Internet-Ready Houses For Sale

nilrake writes "A bit on NY Times talks about new homes are that being built Internet-Ready. " Hmm...I always figured a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house *grin*.

Wiring a house for ethernet

For under $300 I was able to wire my entire house for 10/100 ethernet. The largest part of that bill was the ~$190 that I paid for the 10/100 switching hub.

I have been thinking about throwing up a page documenting the process.

LK

Now Your Home Can Be Rendered Obsolete!

The problem is that communications technologies will continue to improve and may require upgraded wiring. For example, a friend of mine paid to have his house wired with Cat5, cable (with central hub), multi-room stereo, etc.

Since his house was built, the local cable acess provider has upgraded its system to support cable modems, but my friend's hub is too old for it. Gigabit ethernet requires either fibre or copper with a grade higher than category 5. Now, good home theater preamps support multi-room video as well as audio. He will need to upgrade his wiring anyway if he wants to take advantage of this new technology and his house is only a few years old.

The problem exists because people tend to keep their houses longer than the cycle of obsolescence for computer components. As a result, even people who purchase these wired homes will have to pay large sums of money to upgrade their wiring if they want to stay on the cutting edge.

Re:Helped do this once

Yeah, I was going to wire my bathrooms too, but my wife nixed that.
-russ

Conduit

Run conduit. I ran some, but not enough. I should have run it to every room.
-russ

Hrmm..

so I guess when they say Internet-Ready, they make up the cost of running cable and stuff by not installing windows, right? I mean, who needs to look at this thing that's called the "outside"?

direct link

.. The obligitory link without login [nytimes.com]
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New Mastercard commerical...

500' spool of cable - $68
SOHO cable set (crimper, tester, rj-45's, punch down tool, booties) - $110
Tie wraps and glue clips - $6
Beer to convince friends to help - $24
The ability to surf porn and IRC from your room - Priceless

When the wireless solution you bought doesn't work with Linux, there's always Mastercard.

(Sorry, just did this project last week. `8r) )

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Historic neighborhoods, abandoned houses...

I've jumped into a project that might be of some interest to some folks here.

I've recently purchased and begun renovating a 114+ year-old house in North St. Louis. The neighborhood is pretty run-down, but it is going to come back to life in the next few years (I'll make sure it does). The house is about 4000 ft^2, and cost me $4,500. It's an all-brick structure, but in need of a complete replumbing, rewiring, and refinishing inside. The windows are boarded up, etc.

The place is gorgeous, though. It has big, nice wide woodwork, a spiral staircase, balcony porches, and a big, big room in the attic that will be my lab (I even have computer-room flooring to put in it now... :).

What I'd be interested in are opinions here, and maybe leads to more information - are there other geeks out there who, like me, love beautiful old houses and unique architecture, who can (and are eager to learn how to) remodel houses, and who would like to participate in a NAN (neighborhood area network - did I coin a new term?) with perhaps a shared fat-pipe to the Internet?

I'd like to be able to get together a partnership with a/some telecomm company who'd like to score a big PR coup, and to accelerate the rejuvenation of this beautiful neighborhood.

Will geeks move buy and move in if such an opportunity arose?

--Corey

I hope this marks the start of a new standard

I've looked at a couple of "internet ready" homes in the last couple of years. The houses were wired internally with cat5 cable and a small ISDN router, but there was no permanent broadband connection to the internet. That is not "internet ready" by my standards.

This story shows a construction company that gets it. They are laying 2 conduits for fibre directly to each home in their estate, just like they now add connections for all the other utilities like electricity, gas, water and telephone. All that an internet provider has to do is lay a line out to this development, and tie into hundreds of waiting customers.

I'd really like to see housing estates with a clued-in homeowners association running their own router for the area. Then different ISPs would be invited to connect to the estate's POP, and each homeowner could choose their provider and switch between them depending on service and price. The estate could then run fibre to neighboring estate POPs and run local routing which wouldn't need to traverse an ISP, a true Metropolitan Area Network. Since the fibre would have a lot of unused bandwidth (except to my house), they could re-sell the bandwidth to local businesses and cut out the phone companies completely.

Aaaahhhhh, but I'm dreaming of a distant utopia :-)

the AC

[ for those who are building an internet ready house, where I live there are 7 routers, 100baseT running to all rooms in the house, with DSL, cable, ISDN, and wireless connections to several different ISPs in the area. Beat that :-]

connectivity first, competition second

The first phase of internet ready homes just have to market the fact they have a connection.

The next phase of internet ready communities will have to differentiate themselves by allowing several choices of connection, or perhaps just route to a regional tier 2 carrier with no filtering or firewalling. Or to be family friendly, offer a choice of a raw pipe or tie the connection to the community firewall/filter system.

There were several companies mentioned in the article who are jumping into the market to run the connections for these housing estates. It certainly sounds like a niche market for some smart people. I hope they are smart enough to offer more than just AOL, @HOME, and some other lame pseudo-internet connections. Certainly home-buyers, especially us internet-savvy post-IPO-vested nouveau-riche, will decide which housing estate to look at based on positive reports about good connectivity. Housing developments that only offer AOL will soon find the money goes somewhere else.

the AC

Yuck!

