Home network setup is easy if you follow these simple tricks yourself at home. It is easy to home network setup yourself with these simple devices on your own without any expert. You may have ever had to ask a friend for their toolbox and in it, in addition to finding the usual hammers and screwdrivers, you have found a bag full of RJ45 plugs. No, that friend is not in the business of tapping phones: that friend makes his own network cables at home.
In large surfaces and online stores like Amazon we can find these cables easily and to the length we want, but there are certain people who prefer to have the basic parts of these cables and make them themselves. We have spoken with several of these people to find out why they do it.
If you want to do home network setup, do it yourself
Javier Lobo, a veteran systems administrator and expert who has preferred to launch an ethernet cable network in every corner of his house (which took him days), explains what tools these are. It all starts naturally with buying a generous roll of network cable, like this one 100 meters and Cat6 to support local 1 Gbps bandwidth. Along with the cable, another basic thing is the RJ45 connectors that will go on each end of the cables that we make. Here’s a pack of one hundred. Lobo has done his home network setup himself at his home without an expert.
Then we will need the tools to strip, cut and crimp the cables that we make according to our needs, which are usually sold in sets and complete cases. And if you already want to get honor plates in aesthetics and pass the cables through the pipes of the electrical installation so that they are not visible, you will need a cable gland, lubricant (yes, lubricant) and some rosettes that provide some aesthetics. And if you have to connect a lot of devices in a room, you will probably need switches like these.
In total, and depending on the amount of cable required and devices to connect, we can already see that the material costs will be at least $150. Is it worth making this outlay when Wi-Fi networks are increasingly powerful? For Javier the answer is totally yes.
“In the long run, the effort pays off. Moving a 4K movie from my server to my Apple Cable TV is always going to be faster and more satisfying. I’m not going to have buffering breaks or drops in quality. Large transfers files are noticeably faster and more stable over cable. In addition, the cable uptime is 100%. Even if the internet goes down for some reason, the local network continues to function if there is no power failure. WiFi can suffer interference, saturation channels, noise and bandwidth drops “
If a device can be connected by ethernet cable at Javier’s house, it is connected by cable. Strategic places such as the television cabinet in the living room or the computers in the office are connected using Switches, she says, in order to properly distribute the signal.
Javier points out to me what was his main obstacle when it came to mounting all the wiring: the difficulties that can arise when using the cable gland to route the network cables through all the interior conduits of the walls of the house. “Normally there are ‘macaroni’ free to be able to pass the cables that you want, but sometimes it is not like that and you have to go to sack. That’s when passing a cable through gutters where there is more wiring can be hell”.
It’s that part of the job that Javier has had the most problems and mistakes with. He insists that we use special lubricant to pull the cables, since he verified in his own meat how to use ordinary dish soap (some people use it as a homemade lubricant) causes sticky remains all over the cable, which precisely prevents them from remaining.
Home network setup of cables to work, but also to play
Paco Fernández, technician who works in Barcelona, is another person who also decided on his day to make the effort to pass home network setup with cable for his house:
“I don’t like relying on Wi-Fi to download content or play games, because I lose a lot of latency in games and I like having a stable 1 Gbps to send me anything I want to see on other devices through the local network. I took advantage of a moment when I had I had to change the electrical installation of my apartment and I also began to add ethernet cables “
At the time of installation, Paco used Category 5e cables, which at the moment he does not plan to change since the speeds of the Spanish fiber optic plans do not exceed the speed of 1 Gbps. The technician is more optimistic about the Wi-Fi networks of the future, saying that he does not rule out using them if they one day exceed the performance of cables. Javier, on the other hand, defends that the ethernet cable will always be between the walls of his house.
Someone who avoided the work of running cables through the bowels of the walls of his house is Fernando de Córdoba. Seeing that telecommuting is going to be something much more common in the remainder of the pandemic and in the time that will come later, he decided to wire his office to avoid the rather poor bandwidth that came to him with the Wi-Fi router.
“In general, the connection is very unstable, and I have tried different routers, Wi-Fi channels and providers, even technologies (cable, fiber and ADSL). From time to time I drop Wi-Fi … and for work it is complicated, imagine if he catches you in a virtual meeting or working remotely. I live near a military installation so I think that’s why. Either that or I have a Luddite ghost at home. “
For Fernando, Crimpar the cables turned out to be “a traumatic shock
Fernando’s solution has been to pass the cable out, fixing it with staples just above the turlfide of the floor and drilling holes to pass it from one room to another. It is the first time that it has dared to it from a network cable roll, and for it the biggest challenge has been crimpar the cables:
“Crimpar is a hell. At first, innocent of me, I thought” Let’s see, it’s a cable in a plastic box, it can not be for so much “, and I cut it with scissors a little as God gave me to understand. A chaos. Meter the eight Cable.
When crimping the cables, Javier also gives us a tip to avoid frustrations: not cutting the cable too short at the ends: “You have to leave a margin of error in case we fail to crimp and we have to cut a little more the cable”. In the words of Fernando, he will consider wiring the area of his television in the living room “when the traumatic shock is passed” from crimping the dispatch cables. From his periplus he leaves several recommendations to all of us who plan to use cable in our house: Buy Sobra material, always prioritize it before the Wi-Fi and demand integrated network cable at the time of buying new construction flats. Creating own home network setup is easy if we follow guidance of these people.