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Cat-Wired and Wonderful (2/8/2004)

By Jonathan Margolis

The most extraordinary home installations still rely on a specialised but readily available wire technology called Cat5 - despite all the hype from the 'revolutionary' alternatives.

While there is a whole raft of developing technologies with glamorous names like HAVi, FireWire and UPnp, all promising to deliver ever-faster and ever-more convenient home networking, installers are already delivering a perfectly future-proofed model of our electronic destiny with nothing more exotic than wiring, to a design specified more than ten years ago.

Category 5 wiring is thin, like regular phone wire, relatively cheap, and, crucially, capable of carrying all the data and voice a home network is likely to need for the foreseeable future. No more than a couple of Cat5 cables need run to any room in even a highly-sophisticated home network.

Home networking

Home networking is the art of getting a multitude of devices and subsystems, such as heating, lighting, security, entertainment, IT, and phone, communicating with one another through an integrated web of wiring. It is the technology that enables everything from routine tasks, such as connecting PCs so they can share the same Internet connection, files, printers and assorted attached gizmos, to the exotic, sci-fi applications, such as turning on the oven via the Internet, to downloading movies on demand.

To an extent, of course, most homes have been electronically plumbed for the best part of the last one hundred years. But with the exception of the ring main, which came into the electricians' lexicon forty or so years ago, no fundamental advances in wiring technology have been made, not even in Internet-savvy homes today.

To get the family PC on the Web, lengthy white phone extension cables snake across living rooms towards distant BT sockets, losing connection speed at an alarming rate as they go. The most imaginative part of the lighting setup, even in expensive modern homes, is frequently the switch in the downstairs hall that turns on the upstairs landing light.

And it has taken a hundred years of scientific progress for there to be much enlightenment in the British tradition of having a single telephone point in the downstairs hall. Even though the 'decadent' bedroom and kitchen phone extension are now a standard feature in many homes, phone wiring is still entirely divorced from the often piecemeal installations of coaxial wiring for the TV and audio - which like the phone cables are as likely as not to be several decades old.

Ferrying vast amounts of compatible data from room to room is the basic principle underlying the intelligent home. It enables the internal workings of the home to proceed efficiently, conveniently and economically, and also enhances the home's interface with the outside world. The more data that flows in from the Internet, the more there is to share among devices within the home through multiple access points. Streaming media and other Web-delivered broadband, always-on, content.

Compelling reasons, then, for consumers to invest in home networks, whether they be retrofitted into existing property or part of a marketing strategy from new build developers. Compelling reasons too, to make sure a home network is fitted properly from the outset, by a qualified installer, rather than a handyman with a practised line in nailing coax to skirting boards.

Alternative network technologies

The question, 'How do I future-proof my home?' is occurring increasingly to homeowners who, while aware that there are some astonishing technologies already around - from digital TV to faster Internet links to more cable services - are uncertain what to do about keeping up with such exciting developments in the years and decades to come. How does one prepare for the impending influx of digital entertainment and other services to the home?

Apart from Cat5, there are other methods of delivering home networking. One such, which has been used since the 1940s for such applications as home intercoms, is to piggyback data on the existing mains wiring. Mains circuits still provide a useful attempt at networking on a tiny scale; there are devices in the high street, which provide Internet access via the mains - at half speed.

Then there are the rather more interesting wireless initiatives, from Bluetooth to HomeRF to WiFi, which offer considerable mobility and convenience, and that experts consider a useful adjunct to many home networks.

Additionally, the home networking market is promised a further revolution by enhanced hard-wiring systems, such as Ethernet or IEEE1394 (FireWire), which offers the highest data rate performance available, and is touted as being ideal for high-quality multiroom, multichannel audio and video.

FireWire, originally developed as early as 1986 by Apple Computer, has been widely publicised as the single most important accelerator to the pace of digital convergence in the home. In the system's 1995 IEEE 1394a specification, it evolved to operate at 400 megabits (50 megabytes) per second, and ever- faster versions are in development at any given time.

HAVi (Home Audio Video interoperability), meanwhile, is a non-profit making organisation established in 1999 to devise and promote a common approach to digital home networking, and which has adopted IEEE1394 as the operational platform for its home network specification. HAVi enthusiasts believe the acronym is going to become as well known to the public as ADSL or USB.

Why Cat5?

While such alternatives may be very interesting, leading London CEDIA installer Steve Moore maintains that they are unlikely to be of any serious consideration in 90 per cent of home networks. 'Cat5 has the balance of ubiquity, utility and price,' explains Moore. 'Furthermore, its universality has gone into a virtual circle. The more Cat5 cable is out there, the greater the availability of compatible equipment.'

The specification, which was first developed and defined as early as 1993, accordingly meshes perfectly with PCs, printers and the gamut of popular peripherals.

So what about the question of speed of data transfer? Are consumers who restrict themselves to Cat5 wiring not effectively buying a Ferrari and fitting tractor tyres? According to Moore, 'Most Cat5 networks now do 10 to 100Mb/s. Your home Internet connection, if you're on ADSL, is 512kb/s - a twentieth to a two hundredth of that speed. The fastest is ADSL might be 2Mb/s, and that's still an order of magnitude slower than existing Cat5 wiring can comfortably handle.'

'The best DVD quality video can be transferred at 8Mb/s, well within Cat5's ability. A Sky signal, by contrast, probably comes down from the transponder at 2Mb/s.'

Without wanting to be dismissive of clients' desire to have the best, Moore tries to dissuade anyone demanding their home installation have higher specification wiring than Cat5. 'Clued-up clients will occasionally want, say, fibre optic cable to all the points in their house, and I always argue that you really need to be a propeller head, and a paranoid one at that, to request that. You can squeeze whatever you want down a Cat5 cable quicker than other people can dream up something faster.'

'That's why, of the technologies available at the moment, simple wiring is probably going to represent the best solution for the greatest number of clients. It may be that if you've got a large, open-plan horizontal dwelling and want to use a laptop a lot, then wireless technology may be ideal. But if you've a tall, vertical London house, it probably isn't. And what a CEDIA installer is going to do is to find out what's right for you. And that may be wires this year, wireless next - who knows?'

Jonathan Margolis is a freelance journalist for national papers such as the FT, Mirror etc. This article appears courtesy of CEDIA UK (Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association).

www.cedia.co.uk