Setting up Wired Network

[Amp34]

I'm going to wire up my rented house as powerlines just aren't cutting it. As I can't drill holes in walls the easiest way is to go outside through a window and up the outside of the house, into another window. We have a number of wireless devices and three wired devices.

One will be in the room with the router - simple connection.

The other two will be at the far side of the house in separate rooms. My plan is to trail the cable from the router round the outside of the house into one of the rooms and then have a gigabit switch connecting the device (a Synology NAS) and another cable going outside the house into the other room as seen below.

I basically want the fastest possible speeds as the NAS contains 30MB RAW photos and we transfer them around a lot. The router is a Homehub 3 that I may upgrade to an Asus AC router, but both have plenty of Gigabit plugs. This is essentially a temporary solution as we will either be leaving this house in 6 or 18 months. I

assume Cat 5e will be fine, no benefits for Cat 6 in a setup like this? I also like the idea of using flat Cat 5e cable rather than the standard round cable (so it goes through the windows better), again I assume there will be no benefit. Quality of cable? I assume Cat 5e at those lengths is just Cat 5e, no need for hyper expensive cables, just the cheapest is fine? Lastly I assume any cheap gigabit switch will do, or will quality make a high difference?

 

[Amp34]

Thanks for the replies guys.

First off I'm not drilling through walls or windows. I don't want the hassle from the landlord about it. I may be able to steal one hole that is currently used by a redundant "telewest" cable connection, if I can find a screwdriver to undo the "funny" screws...

Running cables in the house is pretty much out as it would involve going through and past about eight doors, much easier to just stick it out a window and round.

With homeplugs I'm getting 5MB/s throughput (real world file transfer) with the gigabit ones. Im pretty sure there are two separate rings. Even then 15MB/s is still deathly slow when you're transferring tens of GB of flea around at a time. I'm likely to get much better throughput with wireless AC!

I'll go with round cat 6 then, looking into it a bit more there is negligible difference price wise. Is it a stiffer cable? I don't intend to use it in the next house, which we plan on buying, as I will be wiring it properly... I've actually had a standard indoor cat5e cable running through windows at my parents house for about 10 years... Still works as advertised! Ill also grab that switch, thanks Gel.

 

[Amp34]

Better quality cable will be stiffer as it should have single strand copper cores as opposed to multi stranded copper clad aluminum etc but for your run I'd be happy to use cat5e,you should get 1Gbps out of that or enough to stream a few 4k HD vids by my calcs.

Can you not make do with wireless until you move or get some wireless repeater/extender kit?

I'm looking to get as fast as possible. That means with AC wireless I'll have to be spending about £300-400 for the necessary router and a couple of dongles. There's also the issue of the Synology NAS being picky with wireless dongles anyway. All that and it probably won't be as fast as just sticking a cable round the outside of the house and spending £30. I will probably get an Asus AC router shortly however for the wireless devices (one of which is a surface 3 and the other a MacBook air, both also used for editing). I want to get at least 50-60MB/s real world throughout from the NAS to the router and the computers, which is on the edge even for the trip/quad channel AC routers, before factoring in walls.