After my two parter on networking, IPv6 and wireless, I got a few questions on why I don just use a cable connection rather than dealing with wireless bridges. The answer is, unfortunately, that I don’t have a clean way to reach with a cable from the point where my ADSL is and where my office is, on the floor above.
This is mostly due to bad wiring in the house: too little space to get cables through, and too many cables already in there. One of the projects we have going on the house now (we’ve been working on a relatively long list of chores that has to be done since neither me nor my mother foresee leaving this house soon), is to rewire the burglar alarm system, in which case, I should get more space for my cables — modern burglar alarms do not require the equivalent of four Ethernet cables running throughout the house.
Unfortunately that is not going to be the end of the trouble. While I might be able to get the one cable running from my office to the basement (where the cable distribution ties up) and from there to the hallway (where the ADSL is), I’m not sure of how many metres of cables that would be. When I wired with cat5e cable between my office and bedroom (for the AppleTV to stream cleanly), I already had to sacrifice Gigabit speed. And I’m not even sure if passing the cable through there will allow the signal to pass cleanly, as it’ll be running together with the mains’ wires — the house is almost thirty years old, I don’t have a chance to get separate connection for the data cable and the power; I’m lucky enough that the satellite cable fits. And I should shorten that.
To be honest, I knew a way around my house if I wanted to pass a cable to reach here already. But the problem with that is that it would require me to go the widest route possible: while my office is stacked on top of the hallway (without a direct connection, that would have been too easy), to get from one to the other, without the alarm rewiring, I would have to get to the opposite side of the house, bring the cable upstairs and then back, using a mixture of passageways designed for telephone, power and aerial wiring; and crawling outside the wall for a few metres as well.
The problem with that solution, beside the huge amount of time that it would require me to invest in it, is that the total cable length is almost certainly over a hundred metres, which is the official physical limit of cat5e Ethernet cables. Of course many people would insist telling me that “it’s okay, there are high chance it would still work” .. sure, and what if it doesn’t? I mean I have to actually make a hole in the wall at one place, then spend more than a day (I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to do this in just a day, already had to deal with my wiring before), with the risk of not getting a clear enough signal for the connection to be established. No thanks.
I also considered the option of going fibre optic. I have no clue about the cabling itself, and I know it requires even more specific tools than the RJ45 plugs to be wired, but I have looked at the prices of the hardware capable of converting the signal between fibre and good old RJ45 cabling… and it’s way out of my range.
Anyway, back on topic of the current plan for getting the cable running. As I said the current “cable hub” is in the basement, which is mostly used as a storage room for my mother’s stuff. She’s also trying to clean that up, so in a (realistically, remote) future I might actually move most of my hardware down there rather than in the office — namely Yamato, the router itself (forwarding the ADSL connection rather than the whole network) and Archer, the NAS. Our basement is not prone to floods, and is generally cool in the summer, definitely cooler than my office is. Unfortunately for that to work out, I’ll probably need a real-life rack, and rackmount chassis, neither of which is really cheap.
Unfortunately with that being, as I said, in the future, if I were to pass the cable next month from there, and the signal wouldn’t be strong enough, the only option I’d have would be to add a repeater. Adding a repeater there, though, is troublesome. As I said in the other posts, and before as well, my area is plagued with a very bad power supply situation. To the point that I have four UPS units in the house, for a total of 3750 VA (which is, technically, probably more than the power provided by supplier). I don’t really like the idea of having to make room for yet another UPS unit just for a repeater; even less so considering that the cables would end up being over my head, on the stairs’ passage (yes it is a stupid position to add a control panel in the first place), and while most repeaters seem to be wall-mountable, UPS units are a different story.
So the only solution I can think for such a situation would be to add a PoE repeater there, if needed, and then relay its power through a switch, either in my office (unlikely) or in the hallway near the router (most likely), behind the UPS. Once again here, the factor is the cost.
Honestly, even though I decided not to get an office after seeing costs jumping higher and higher – having an office would increase my deductibles of course, but between renting the office, daily transportation, twice the power bill, and so on so forth, it’s not the taxes that worry me – I wonder if it is really as cheap as I prospected it to be, to keep working at home.
Sigh. I guess it’s more paid work, less free time next year as well.