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On Sun, 16 Jan 2011, Malcolm Blackmore wrote:
The upstairs corridor that runs the length of the house (55'x16', odd long and thin house design) is all up and loosened in order to correct electrical faults - and we are wondering whether it is worth running fibre optic under the boards at this point to terminate in every room in the house. I don't intend to lift this floor again for the next 20 years! It is probably going to be laminated or even tiled due to my daughter's serious problem with allergies. So once it is down it is staying down. How much does it cost per metre for fibre? What size of fibre? I suspect the killer is the cost of fibre to ethernet conversion box or thingummy in each room used! Unfortunately the joists have been really hacked about and due to a particularly incompent wiring job there is little if any space to run multiple instances of gigabit wires without touching electric cable, which can cause eddy currents in twisted pair up to 20 volts and I've killed a couple of ethernet cards in the past where cables have touched.
You must be really, really unlucky. Although I've never done it myself, I've seen cat5 twisted round mains and cable-tied to three phase cabling without any issues. If you want to be paranoid, run shielded cat5e - it's harder to terminate and work with (cable's thicker and there's a foil shield) but it'll be fine. You'll run Gb and 10Gb over it when the time is right... (maybe ;-)
(Actually, looking over at my workbench there's a 16-port switch with 5 or 6 cat5 patch leads coming out snaking over the multi-way mains block feeding into a bunch of phones... It didn't even occur to me to not do it that way)
The only time I've ever managed to blow-up an Ethernet card was after I'd run a cat-5 cable over a TV set to a video phone - connected to said TV - which is a 36" last-generation Sony flat-screen tube TV.. the boing of the degausing coil when I turned it on must have been what blew up the switch - the Video phone was OK...
Wireless is so crowded in our small town, within the local vicinity. it is often not possible to log onto the wireless router.
Sounds like a fault in the router.Do a channel scan and pick the one that's leased used, although sometimes hard - channel 13 is a good one, but make sure everythig else can use it - some US-centric kit only goes up to 11. Remember that a Wi-Fi channel actually uses up +/- 3 channels from the centre. So 1, 6 and 11 don't overlap, but if they're in-use then there's nothing wrong with using 3 or 9, but try to avoid 2,5,7,10, etc. Wi-Fi is so low-powered you really shouldn't get much interference from neighbours.
As an aside can one get better aerials to screw into wireless routers that pump out more power and literally drown out some of the neighbours (wireless wars commence eh).
Yes, but it's not always good - the issue is usually the transmit power in the mobile device not the base station. Use multiple base stations to cover the house - same SSID, differnet channels. (that's what I do)
See e.g.: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/aerials.html I have 2 of these: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/ap700.html Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq