10 gigabit Ethernet in your home in about two hours
Chances are high that if you've ever tried moving a file larger than 1GB from one device to another over your Wi-Fi network, you've noticed that you have just enough time to floss your teeth, clip your nails, and stare at that old pencil mark on your desk for a solid minute before that file makes it to its destination. As you sat there waiting you probably thought to yourself, "There's gotta be a better way!"
There is! It's called a "wired network" and it has been around since Intel was a pup. While not as easy or as buzzword-laden as Wi-Fi, you can't beat a wired network for serious, intense throughput. And we're going to show you that it's not as tough to install in a home as you might think. C'mon, let's get dirty!
WARNING: Check your local regulations on permits and cabling in your area!
Tools you'll need:
Sure, we could have gone with plain old Cat5e cable rated for gigabit Ethernet transfer speeds, but this isn't "Average PC" is it? No, we want future-proofing and room for 10-gigabit Ethernet, son! Arr! We're also using a patch panel that handles 24 ports to allow room for later expansion. Note that we're assuming you already have a Gigabit router/switch available (which would include 802.11ac Wireless routers); 10GbE switches are still very expensive, but they'll drop in price as sure as you can say "gravity," and when they do you'll be ready.
To start, you should measure your wall height and the approximate run of your cable from your source to the area you'd like to install your new wall jack. You want the jack on an interior wall to avoid dealing with insulation, and at least one stud away from an electrical outlet to lessen the chances that you'll nip a live wire and black out the neighborhood. You also want it centered between wall studs to make the drilling portion easier. Wall studs are about 16 inches apart, but some are 24 inches; you'll need to use your stud finder to see what standard your home uses. Use a pencil to lightly mark the studs on each side of your work area.
Find Your Supports
A stud finder shows you where boards are in your wall.
Once your new outlet spot is chosen, measure 12 inches upward from the baseboard. Mark this point as the bottom of your jack. The idea here is to make the hole of your new wall jack the same height as existing electrical and phone plugs for continuity. Use a pencil and draw a square using your single gang bracket as a template. Now, look at the spot you just drew. Really look at it, because in about a minute we'll be making that hole permanent.
Use the Single Gang as a Template
Templates make art class so much easier.
Happy with your placement? Let's get down to business.
For safety you should walk to your breaker box or fuse box and turn off the electricity to the room you're working in and the one on the opposite side of the wall. You may not run into a wire, but we want you safe. All good? OK, get your wall saw. We prefer the Stanley FatMax six-inch Jab Saw for rigidity and easy sawing in sheetrock. You do not want a flimsy, flexible saw for this procedure. Starting at the bottom-right corner of your receptacle drawing, push the saw into the wall, and begin sawing horizontally along the bottom. You may need to use a hammer to lightly tap the saw into the wall to start.
At the first corner, pull out the saw and start again, this time cutting your line vertically (upward). This allows you to turn your cut if you run into a stud that you missed with your studfinder. Complete your cut the same way on the remaining two sides, then pull the cutout out of the wall and set it aside. It may fall into the wall. This is fine unless we have to mud up the hole due to wires or other issues.
Remove the Cutout
Your jack location exposed.
Take your single gang bracket and test your work by fitting it in the hole. The goal is to make for a tight fit. Now, let's do some drilling. To keep fire from moving easily from room to room, our homes now have a horizontal board between some studs called a fireblock.
Fireblock
Fire safety first!
Use your stud finder and slowly move upward from the hole you sawed. Assuming a standard home, you'll hit your fireblock within 3 feet of your receptacle. If your studfinder doesn't signal a stud running horizontally in your wallspace, you are in an open wall, you have an older home, or you simply missed it; try again. If you found one, mark it with a pencil.
Going Fishing
A fish bit eats through fireblocks for breakfast!
Get your fish drill bit and push it into the hole and upward at an angle away from any electrical outlets in the same wall. The goal is to work it to the fireblock into one corner where it meets up with a stud. Running the drill in reverse can help the drill bit "walk" up the wall stud easier to reach the fireblock. To be sure you're hitting wood pull the bit out about 4 inches then poke it back up to the fireblock hard enough to make a noise. It should sound like wood. Anything else is danger. Stop now and call a licensed electrician. If you choose to stop, use wall mud and the cutout piece of sheetrock to fill the hole you made. Let it dry for 24 hours and paint over it.
If you hit wood, connect your drill bit to a cordless drill and start your hole. Once finished, take your wall saw and cut another, identical hole about four feet from your ceiling, but this time there are two differences: First, use a pumpkin cut. A pumpkin cut is a side-slanted cut to form a bevel, like you make on a pumpkin's lid. And second, don't make the cut across the top. Leave that part attached so the lid will flip up and down easily, but not fall off of the wall.
Pumpkin Cut
Cut with the blade at an angle to allow the plug to reseal easily.
