Ideal Home Network (Hardware) Setup?

You're probably going to hear a lot of people saying "go wireless." It's not a terrible option, but I'm not going to tell you to do that because I personally think that going wired is the best solution for home installations. In my own house, I ran all of the cabling myself. I also have a wireless connection, but that's my "play network" where I mess around with war drivers...

You first need to ensure that you feel confident doing the installation. It'll mean crawling around in your attic or being up on a ladder and peeking behind the walls in your house to get the wires installed. You should also ensure that you know how to punch down and test wires. Every manufacturer of equipment makes it rather easy for anyone to do, given you have the gumption and tools to do it. You will require a punch down tool, ladder, insulated staples, staple gun, a sharpie marker, a cable tester (optimally), and fish tape or fiberglass push rod. You'll obviously need the cabling, face plates, RJ45 modules, a patch panel, and server to do the job as well.

Thus said, here's what I recommend for running the cabling and I'll say that it all depends on your house layout:

Whenever possible, run all cabling within the walls and use solid core wiring. Sometimes this may be hard to do because you'll need to run horizontally because you don't have access to get right where you want the connection. Obviously, going horizontal requires putting holes through studs in the walls... That cannot be done without either a super long bit or putting holes in the walls. I don't recommend taking out parts of walls if you don't have to. There may be other ways to get it where you need it.

I've found that using the basement is the best way to get to most of the walls in the house. The attic is the second option. Rooms without attics or basements above/below them are challenges. There may be a crawl space that you can use above or below it. Hopefully it's big enough.

Get yourself a fiberglass push rod or metal fish tape to use to get the wires where you want them. You can also use the fish tape to get a good idea where to put the holes in the basement/attic by tapping it inside the wall and having a partner try to locate the exact location in the header/footers.

Because you are going to need to put outlets in the walls, you can locate those outlets and put the holes in the walls for the faceplates. The faceplates/openings in the walls are about 2x4" so you have a place to either fish a pull tape down, or the wires through. When you are installing from the basement, you'll probably want to use a fish tape and push it through from the basement and grab it at the hole in the wall. When you are going from the attic down, you start from the attic.

In the basement, you can use a staple gun with insulated staples to tack up the wires to the studs. I don't recommend using a wire rack or raceway because I think it will draw more attention to the wiring than to simply have it hung with the staples. This way, it'll look similar to your house wiring with the romex staples.

If you're going to have a server, you may as well do a nice job and stick it and the patch panel in a cabinet. Ensure that it has proper ventilation for cooling. Your other option is to put a swing bracket for the patch panel and install the server anywhere you choose. See the link below: the swing bracket is at the bottom of the page.

You can get most of what you need at Lowes or Home Depot. They carry ladders, Cat5e cabling, punch down tools, face plates, RJ45 modules, fish tapes, pull cord, insulated staples, staple guns, possibly a cable tester, and may have a patch panel. I think they have 24 port panels. You can get the sharpie marker at any office supply store. That's used to label all of the cables when you run them. Make sure that the patch panel and RJ45 are the same wiring configuration (TIA-568A or TIA-568B). 568B is the more popular and some panels and modules have both on them. Make sure you punch them down to the proper one.

I hope this doesn't scare you off doing the job. It's really not that tough to do and will give you better throughput than wireless, considering that the best wireless connection to date is 108Mbps. Remember, wireless connections achieve only half of their stated throughput, so 108Mbps will do the best of 54Mbps throughput... See third and fourth article below. You'll hear differently, but it's a fact. This is why wired is still your best option if throughput is your goal, especially considering that a 5 port 1Gbps wired switch is cheaper than it's ~108 Mbps wireless competitor.

WG