Structured Cabling for Homes
What is Structured Cabling?
A structured cabling system comprises designing, installing, and testing a combination of cables with the functional flexibility to support multiple technologies available today, as well as future technologies yet to come. With a thoughtfully specified cabling system, current and future requirements can be met, and any product changes or additions will be supported without requiring new cabling infrastructure. Typical structured cabling systems consist of a variety of 6-wire security cable, category 5e (cat5e), category 6 (cat6), fibre-optic cabling, and 2-4 wire speaker cabling of varying thickness, depending on cable length.
Structured cabling design, installation, and testing requirements are outlined in Australia by rules and standards set out by the Communications Alliance, and regulated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
Isn’t Everything Going Wireless?
In short, no. There’s three main reasons a robust structured cabling system is necessary:
Reliability - By following the rules outlined for design and installation, and thoroughly testing post installation, your cabling system will provide a bulletproof, quick, and obstacle free way to transfer information. There isn’t much that can go wrong with cabling, once you’ve got it right; and it will likely outlast you. The same can’t be said about Wi-Fi unfortunately. When communicating from one device to another wirelessly, the constantly changing environment can lead to information being lost along the way (packet loss), and cause devices to have to reconfirm information at best, or completely miss something at worst.
Speed - Cables are fast. Fibre-optic cables are even faster. When we press a button on a screen, we expect something to happen instantly. Call us impatient, but let’s face it, we don’t want to stand in front of the TV waiting for it to turn on, we just want it on… now! You can achieve this result with Wi-Fi, or near enough to it that the difference isn’t noticeable, in certain environments, but without a Wi-Fi access point somewhere nearby (which needs a cable), the Wi-Fi signal will have a long distance to travel. The further it is, the longer you will have to wait, and the more likely you will be to run into reliability problems.
Throughput - This can get confused with speed, but throughput is how much information can be transferred, not necessarily how quickly it reaches its destination. Think of it like a bullet train (cables) vs a plane (Wi-Fi) between Tokyo and Osaka. Both take roughly two and half hours to get there, but the bullet train can carry 1300 people, while the plane can carry between 200 and 850. If I want to watch a 4K, or even 8K blu-ray movie on one TV, and someone else is listening to high quality music, whilst another person is watching youtube videos, a typical Wi-Fi system will struggle; whilst a structured cabling system won’t break a sweat.
How Do We Prepare For the Future?
By looking at trends in the home technology space we can predict the general trajectory of home cabling and wireless requirements, and cover both bases appropriately. More and more devices are connecting to the internet, so planning for a high speed multi access point cabling network will support the connection of current and future Wi-Fi requirements, as well as other potential emergent technologies.
There are also other wireless network types (Thread / ZigBee / Z-Wave) emerging as popular options for a variety of technologies. The very same cabling backbone can be utilised to service these for their current use cases, and if they become more dominant options in the future.
TV resolutions continue to increase, alongside the complexity of their audio counterparts, with more and more speaker channels becoming prevalent in the surround sound space. This means high quality content file sizes will also continue to increase to suit. Installing cabling systems now with suitable throughput head-room will be important for keeping up with this continuing trend.