Put the drill back into the wall in your pumpkin cut. Feel the resistance of the bit as you drill upward through the ceiling cap boards toward the attic. It should give resistance for about four inches, then break free into the attic. If you find yourself drilling more than four and a half inches or past your taped mark on the shaft, you may be in a rafter of the attic and you'll need to move your drill bit to the opposite corner of the ceiling and the fireblock then try again from the beginning. Thankfully, we're working on an inside wall and this is very unlikely.
At this point you can pull out the bit and use your glow rods to push up through the wall. For our home, we needed three sections of glow rod to make it from the jack into the attic space. At the end, connect about three inches of your cat6 cable to the glow rod with electrical tape. Use more tape to cover any bumps in the connection to prevent snags.
Become the Tape Master
Tape the cable to the glow rods.
Then push the rods up through the wall along the same route you took with the fish bit. It should slide into place easily.
Up with the Rods
Once more into the breach!
Grab a strong, reliable flashlight and head up into the attic. WARNING: Attics are scary, dangerous places. Only step on the wooden crossbeams while in the attic unless you want a visit to a hospital and do some tricky ceiling mudwork. Avoid the overhead nails and any metal ductwork you see. Also, most insulation is fiberglass or rock wool, which is very itchy. Don't touch it more than you have to. Always wash hands or shower afterward to avoid itching. Finally, if your home was built between 1930 and 1950, you may have asbestos insulation. Asbestos has been shown to cause cancer when inhaled. Have your insulation tested if you're unsure.
Typical Attic Route
Easiest route in a standard attic. Go forward, then cut across to target area.
Watch Your Step!
Step only on the crossbeams.
Duck Your Head
Watch for overhead spikes.
Silver Is Soft
Don't lean or walk on ductwork, you'll fall!
Work your way over to the area of the attic you believe to be above your wall. You should see the glow rod sticking out of the insulation like a beacon.
Finding the Glow Rod
A shining beacon from below.
Once you reach the glow rod, slowly but firmly pull the cable up through the wall. Again, snags can and do happen all the time. If you hit a snag, just push the rod down and pull it back up again. Keep firm upward pressure on the glow rod and it should pull through. You may need to disconnect some lengths of the glow rod as you pull it up to keep from hitting the ceiling. Once the glow rods pull through completely, keep pulling until you have a enough cable in hand to reach across the attic and down the wall to your router. The cable should pull freely through the wall. If you feel a snag, head back downstairs and untangle the wires from your spool. You don't want a kink in this cable. If you bought an industrial-size box of cable (500–1000 feet), it will feed through the wall easily by design. Do not disconnect the cable from the glow rod. We'll use it to feed down to the router later.
Now, work your way carefully across the attic to the general area of the router, stringing the cable along behind you and laying it across the insulation but away from your walking area. You don't want to step on a cable and break a wire inside. You may have to use cable tacks to affix your cables to the crossbeams if your local regulations require. They're available at your local hardware store. Coil the cable, set it down, and head back downstairs.
Laying track
Lay the cable on the insulation out of the main walkway to prevent stepping on it.
Tack It Down
Cable tacks hold the cable in place and tidy up the look.
We repeat the process on the wall by our router. Leave the drill bit in the hole poking up into the attic. Now, crawl into the attic and view the drill bit to get an idea of the location. Clear insulation from around the hole.
We Struck Oil!
Locating the drill can be easy if it's high enough.
After removing the drill bit, start feeding your glow rod down through the hole you just drilled and into wall until it stops. Take a moment here to replace any insulation you moved as best as you can. Holes leak heat and heat costs money.
Head back downstairs and fish the glow rod from the cutout in the wall using a coat hanger or a hook. Once through the hole, pull the glow rod down until you see the end and cable emerge. Disconnect the cable from the glow rod and pull enough cable through the hole to reach your patch panel location.
The rest of our cabling happens inside. Get your new crimping tool and use the cutting blade to cut the cable entering the wall at your destination point if there is excess or if you used a cable box.
Affix your wall brackets to the wall using the screws provided in the pack. Don't overtighten these screws or you'll pull the braces through the wall. You just want it immobile, not bending the fabric of time.
Install the brackets
Tighten just snug.
Now, use the sheath-stripping part of the crimping tool to remove the sheath from your cable ends. Ideally, you'll want no more than one inch of wire unsheathed to protect bandwidth. Any more than that and you chance line interference.
Strip It Off
Remove one inch of sheathing from the cable.
The next step depends on the type of jack connectors you bought.
*Tip: The standard pinout order for cable 568A is white/green, green, white/orange, blue, white/blue, orange, white/brown, and brown. 568B is white/orange, orange, white/green, blue, white/blue, green, white/brown, and brown.
Single-piece wall plates are more commonly used for phone jacks than Ethernet cable, but they are much easier to install for a newbie or those with big hands. The main drawback is to single-piece plates is the length of exposed, untwisted wire. This makes them more prone to interference, which can slow a full 10 gigabit connection, though this generally isn't a concern on an inside wall away from electrical outlets. You will need to strip the sheathing back about three inches to have sufficient wire to stretch to the screw mounts.
