Three Reasons Why Your Home Needs Data Cabling

Now that we have great wifi solutions for the home, you might think there aren’t many advantages to getting data cabling installed. There are still some good reasons to think about data cabling in a modern home.

For more information about data cabling on the Gold Coast, talk to TES Property Group.

Reason For Data Cabling One: Reliability and consistency

Have you experienced this, you’re watching Netflix (insert streaming service of choice if you’re not a Netflix subscriber) and suddenly if buffers. You think to yourself, it’s been working perfectly for months, why now?

That's a fairly common scenario. Wireless bandwidths are shared bandwidths and vagaries such as your neighbours' usage can affect your wifi.

Large metal objects can affect it. I know an incident that highlights this particularly well. A client of IT company Pogo moved his laptop to the other side of a bench of lost wifi. What he'd done was move closer to the fridge. When he moved a meter back away from the fridge his wifi returned.

Illegal use of bandwidth is possible also. We spoke to a communications regulator years ago and were told this is not uncommon. It was his job to find these culprits and he had many a story.

Or maybe your son is downloading a huge new file he just has to have.

Or your home wifi you might have sufficient speed to stream when there are ideal conditions. But you may perhaps only have 10% of the total bandwidth available. That is not uncommon. Let's say you're streaming 100Mbs into the house. At 10%, you're still getting 10Mbs so you're aware of the drop between home NBN connection and your device. Netflix will stream nicely on less than that. Until someone else in the home gobbles up a lot of bandwidth and your 10Mbs drops to 1Mbs.

A data cable into the back of your smart television will solve all that.

It's the same with online gaming. If you have a son (or daughter) who is complaining about lag destroying their gaming, then connect them via cable. We're well aware of how annoying teenagers can be when their gaming is compromised. A data cable can make those problems go away.

And of course the same applied to a home office. Zoom meetings, VPN connections, remote desktops...all depend on good connections to the internet.

Reason For Data Cabling Two: Better Wifi

This one sounds like a contradiction. But hear me out.

In many homes, the wifi doesn't reach one end of the home to the other properly. Perhaps you've installed an extender to improve the strength of the signal. But the extender loses speed with each hop. Even modern mesh wifi systems will lose speed with each hop. This means you might be getting a strong signal at the other end of the house but you're only getting half or a quarter of the speed.

The way to fix this is with data cabling. You can run a data cable directly to the auxiliary wifi units (whether they extenders or mesh wifi) and have them pumping out wifi at full volume.

If you're using a modern mesh system you might find that it supports POE (power over ethernet), meaning you don't have to power the wifi access point separately. This makes for a neat wifi installation without excess power cables hanging out. You can even use a in-wall wifi unit from TP Link or Unifi that mounts as a wall plate.

Reason For Data Cabling Three: Security Cameras

Security cameras are becoming more popular in the home these days. There are a number of smart solutions from Netgear, Google, Nest (etc...it's becoming a big list) as well as standard solutions that involve installing an NVR (network video recorder) and connecting digital cameras to it.

Both of these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. We won't go into them here. If you are opting for security cameras, what doesn't change is the importance of network cabling.

First, if you're looking into smart cameras you can now get some that have wifi and batteries. These don't need cabling then? Yes, true. Except, see reasons One and Two. Moving data around wirelessly can impact the speed of the entire network. Also, these cameras tend to cost more and come with overheads such as the need to recharge them. A camera that is cabled will be more reliable.

You can also run most security cameras via POE. That means you're plugging directly into the network for data and you're powering the camera via the same connection. This is a much better solution than the old analogue cameras that required a video cable and a power cable separately.

In Summary

Whether you're running a home office and want a reliable connection, or you're wanting to avoid interruptions to your Netflix and chill, data cabling is still a great addition to your modern home. It'll provide speed, consistency and reliability. It can be used to grow and improve your wireless network. Or you can protect your home with security cameras.