What kind of a house has all the network wires run in the walls? That takes all the fun out of having wire runs along the ceilings and the floors! It totally ruins the nerd look.

Wired Home

I'm actually a bit suprised that this is 'newsworthy'.. I would think that by now a lot of homes should be built with some sort of consideration toward a high speed connection - apparently this is not the case.

According to Jo Chapman, director of surveys at the National Association of Home Builders, only 5 percent of new homes come with "structured" wiring, the fatter in-home pipe needed to get the most from broadband service.

And just how 'fat' are those pipes anyways? I always thought that if I built a house I would do the basic ethernet cabling, but I would also put in some sort of open-ducting in the walls so that 'fatter' cable for other purposes could be run from room to room fairly simply in the future.
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Re:As a builder...

We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.

FWIW, I'm remodeling my 10-year-old home now (not worn out, but it suffered from terminal architectural boredom), and I used to be a telecom consultant making recommendations right down to the wiring, so here are my general recommendations:

First, I'm cheap, so I only want to spend money where I'm fairly certain I'll get it back. You can pull fiber everywhere, but then you'll choke at the cost of network electronics (priced optical hubs lately?), and you still won't have the right type or grade 20 years from now and will pay a premium to deal with weird media. You have *no* idea how much really expensive cable I've seen abandoned in place just because someone decided "we might use it someday".

What to pull: The most I could justify is two jackets (w/ 4 pair ea.) of Cat-5 to each location. This is enough to still let you keep analog and digital in separate jackets and you still have plenty of pairs left over for future use. (For instance, in the digital jacket you'd use just half the pairs for 10 or 100 Ethernet, and in the analog jacket you could have two phone lines, the cable, and still another unused analog pair - that's probably plenty.) Try to keep analog and digital in separate jackets, and remember that although the phone loop itself is 48V max, the ring signal is a 90V square wave. If you're still paranoid and have money to burn, pull a third jacket, but I bet you'll never use it.

How to Pull It: This is one of the most important considerations. When doing my remodeling, I took advantage of a leftover triangular space to put a storage niche and wiring center. You want to "home run" everything, that is, everything is a star topology running from the outlet to your wiring closet. You may need more or less space depending on what's going to be located there. Although your first inclination is to put your servers, etc, there, you might later find this is inconvenient. I have one rule that works for me: If it can't hang on the wall (there's a sheet of plywood there to act as a substrate), it doesn't go in the wiring closet. Consider ventilation and power requirements, especially if you want many computers there. This is the one reason I'm a fanatic about low power machines for server use (I use a Laptop and a "cash register computer" for my Linux servers): I hate paying for all the KW-hrs big servers burn, and I also don't want to have to worry about special A/C or power requirements. Remember the trend is for things to become much lower-power, so skipping the dedicated 30A circuit and A/C duct should be fine. Hard conduit, whether steel or PVC is quite expensive and is not required by code in most places, so avoid it if you can. It can make pulling things later much easier, but if there's much "snakiness" in the run you'll usually wind up using whatever was already in there as your pull-cord for the new stuff, anyway. Electrical and building supply places sell a blue corrugated flexible conduit commonly called "smurf tube" that can be great for getting through the tough spots or as a tough sleeve when for instance, crossing through metal studs. Just keep in mind before you start that it's *much* easier to pull wire in new construction before all the walls, cielings and floors are there than aftterwards. You can spend all day failing to get wire into some places if you're not realistic about your experience level.

Cable Wiring: Some purists may disagree, but the frequency response and noise immunity of good Cat5 cable is so impressive that I really don't think there's any need to go to the trouble (and considerable expense) of pulling coax any more. Use balun transformers instead - you can even buy them integrated into F-connectors now, so your coax gear plus right in.

Termination: This is where things can get expensive, especially if you go with the slick looking prepackaged wiring boxes like they're putting in the new homes. In reality, most of them are just way overpriced 110 blocks, RJ jacks and cable splitters. Again, if you've got money to burn, you can go that route. The home automation guys have this stuff (try smarthome.com, worthdist.com, and homecontrols.com), but I really don't recommend it because in addition to expense, the box itself my limit you before long. I prefer to simply terminate all the wires into RJ-45s and then patch them into whatever is needed. On that subject, I recommend the EIA/TIA T568A terminations, as they're the most common. (You can use T568B if you plan on any AT&T phone gear.) Leviton has some great low cost 8 and 16 jack surface mount termination boxes (what I use instead of the expensive fancy deals), and they use the same little plug-in adapters (RJ-45, RJ-11, F-type balun, etc.) that fit in the really slick little Leviton faceplates. (I've seen these with from two to eight positions for a single gang box, which should be plenty. They're available at Lowe's, Home Depot and the like these days for less than the specialty places.)

Hope this helps. Now if there were just an easy way to add speaker wires!