Stripping Crazy!
Strip the sheathing farther on single piece wall plates.
Starting with the bottom-left corner, wire them in order for your chosen standard, either 568A or 568B. For ours wired with 568A, we went with white/green to blue, green to orange, white/orange to black, and blue to red up the left side.
Wiring on the Left
Wire the left side as shown.
On the right side we connected brown to blue, brown/white to brown, orange to yellow, and blue/white to green.
Wiring on the Right
Wire the right side as shown.
Once the jack is wired up, you can screw it into the mounting bracket. Take care to screw it down just snug, as the faceplate will crack if you apply too much pressure.
Button It Up
Screw your new jack to the wall.
Stick with us here, we're almost finished!
On the router wall again, you can now mount your mounting bracket in the opening on your wall exactly as before. Then add your hole-style wall plate and secure it with the provided screws. If you're not using a patch panel, you can simply put another jack on this wall too, then plug it into the router and you're off and running. However, using the patch panel and a hole-style receptacle wall plate allows for expansion for running cable to your new TiVo, your refrigerator, security cameras, or anything else that connects to the "Internet of Things" in the future. It's something to think about.
You should now mount your patch panel bracket in a place that is easily accessible to plug new devices into your router. If mounting to a sheetrock wall, mount only on the studs at least one stud from any electrical outlet. You'll need to use the stud finder again to find them through the wall. Some use brackets that allow for the panel to swing outward in one direction or another to make mounting new cable easier. Be sure to allow for the swing if yours does this. The mount we chose is a simple vertical mount that we'll be affixing to the bottom of a built-in desk for easy access.
"Jerk Screws"
GRK fasteners drill their own pilot holes and provide strong holding power.
To affix our bracket, we chose what we affectionately refer to as "jerk screws." These self-tapping, hex head screws made by GRK Fasteners are corrosion resistant and strong enough to back out multiple times if necessary. And when you're finished you can build a house with the leftovers.
Hold your bracket up and mark the mounting holes with a pencil. Then run the screws in about a quarter inch to create a guide hole at each pencil mark. Finally, mount your bracket using the holes.
To create a smooth-looking patch panel, we started mounting our wires on the side that faced the wall that our wires entered the room. This prevents a big curve in the bulk of cable running from the panel. That meant for us the first cable punched down was number twenty-four. Afterward, simply zip-tie the cables in bundles of two or three as you go down the patch panel for a clean, streamlined look. Then zip-tie the cables every six inches until you reach the wall receptacle.
Punch Down the Cable
Start filling your panel on the side the cable enters for easy expansion.
After connecting your cables, test them all with a cable tester. If problems happen they are likely at the patch panel because of misaligned wires or wires that were too short to make contact. Once you correct any problems, mount your panel to your bracket.
Now, pat yourself on the back. You did it! Want to take it a small step further? Take a sharpie to your new jack and mark it with a small number corresponding to the number on your patch panel. This would be 1–24 on our panel. Next, label your panel with a sticker or a bit of tape. This will make tracking down connection issues much easier.
Label Your Jacks
Human-friendly sticker labels are easy to identify without tracking down numbers.
Let's clean up. Get that tub of wall mud.
Wall Mud
We prefer the low-dust variety in case we have to do some sanding.
A word about texturing: In our example home, the walls are textured in the popular style where the mud is simply drawn in big sweeping paths going in different directions. This makes for easy repair. For flat walls, simply sand down the dry mud after 24 hours to a consistent height. For the style that looks similar to worm trails in the wall, you can use wall mud on a moistened automotive sponge, dabbing the sponge in the mud, then on the wall with straight, short jabs to retexture. We promise it is not as hard as it sounds.
Start with opening the pumpkin cut. Lift up the swinging part of the wall and smear a good ½ inch of mud into the mating surfaces of the cut. This will serve as "glue" to hold the cut back together.
Mud the Pumpkin
Any excess will be scraped off the front and help fortify the back.
Once you have all three surfaces of the pumpkin cut mudded properly, you can fold the top down and press gently until it is seated. Don't press too hard. Use your putty knife to smooth out the surface portion of the hole. If your walls are like ours, simply spread the mud to texture now. While you're at it, you may as well mud up those old nail holes.
Texture and Wait
Cover the wall-wrecking evidence!
Now, the waiting begins. You should wait 24 hours to paint or you may end up with cracks in your wall, forcing you to start over again. While you wait, run the vacuum to remove all the dust and chunks of wall left behind. You can take any painted chunks to your local hardware store to get your paint color matched for free.
That's it! You're done! Enjoy your new blazing-fast speeds. The future is now.
If you were brave enough to follow our tutorial on running cables in a standard home, send us pics of your project to comments@maximumpc.com. We'd love to see how it turned out.
