My new apartment has some ethernet cabling built in, but it’s done in a haphazard fashion:
Cables are coming directly out of the wall instead of terminating in outlets.
One room has cabling which goes to the living room instead of to the central switch cabinet.
I’m thinking about buying some ethernet cabling/wall plates and replacing this myself, but I’m not really sure how difficult this would be. In particular, I’m not sure how to pull a cable from the central switch box to the room which is currently going to the living room. Like, is there a crawlspace/attic where it all goes through that I can access?
Anyone here have any tips or ideas on how to do this?
Or, alternately, who would I even go hiring to install something like this?
That’s what I was afraid of. I guess I could just go from the bedroom to the living room to the switch cabinet, there are already cables set up for that, but it seems better if I can find a way to go directly to the bedroom.
Great that’s what I was hoping—I’ve added RJ45 plugs on to bare cable before, but I haven’t done the actual wall plates themselves.
They look kinda like this. And most types found in Taiwan fit in Taiwan’s standard modular housings
These are customisable cause they’re modular so if you have a plug, you can remove it and put two electrical plugs in and the ethernet in the centre or whatever.
Don’t worry about the red circle. It’s just something I lazily copied from the Internet.
Standard preface - in some jurisdictions working with internal data cabling requires a license. I’m assuming anyone reading this will follow the law
So, you have a cable that goes from a random room to the living room. There’s also another cable that goes from the living room to the “central switch box”.
Am I right in saying that in a perfect outcome, you’ll have two cables - one that goes from the lviving room to the switch box as it does right now, and one that goes directly from the random room to the central switch box?
You’re going to have to sacrifice some cable. Also, if the conduit is too tight you might end up in a worse position that you’re staring with.
What you do is secure a long piece of decent string (no the wooly kind that frays) to the living room end of the cable that goes to the switch box. Pull that cable out from the switch box end, all the way, until you have the string in hand at the switch box end. Cut the string at about double the length. Repeat the procedure for the random room to living room cable.
Buy one of the 100m spools of raw cable. Secure the end of the spool of cable to the random room end and pull it through to he living room using your string. Re attach to the living to the room to central switch box string and pull the cable through to its destination. Cut he spool at the other end leaving spare length for plates. Pull your string back and secure to the cable spool (now in the living room) and restore your original living room to switch box cable.
No crawlspaces in a residential house I think. In my limited experience we removed the electrical sockets to be able to access the space between the wooden panels and the concrete walls to be able to add telephone and network cables.
Some wiring (like airco) tends to run through the lowered ceilings, there you can usually remove the light sockets and access the space.
Make sure you know what you are doing though, and do disconnect the power
My cable guy helped with pulling some cables to various rooms when installing the cable modem, he had a special bendy rod tool that could be shoved in at the room socket and following the conduit in the wall to the net opening. You could ask at your local Shui/Place or your internet provider.
I helped my father-in-law pull some cable at his house a while back and unfortunately this is what happened then…it took about 3-4 hours to navigate two tight spots .
Good point!
Thanks, I’ll do that too! If it saves me a few hours it’s probably worth it.
Actually, you’ve got me thinking, there is one of these in our kitchen area. There’s even a cut-out panel which I can just push up to access (and also various light sockets). The original goal was to install a wireless AP, so on the ceiling there would actually be an even better location than inside the bedroom…
A full diagram of the current house layout and current cabling with marks where you want stuff to go would be helpful to provide a better solution. Also what are you trying to achieve? Do you want everything hardwired or just want to place Wi-Fi APs around the house?
Then I think it would be easier to get one of the mesh wi-fi routers instead or rewiring everything, as long as you can find a way to connect one to another, you will be fine. it will also help with the fact that you will have multiple SSIDs if don’t have a mesh network and those are better at handling traffic from one router to another.
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