I have a Zotac Zbox in my basement living room that is equipped with 802.11 b/g/n wifi but is notoriously slow. Mine is no different. I pay for 105 Mbps connection and the shit Zbox has been reporting between 1 and 1.5 Mbps during various speed tests. After setting up the new 65" TV and speaker system, I just couldn't bear to sit there watching watching my Kodi box buffer for another minute. Something needed to be done. I kicked around the idea of building a new machine. I even pondered getting an Nvidia Shield. But there was always the chance I might have spurious results with any of those as well.
The solution hit me. I opted to run my own cable and do away with wifi for my downstairs home theater area once and for all.
The house I recently purchased is almost 60 years old. I figured that with an old home without fire blocks, I could likely tackle this project on my own.
My town has been rolling out a local fiber gigabit network and I wanted to get everything done before that hit my area sometime soon ("Spring 2016"). I planned to run Cat6a from my office modem, down an internal wall into the basement. Then I would remove the baseboards and cut into the wall. There I could bore holes into the studs and run the cable around to the TV area. That plan fell flat as I had a door in my way. I opted for a similar plan, but this time outside the wall.
I already had the tools I needed except for a few job specific items. I purchased 250ft of Cat6a cable on Monoprice for $35. It was cheaper to order it that way than to order the individual pieces I needed. This would also give me some versatility if I changed my mind or ran into any problems. I bought the Cat6 jacks and wall plates at Lowes for around $30. The plastic molding/conduit type stuff was the most expensive thing at around $10 per 5 ft section.
Before I even got started I ran into a problem. The walls weren't aligned right on top of each other in the upstairs office and the downstairs basement. After doing quite a bit of measuring, calculations and sketching, I was able to drill a 1/8" test hole in the office floor (out of sight, under the printer stand) and hit inside the basement wall perfectly. I then opened that test hole up with a 3/8" bit to accommodate the three cables. I wasn't keen on putting a hole in my original wood floors but it was an unavoidable sacrifice.
My initial thought was to just run one cable to connect the Kodi PC. This quickly turned to, "well if I'm going to run one I might as well run two". It ultimately ended up as "If I'm going to run two I might as well run three." I did some more measuring and cut three 60' lengths of cable that I would run. I put a 3/8" hole in the very bottom of the basement wall and used my fish tape and some fine wire to pull it through. I started running the cable inside the plastic molding and sticking it to the wall. This went very quickly once I got the hang of it.
My doors go right to the ceiling so I needed to remove the top molding and cut it with a table saw to re-fit.
Once I had it all the way behind the TV area, I cut another 3/8" hole and put the cables back into the wall, up about a foot, and out to the box. Then came punching down all three cables to Cat6 jacks on both ends. Then testing to ensure everything worked and label each one.
Kodi PC that was getting 1-2 Mbps over wifi is now getting full speed 120 Mbps and is ready for the impending gigabit network.
Bookmarks