Networking Info Page:

We provide services for pre-wiring houses for telephone, cable and internet.  This service is mostly used by rental property owners who are tired of the damage and expense of having tenants, students, or by the job installers run surface wiring everywhere.  We've seen it all, multiple telephone / cable and internet wiring stacked up on the baseboards, around doors, over / under the carpet and all over the outside of the house.

In our experience there are four main problem areas, 1) access into home through the outside wall, 2) a central distribution point where most equipment can be easily mounted,  3) easy wiring channels to all rooms which require services, and 4) a room panel for connection.   If you provide it, they will use it.  The Bell, cable and internet installers will all use the path of least resistance, make the path you want them to use the path of least resistance.  Now if all or most of these areas are addressed most of your problems will be eliminated and you can then gradually remove all the ugly interior and exterior wiring at your convenience, usually when repainting.

1) Access

This is the first step, provide an easy entrance access point which usually includes an access through the outside wall of the house leading to a central distribution point.  The installers would rather push wires through a pipe than drill another hole through the outside wall into who knows what, a water pipe or other wiring.

2) Distribution Point

Now the installers find a nice area, usually a plywood board in the basement, (or a closet / cupboard), to mount all their terminal blocks, splitters, modems etc.  It's also good to have an electrical outlet here for anything that requires power such as modems and some splitters.  We also identify all cables coming from the rooms and terminate them in the appropriate connector for easy plug and play to the appropriate modem, splitter or phone jack.

3) Wiring Channels / Conduits

All the home networking cables are lead to the distribution point, phone, internet, cable etc, thus connections are easy and quick.  With all the cables identified, it's easy to connect specific services to specific rooms, particularly such things as different phone lines.  If possible we also like to run plastic conduit to the individual rooms, as this provides an easy route for new wiring.  May people elect not to run cable TV wiring to each room, only to find later that cable wiring has been run all over the outside of the house and holes have been drilled through the window trim to gain access to the rooms in question.  If there had been a re-useable conduit to the room, future wiring could have easily been added to that room, who knows we may all be running fiber optics to each room in the near future.

We use only high quality / certified wiring, heavy duty coax for cable TV and the latest Cat 5E cable for high speed internet.  For phone wiring many installers use 4 conductor parallel station wire which is OK for one or two regular phone lines but not dial up internet.   We prefer to use 8 conductor, (4 twisted pair), high performance cable which can handle 4 separate phone lines or a couple of phone lines and high speed dial up internet along with providing some built in backup conductors in case of a problem.

4) Room Connection Panel

The room connection panel is usually a wall mounted box which contains all the wiring and plug in terminals for the services provided such as phone, cable and internet.  This box is usually placed for installation and wiring convenience, the tenant can then run temporary extension cables to the phone, TV or computer.

If this service is of interest to you, please contact us for a discussion of your needs and we would be happen to provide and estimate of what is possible for a particular property.