexibility to use any available wire in the jack for any purpose.
For cable TV you should use RG6 coaxial
cable and connectors.
The best approach is to
pull three Cat 5e UTP cables and 1 RG6 coaxial cable to each jack location. One of the twisted pair cables is for voice, the
other two are for data and the coax is for video. Once again, this is for flexibility. Twisted pair cable has 4 pairs of wire
in the jacket. Voice requires only 1 pair, so the voice wire can be split for up to four separate phone lines. Data, or Ethernet,
requires two pairs of wire. Even though there are four pairs in each cable, you don’t want to split a data wire. This
causes NEXT or crosstalk on the cable and the result is packet loss and retransmits. That’s why you want two data cables.
One for your current network connection, the other for future expansion or other technologies like Power Over Ethernet or
video distribution over twisted pair.
You'll want to use a 110
block for termination of the wires at your distribution point. You can use a standard 110 or you can use a 110 to RJ45 distribution
panel like the Avaya Systimax.