Internet and Covenants

I just bought a condo and luckily it didn't come with internet access. It did come with a covenant that says the outsides of my curtains have to be white and that I can't run a business out of my home, although according to one of the two agreements I signed, I can have a home office. Can I run a web server out of my home? Is that a business? The other agreement says nothing about business one way or another. (I also can't own "exotic pets" such as an iguana or a peacock. Oh, well.)

My covenant really isn't so bad, or I wouldn't have signed it. But I know that covenants can decrease the value of a home. Ask anyone who's ever been unpopular with the homeowners' association.

Oooo, and they got us now. Next thing you know, when your house comes with internet access, you'll be signing a covenant that says that, for as long as you live there, you won't buy internet access from anybody else, and that you won't run a server, and that you won't download porn (porn being defined as anything your seller considers objectionable, such as ads for his competitors), or allow people to download WAV files that you recorded of your own music because they take up too much bandwidth, or... or... [shudder!]

In a country where the bill of rights probably wouldn't survive a constitutional convention (it never did when we had mock conventions in high school), what do you think happens when the people vote in homeowners' associations?

You better read those covenants damned carefully!

New! Improved! Internet Ready Homes!

New! Improved! Internet Ready Homes!

New Sheistman Homes now come with phone jacks in almost 4 full rooms! Also, as a welcome gift, we supply you lucky home buyers with a "10 Free Hours" AOL cd! Now how much would you pay? BUT WAIT! There's more!

Along with the AOL cd comes a FREE top of the line, state of the art, and other assorted buzzwords, WinModem! <font face="flyspeck 3 lawyerese">(a $1.50 value. Installation and phone cords extra)</font>

All this and more, in your new Sheistman Home!
Operators are standing by.
--

do it yourself.

"...a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house."

Yep. I'm in my second house, fully "internet-ready" even tho it's a 1919 woodframe monolith. When remodeling the bathroom (walls & ceiling out), we took the opportunity to run several strands of cat5 from the basement to the second floor, install segmentable hubs, and provide ethernet jacks at most of the phone jacks. It was even easier in my old house (a quaint 1909 shoebox), where the panel upgrade to 200a was the perfect opportunity to put in isolated system power, hi-grade power filtering, and ethernet everywhere. It really ain't that hard.

Here's a tip: Go to Home Despot/Eagle/Lowe's or whatever well-stocked DIY store you can find, and buy the 5-foot long drillbit in the electrical section. It seems goofy, but it's a fantastic thing for retrofit wiring. Take it into your basement, and use it to drill up thru the 1st floor into the wall. If there is no opening in the wall (switchplate), use the 5-foot extension bit to keep drilling until you hit the 2nd floor/attic. Now you need a second person to hold the drill in place, with the bit poking up two floors above you. Go upstairs and grab a hold of the end of the bit (in the attic or thru an access/outlet hole). Notice that the bit has a small hole in the blade. Thread the wire thru the hole, and use the bit to pull the wire back down to the basement. Drill, pull. Drill, pull. Repeat as needed, pulling each wire back to a central point in the basement. A few rj45 crimps and staples later, add a hub or two connected to your dsl/cable/isdn/pots device, and you are the proud owner of an internet-ready house.

That one silly piece of metal with a hole in it makes the job tremendously easier. And besides, (a) it's an excuse to buy new tools [drillbit $20us, extension $15us, rj45 crimper $35us], and (b) it's oh-so-much classier if you provide networking in a house that isn't made out of .325" sheetrock and outgassing toxic crap for the next 10 years.

Jon

Internet Ready: Check

Note: I haven't read the article; the concept of an Internet-ready home is interesting enough

I've been looking for a home in the Long Beach, CA area (why? I don't know...). After the birth of my child last October I long for things like a yard, a pleasant street, a den, a ... you understand. Things that an apartment just don't provide (here, anyway). So, I contact my friendly real-estate agent and arrange for a meeting.

First question: what are your needs in a home. First answer: we must be within 1600 feet of the local phone company switch.

Blew him away.

I explained: since ADSL came into my home I refuse to live without some kind of fast Internet connection at home. This connection allows me to work from home as if I was in the office (plus a few security hurdles, of course). This allows me to enjoy my son (oh, and my wife) much more than if I had to travel Highway 22 every morning to get to work.

The Internet has become a crucial part of my family's life: in a healthy way (well, except all the time I spend on Slashdot).

So, am I surprised there are stories about Internet-ready homes? Nope.

If you know of a good deal in the $230k to $260k range in decent parts of ADSL-capable Long Beach send me a note [mailto].

As a builder...

...yes, really, [customsteelhomes.com] (amazing who you meet on /., isn't it?) this isn't exactly a new thing. Homes have been pre-wired with for phones for 30+ years, cable for 20, security systems & stereo since the mid-70's, and data since the mid-90's. We typically run 1-CAT3, 2-CAT5, & 1-Coax drops in each bedroom, living space, study, etc. This has been done to over 1/2 the houses we've built in the last 3 years.