[conspire] (forw) Re: Need help with a couple technical questions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Josef Grosch (jgrosch at gmail.com):

> I have a little experience wiring multi-story  condos and, yes, it is
> basically impossible to do anything with out buy in from the building
> management. They tend to be territorial about such things.

That's putting it mildly -- but one can see their perspective:  Letting
tenants do such work gets them nothing and has huge and largely
unpredictable potential downside exposure.   The only real question is
how politely they'll say 'no'.

>`Aside from that, rather then running CAT5/CAT6 long distances I would
> recommend running fiber optic between the floors and then CAT5/CAT6 to
> wire the building floor. Yeah, I know fiber is bloody expensive but it
> gets around the problems of long Ethernet runs.

However, in this case, the distances Jennifer was talking about were
well within 10Base-2 thinnet spec -- and using 'thicknet' 10Base-5
(admittedly even more exotic and antique than thinnet in 2014) would
extend that to 500 metres.

You reminded me of another borderline-relevant point I'd intended to
throw in, earlier:  Always jump to the next, slightly-better cabling
standard _early_.  It'll cost 20% more today, but you'll thank yourself
for spending that extra money in no more than a couple of years --
because cabling lasts a long time, doesn't cost very much, and can be
futureproofed for only a tiny premium.

Notice that maximum run length for copper depends on how fast you want
to push it:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable#Category_6a
As you say, fibre optic cable doesn't have that problem.  (If I were
doing a copper cable run 14 floors, I'd not bank on being able to
reliably do better than 10Mbps.)