Lessons learned from running Cat6 | Nathaniel Read

Lessons learned from running Cat6

From about 2008, we’ve used Comtrend Powerline Adaptors (due to them being shipped free with BT Vision). I’ve never really been a fan of them as if something spontaneously stops working, you can bet they’re the problem. With us getting the new UniFi APs and ceiling mounting them, running cables to each we thought it would be the best time to run cables to the rest of the house too.

Dropping cables was as more of a pain than I thought it would be (old house, solid walls, joists running against us) but so far I’ve managed to connect up the key rooms. Advice I’d give though from this is to get a cable access pole kit (£10 as a Aldi specialbuy woo), they’re invaluable in finding concealed blockages and navigating down walls, also run more cables than you think as with HDMI over Cat6 available you may use cables for other purposes.

I terminated all of my cables in the loft into a 16 port patch panel and with a faceplates in the house, but I’m not done yet as I’d like to future-proof the whole house by putting drops in every room where future devices could potentially go.

My patch panel positioning still has something to be desired (and I need to find a way to mount my Ubiquiti POE injectors) but apart from that it’s awesome to have a network that isn’t horribly sluggish!