Camster342 wrote:
Well, with this fine weather, it must be time to get the spade out and start digging a ditch from the house to the garage and bury a couple of lengths of PVC or alkathene pipe and then run a couple of lengths of Cat5e cable through one of the pipes...
:-) it's on the todo list. Anyone have any gotchas about doing this?
This is just from what I've read, and you probably know it anyway, but just in case...
Try not to run parallel to power cables, or if you must, you'll have to look at shielded cable.
According to the specs for Cat5e cable it'll run for 100m lengths at 100Mbit speeds, but it's different for Gigabit speeds, but generally if you think you might have more than 50m from computer to router/switch/hub/repeater/other computer and you want reliable Gigabit, you may want to opt for Cat6, otherwise Cat5e should be fine.
I was originally going to bring up gotchas like plenty of sunscreen... Beer is an absolute requirement, really crucial if you intend to get other people to assist, and make sure the gas bottle is full and you have plenty of meat for the BBQ to feed those that assist. After the job, things like blisters, sore arms could be an outcome. But seriously, gig requirement is exactly the same as 10 Meg and 100 Meg and that is the cable run itself shouldn't exceed 90 Mtrs (allowing for 5mtrs each end for the patch cords), but the total distance is 100 Mtrs (Please note, metres, not feet). Cat5e vs. Cat6, for this sort of application, Cat5e is fine. Run in pipe/conduit, don't bury direct, also bury at ~ 600mm deep. When digging, be careful of existing stuff underground like power cables, gas/water pipes. Having running the cat5e/cat6 in it's own conduit would give sufficient segreation from power cables, but if you're running power in the same trench then go either side of the trench.