Rewiring Costs

[NT]

Some people may wonder why on earth anyone needs gigabit in a house.

5 years ago some people wondered why anyone would want 100M networking
5 years before that some people wondered why anyone would want 10M networking
5 years before that some wondered why anyone would need 128k broadband.
5 years before that, high speeds like 56k were unheard of.
5 years before that we cursed our 300 baud modems and dreamed of 1k and 2k dialup.

(Timeframes may be subject to unavoidable distortion caused by the Dopler effect of increasing speed)

Since Home wiring is not elementary to replace, the name of the game is future proofing.


NT

 

[Flyfisher]

The good thing about Powerline technology, though, is that it doesn't need any data wiring, so future upgrades are just a case of buying new plug-in units, which is the same with other wired LANs anyway.

 

[Penners]

NT - you forgot that, 5 years before that, we had never heard of a modem or the internet, or hard drives, or mice, or Windows, or... etc. etc.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 that loaded software from a tape recorder (occasionally!).

 

[Penners]

Flyfisher - many thanks for all the advice. I know what to put on my next birthday present list!

 

[Nemesis]

Yes, I had one of those - I even bought a stick on proper keyboard for it, anda printer which printed on long rolls. Not very useful. And cost a fortune.

 

[Flyfisher]

Ahh, IT nostalgia. My first computer was an Apple II but I couldn't afford the floppy disk drive at the time so I stored programs on cassette tapes, which was a real pain. When I finally added a floppy drive I was amazed at having so much storage space available . . . about 140KB per disk!!

I worked on some modem development projects in the early '80s and 9600 baud was the cutting edge. The general view was that this was the theoretical maximum speed for data over nasty old twisted-pair telephone cables - ha! I suppose it was the maximum for the modulation techniques they were using at the time - perhaps a salutory lesson that we can know nothing about things that have not yet been invented!

Penners, you're quite welcome. Let us know how things work out.

 

[Penners]

After my ZX81 and my BBC (32k memory - none of yer 16k rubbish!!) I bought my first business computer, which was a Sirius. It had twin 5.25-inch floppy drives and 128k of RAM. I learned to manage MS-DOS and to program in Basic, and wrote several useful little stock management programs for my company.

I felt like Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future!

 

[NT]

NT - you forgot that, 5 years before that, we had never heard of a modem or the internet, or hard drives, or mice, or Windows, or... etc. etc.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 that loaded software from a tape recorder (occasionally!).

5 years _after_ that I'd never heard of internet, mice or windows. Modems meant BBS to me for a long time.

Hard drives I came across quite early on, I still remember watching a chap spending something like 2 weeks full time trying to get an awe-inspiring 70M HDD to work properly. Hard drives were pie in the sky when a machine with a floppy was over a grand, and even a non-business-proof cassette based system was £400. At that time I was on a networked system where the server had twin 8" floppies. We all knew more space was needed, but thought 70M would last a life time! lol

(I'm writing this on a 486 thanks to the screw-up fairy.)


NT

 

[NT]

The good thing about Powerline technology, though, is that it doesn't need any data wiring, so future upgrades are just a case of buying new plug-in units, which is the same with other wired LANs anyway.

Yes. But it has significant downsides too. The biggest is that its only good for computer networking, you cant hook up your burger alarm, stereo, heating control, lv power and so on over it, or not without much unnecessary complication.

The other thing is that with such a non-ideal wired network its never going to deliver good data rates in comparison to cat5/6/etc.


NT

 

[Penners]

you cant hook up your burger alarm

I've got one of those in my car. Goes off every time we pass a McDonalds.

 

[Flyfisher]

Yes. But it has significant downsides too. The biggest is that its only good for computer networking, you cant hook up your burger alarm, stereo, heating control, lv power and so on over it, or not without much unnecessary complication.

IP networks are a lot more than just 'computer networking' these days. I have connected my hi-fi to my music library using powerline units and it works fine. I also stream video over the same connection. I also have IP-controlled switches that I can use to switch lights on over my network. Ditto for CCTV cameras. I would also bet that IP heating controls are available, although I haven't gone that far (yet!).

More and more appliances are integrating IP networking and use internal 'web servers' to provide the user interface to the equipment. It all sounds complicated but the necessary development kits are only a couple of hundred pounds and the actual chips only a few pounds. And all this sort of 'control data' is very low speed/volume so absolute LAN speed is not a problem. So, Powerline is a simple way of adding wired networking to a home without having to install separate data wiring

I agree poweline is not as 'good' as dedicated network wiring and would encourage anyone to seriously consider installing 'proper' data wiring if they were already undertaking other electrical or building work, but I don't think I'd encourage anyone with a finished property to ignore powerline in favour of a new data wiring installation. Unless, of course, they really did need gigabit speeds, which is possible, but not common.

