Which CAT cable?

My view is unshielded CAT 5e in plastic trunks for upto 1Gbps running. Run two or three or four  cables side by side. That way you can aggregate for higher speeds and/or run in a resilient mode if you have the correct switching equipment.

Use trunking, so at some point you can swap out with fibre which is probably what we will be using in 10 to 15 years time.

Shielded copper installation are possible but there are careful considerations required for earthing bonding / star earthing points in your house to stop earth loops. Fine for a data centre, probably not appropriate for a domestic setting.

Simon

Building a house you should be aware that CAT cables in the walls are already now a thing of the past, just like speaker cables across the house have become obsolete. Wifi and its sucsessors will run the infratructure of our homes.

Although I sort of agree with the pinkhamster, there are obvious benefits to wired and cat5e is as good as free really, you can pick up 32o metres for like 60 quid so go for that.

there is no benefit in an audio or even I would argue a home environment for anything beyond cat5e. My house is wired with it and I have a 24 port switch with 16 active at the moment. A busy network by most home standards and I have no issues with speed or drop outs.

Concern should be drawn to the router and the switch, the wires connecting them need be nothing more than compliant.

Robbo, CAT6a offers better crosstalk performance and often offers shielding, Probably of not much benefit unless you have runs of 10Gbps or operate in an industrial electrically noisy environment.

With regard to Wifi, it has certainly improved with MIMO and with 802.3ac.. But it is ultimately limited as it operates as a single collision domain or at best split send and receive collision domains..(ac does to start to improve this) which means only one can device can use the network at one time. I can saturate my 802.3ac split send / receive network in certain scenarios just by streaming multiple  instances of 44.1kHz 16 bit FLACs and using Airplay concurrently. A wired switch network allows for multiple devices to share the network at the same time with potentially no bandwidth impact. Therefore for high bandwidth throughput I would always recommend copper or fibre where possible, and leave wifi for the mobile/portable devices.

Simon

Simon,

technically you are certainly right. And in a professional environment I can also not see wifi replacing hard wiring. In a home environment however I consider your scenario a hypothetical instance. In practice I stream 96/24 files without any issues all day long across my wifi (when I am lucky enough to be home, that is ).

Pinkhamster, like you I have no problem streaming Hidef or doing 1.3Gbps data transfers to my NAS from MacBook Pro using 802.3ac. However try doing multiple instances of this on my 802.3ac wifi and the congestion kicks in. No such issue with my wired 100Mbps switched network... 

Simon

of course I meant to say 802.11ac - not 802.3ac sorry for the confusion................