Any point in wiring home with Cat5e cable these days?
 

With the advancements in wireless technology, is there any benefit to having anything hard wired anymore? Wireless N seems to be fast enough for general use.

What do you guys think? Would you opt for hard wired or wireless?

Hi Tical,

At home for my office and tv / set top boxes all hard wired.

The kids's rooms all wireless...

At the office, all hardwired... Don't like wireless at work...

I did just recently. I would take wired of wireless anyday.

I have the four workstations in my office hard-wired and connected to a Gigabit Router for reliability. But I don't drape wires across the rest of the house. Wireless works good enough to connect my P4 media server connected to my 52" LCD HDTV in my living room to the rest of my network.

...when cat6 has been available for years?

Then again 5e is fine. ;)

But hell yeah I'd run cables. http://www.monoprice.com grab wall receptacles too.

Latency, overall speed, ability to stream 1080p content to a media center, etc.

Hate wireless. Unreliable as shit. I've tried and used all sorts of different wireless routers, including the 200$ Wireless-N ones and they all suck. Always prefer wired. Only use wireless for convenience of portable equipment. If you have something that's stationary, go for wired...

4g clear.com coming to a city near you

I hardwire my workstation with cat6 the laptop I ofc use wireless on.

Depends on the size of the home and the location of the router with relation to the wok stations.

Yeah when your stir-frying a good wok, you don't want to be using wireless.

:1orglaugh

Wireless is no good for streaming HD video. I recently had my house wired with cat 6, and even ran a cable underground out to my garage.

Yes, there are advantages to wired.. and as already mentioned by some other smartass, 5e is pretty bad - 100mbit is small potatoes - even your $50 bargain basement machine usually has Gig-E.

Go wired.

Wiress 802.11 N is nice and fast, but it's still not as fast as Wired, nor as safe. It also sucks for sending big fat uncompressed 1080p anywhere. Get Cat6 or Cat5e only.

I prefer hard wired for anything that is going to be a solid work machine.

That includes my mouses, and keyboards. I hate having to replace batteries, and getting error messages about some of that bullshit (signal weak, can't find signal, and so on). I typically have batteries in the house, as I keep them for emergencies like power outages, but it just annoys me.

I use wireless internet and hardware for non-essential machines around the house or office. But if I am working on the machine for any length of time, I prefer all hard wired. I simply have no patience for the other aggravations that come with wireless routers, and hardware.
:disgust

Anything work related, hard wired. I don't care how secure it is, unless you sever the cables, you're not getting into my network :)
WG

If you have desktops i always choose to go wired. I mean, wiring the house where you have cat5e jacks in the walls is a little overboard. If you have a laptop you can always use wireless. But the speed wont be any better or worse except for internal use.

Where security is a concern, I always go wired.

Both. I have wireless for my laptop and hard wire for my PC. You can't beat the speed of THE WIRE. Btw, CAT6 is the standard for Gigabit Ethernet.

Thanks guys,

I was mostly interested in determining whether or not to wire areas like the family room, my master bedroom, etc. I want to build a little media server, stream videos from netflix on my blu-ray, use the internet on my tv, use the PS3 online, etc.

Wasn't sure if wireless is good enough to do these things without problems, looks like it still might not be good enough.

For the most part wireless *is* good enough to do those things but not without problems... expect to be resetting your router often - if you can put up with hardwiring, then do it, if you're too lazy then wireless won't be horrible, just not perfect.

Cat6 all the way.

In fact my motherboard has 2 gigabit ports. 2gbps goodness? :D

Wired. CAT6.