 

[NT]

I realise a lot can be done that way, but its horribly overcomplicated and overexpensive. That brings a whole shedload of extra work into it, and makes for lower reliability and shorter product life. Maybe its just me but I hate 'solutions' like that. I like everything lean, efficient, low cost and to last a century.

But I have to agree, adding LV wiring to a finished property is none too satisfactory either. Its just for when a window of opportunity presents itself, such as a rewire.


NT

 

[Flyfisher]

I realise a lot can be done that way, but its horribly overcomplicated and overexpensive. That brings a whole shedload of extra work into it, and makes for lower reliability and shorter product life. Maybe its just me but I hate 'solutions' like that. I like everything lean, efficient, low cost and to last a century.

I agree it might have been complicated and expensive 20 years ago but not these days. In the '80s, just connecting a computer and printer from different manufacturers could be a major undertaking and networking usually involved hiring a team of specialists from a major consultancy company. These days, networking is just a matter of plugging together off the shelf boxes costing a few tens of pounds and all the underlying complexity is completely hidden from the consumer - if it wasn't then people wouldn't be connecting to broadband services in their millions.

If you already have a half decent PC then you can have a digital music library (of all your CDs, cassettes, LPs) for freeby downloading the appropriate software. If you want to stream this to your hi-fi it will cost less than the cost of a CD player. Integration is the key; many people already have a PC, a TV, a hi-fi system - maybe more than one - and networking just connects them altogether, making it easier to manage all your music, photos, videos etc.

But I take your point about 'horses for courses', which is fair enough.

As for things lasting a century, I assume that's a jest - or are you still using wax cylinders, photographic plates and cine film? :wink:

 

[Pford75]

I work for Cisco - largest IP networking co. in the world so I must declare an interest.....but what I would say is that we cannot possibly imagine today the bandwidth requirements of tomorrow.

Not that long ago, I was happy with 9600 modem...now I have 8MB. Video is the killer app here - even in parts of Africa where I work, telepresence and video-calling is becoming commonplace....with huge bandwidth and latency issues.



FTTH is the future in pretty much every metropolitan area in the next 2-3 yrs...which means that you probably want to get the biggest, fattest pipes you can fit.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns669/networking_solutions_solution_segment_home.html

 

[Nemesis]

Have you ever felt the modern world is leaving you behind?


Sigh.

 

[Lime]

FTTB or FTTH is definitely the future.

Fibre optic cable has been around for a long time, I was working with fibre optics in the 60s.
Then the world only thought in analogue and we were struggling to produce something that that could produce the light to go down the cable.
Valves were still commonplace and many had difficulty envisaging the use of fibre optics with the fibre's limited length and the wattage needed to pulse light down the fibre.
Then LEDs were feeble and slow being only able to be viewed in a darkened room.
Lasers required huge power sources and were difficult to modulate.

However the potential was there.

In the future, when every house has fibre optic communication, we will look back at this time of cat5/6/etc in a similar way we look back on the semaphore or the ball dropping over Greenwich to tell the time.
(You will notice that both of those forms of communication used light )

 

[Flyfisher]

Don't despair Nemesis; your (and everyone else's) presence here is proof that you're not being left behind.

It's true that the underlying technologies are complex and all the acronyms don't help (FTTH = Fibre To The Home = optical fibres instead of copper cables = much faster communication speeds), but 20 years ago would you have believed you would be using your own computer to communicate with people around the world and have immediate access to a massive wealth of information from around the world?

The challenge is not just to develop complex technologies, it's to make them easily accessible and readily useable. If they fail to do this they'll fail to catch on. So, almost by definition, people don't get left behind unless they make a conscious decision to opt out.

 

[Nemesis]

Actually 20 years ago yes ... the idea of t'interwebbyweavything was around then, although not in the form we know it.

But in another twenty I may not be here to worry about it.

Anyhow I can't even get the wireless stuff to work here. Unless the other half's computer is in the same room with the gadget which is supposed to allow him to acess my Broadband connection it won't work.

 

[Penners]

Have you ever felt the modern world is leaving you behind? Sigh.

You mean that you never have:

huge bandwidth and latency issues.

I've found that over the years my waist bandwidth has grown considerably. As for latency - well, I always seem to be late for everything.

 

[Nemesis]

Yes well - the width problem I must try to do something about, like stop drinking all those empty calories, although the latency thing I'm not sure I can do much about. I'm one of those last minuters who drive people like the other half barmy.