Wiring up your home can be a monumental task, depending on whether you’re planning to run cables outside, along the floor, or inside walls. I opted for the second option since drilling channels into some stone walls wasn’t my idea of an enjoyable weekend or two. It wasn’t exactly the “right way,” but then again, so long as it works, it doesn’t really matter, which is precisely what my network became.
Because of the property in question, we had to use more Ethernet cabling than initially planned. It’s an 1800s English cottage with a more recent extension. Half of the building is solid stone, which is absolutely disastrous for the Wi-Fi signal. We had a single access point (AP) when moving in, which handled connectivity on one side of the house. Every other room largely struggled to receive any signal at all.
That’s when we switched things up internally. The original plan was to run fiber links between the detached garage and office buildings, terminating in a network switch inside a central room inside the main house. That’s still the case, but we had to be more strategic with AP placement. Instead of having just one in the same room as the switch, using power over Ethernet (PoE), a second would need to be installed upstairs.
Wi-Fi is convenient
Ethernet is reliable
The reasoning for going with an Ethernet backbone and wireless APs is to avoid flaky Wi-Fi in specific rooms and buffering on the big screen. It’s only when we actually got to laying everything out and seeing how our Wi-Fi 7 APs handled the materials used to build the house that we encountered issues. To remedy this, I opted to use Cat6 to join multiple rooms together. What I wasn’t ready for was working out that I should have spent an additional $50 on Cat6a.
Cat6 is great for home networking. It supports 1Gbps as standard, like standards before it, but Cat6 can also handle 10Gbps up to 55 meters. That sounds like the perfect solution since most homes won’t require more than a couple of meters at most. I convinced myself that I didn’t require 10Gbps outside of the fiber links between buildings, but that was fairly shortsighted with how things are progressing. 10GbE network parts are cheaper these days.
If I had to do my home networking again, I would opt for Cat6a for the small additional cost to ensure I have the best cabling possible for my setup (without spending too much and choosing overkill cabling). Wiring through the house, even when not drilling holes and pulling cables through walls, is simple and cheap enough, but doing it all over again isn’t. We did re-insulate the outbuilding, which became the office, and ran Cat6 through the walls, and this is something I wouldn’t wish to revisit.
If you were to go through drywall inside the home, the cost of cabling (the difference between Cat6 and Cat6a) is somewhat trivial when compared to opening up drywall, fishing cabling through tight spots, and working around any obstacles along the way. After completion, it’s easy to spot the cable as the most affordable part of the entire process, be it time or monetary cost. That’s what makes the jump to Cat6a so enticing when starting over.
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We made better use of multi-gig than expected
5GbE and 10GbE hardware are cheaper
I had planned everything out within the home network with a single Threadripper server for running just about everything, as well as a network-attached storage (NAS). 10GbE may continue to feel beyond excessive for most homes, and it absolutely is, but if you’re a little more serious about the home lab or kitting the home out with smart devices, it can become almost required.
It’s great for larger file transfers. We’re producing and storing more and more data with each passing year. Bringing all that home and self-hosting it will require a network that can cope with it. 4K file editing with remote storage can also make better use of higher bandwidth, and that needs to be the case when you’ve got automated backups moving across the wires.
Cat6 is great for speeds up to 10GbE. It most definitely supports ridiculously high file transfer speeds, but it’s not quite as Cat6a. We’ve got large enough libraries to warrant going above 1GbE, but should you stop at 2.5GbE or 5GbE if 10GbE hardware can be sourced at nearly the same price? Keeping tabs on classified sites is a great way to pick up used enterprise and prosumer gear that can transform your home network.
We’ve gone through which cable type you should choose (tl;dr, it’s Cat5e), and that’s true for most homes that don’t really have much more than short meter-long Ethernet links between the ISP router and a few devices like a console, NAS, or TV. Cat6 is recommended for the backbone of a home network with more serious throughput and activity. Cat6a is simply a better version with enhanced shielding and frequencies.
2.5GbE is the real home upgrade, not 10GbE vanity bandwidth
Unless market conditions are right for the higher speed, of course
Cabling is cheap
Your time and effort aren’t
I’m not regretting my decision to hastily purchase Cat6 cables for getting the home network up and running. It’s serving us seriously well, and I have no doubt it’ll handle 10GbE without much trouble, but there’s always the risk that we could encounter some interference somewhere along the line, especially within a home this old that could have been avoided or mitigated with Cat6a cabling. It’s not guaranteed, and we’ll likely be fine, but there’s always a chance.
And that’s the last thing I want to encounter. Thinking, “Well, I should have just spent a little more and gotten Cat6a just because.” That thicker insulation may come in handy one day. We’ve got PoE cameras, numerous IoT hardware, and other devices that can all produce electromagnetic noise. Over time, we’ll likely add more as things progress. Cat6 is amazing, yet Cat6a would have simply been better.
Fetching that better cabling would have removed all doubt post-installation, extended the lifespan of the install before it would inevitably need to be pulled up, and unlocked more future upgrades.
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I didn’t expect a single cable could bring my network to its knees.
Should you go with Cat6a?
Probably not. Cat6 is likely more than capable for your home network, especially if you have shorter runs and don’t plan on moving up the chain to handle massive amounts of data quickly. If you don’t care for 10GbE and making the most of your network performance, Cat6 and a decent 2.5GbE switch will handle most tasks you can throw at it, especially with today’s hardware. 5GbE and beyond will likely require PCI cards and other NIC upgrades.
So, why bother with Cat6a? It was almost the same price as Cat6 and wasn’t really that much more of an expense in the greater scheme of things. Again, I don’t outright regret my choice, but it’s something I’ll likely return to further down the road. What would I do differently? I’d run Cat6a to the rooms required, as well as leave pull strings within the walls to make future upgrades easier.
