House wiring project. Opinions please.

[Jammrock]

For some unknown reason (probably because they are cheap arse bastards), the developer and local telecom/cable company don't pre-connect jack shite in the house. They run cables and put in faceplates with RJ-11/coax, but that's it. Now I have a huge bundle of telephone and coax sticking out the side of my house because I didn't want to pay extra for terminaling coax and I don't use local land lines (VoIP for me).

Long story short, I was sitting on that place where men do the majority of their thinking (aka the John), when an idea hit me. I can convert all of my phone jacks to dual network/phone jacks. Just buy a 1000 ft. pull box of CAT and tie it to the phone cable sticking out of my house and I can easily pull cable to everywhere in my house. I plan on reusing the extisting phone cables by securing strong twine to one end and pull it through. Then use the twine to pull the CAT and phone cabling through. I'll replace the phone face plates with an RJ-11/45 wall plate. I'll run the cables into the other side of the wall, which is the garage. And ...

...here's where the questions comes in...

What are some good wall mounted patch panels? Are there ones that include phone so I can wire my VoIP into the house wiring? And more important, is there a benefit for paying extra for CAT6 instead of CAT5e? I will be running Gb for certain, and I want to make sure I go full speed since I will eventually install a media server and will be doing plenty of large data transfers for various other project I do.

I can get a 16-port Gb switch for pretty cheap, so I'm not worried about that. Dell has a full speed 16-port with web management for <$200 on sale, and for the money they are supposed to be pretty good.

Assistance would be appreciated.

Jammrock

[agallag]

I believe my brother used these when wiring his house.

http://www.smarthome.com/walljack_leviton.html

They're modular wall jacks, you can have up to eight ports (I think) in one box, and you can choose from RJ11, RJ45 Cat5, Cat6, etc. Cat 6 will be more reliable for Gb, but Cat5e should work decently as well.

[Chucky Cheese]

when i had this house built a year ago i had a local company put in " structured wiring " using OnQ products from here.

basically i purchased 12 faceplates, each with phone,cable and network connections. cat 6 for the network, cat 5 for phone and rg6 quad-shield for cable. everything is terminated in a nice low voltage wiring cabinet(lockable) in the basement.

i would pull cat 6 just for the internal networking that you want to do.

cc

[degrub]

Hmmm, did they happen to run the cables in conduit ? If they did then you can get that to work. Otherwise, the cabes are stapled down every few feet to the framing and the only thing you will pull is your hair.

[gt40]

Don't know if you'll be able to pull the cable thru as you want.
As degrub said, the line will most likely be anchored along studs, unless it was installed after the drywall went up, which is unlikely.

[Jammrock]

Hmmm, did they happen to run the cables in conduit ? If they did then you can get that to work. Otherwise, the cabes are stapled down every few feet to the framing and the only thing you will pull is your hair.

Never thought of that. I guess I should check. Curse these bass turds.

[KvHagedorn]

We use Leviton stuff at work. They make some pretty good patch panels. Of course, they are made to fit in a structured media panel. To me, seeing wires hanging out the side of a building like that tells me right away that they probably cut corners elsewhere in building the house. If/when I manage to buy a new house, I'm definitely contracting it myself unless I win the lottery and can afford one of the few builders I would trust to take a quality based attitude.

[Claymonkey]

If the wiring for the phones was run after the drywall went up then I say pull away... Otherwise you're going to have issues with it being tied down. The other question is did they only drill holes big enough for cat3 or is it wide enough for the cat5?

As for going with cat6 versus cat5e? I honestly can't see the point of the extra expense. Cat5e will do gigabit just fine and is cheaper.. just buy good quality cat5e.