if you can rebuild an engine going in thru the muffler, go for it.

quote:

WiFi is shit in this house--it's too spread out and built in a U shape around a central courtyard

An outdoor wifi omni antenna in the courtyard?

If it was me, I would run new Cat cable in the attic and in the crawl space. Then drill down or up, through the wall "plates".

You can cut small holes in the drywall and pull the Cat cable through. Use those blue electrical boxes. The old Cat 5 cables can be left in place. You can remove the covers to the old boxes and fill with drywall and plaster.

Everyone has addressed the concerns - bends, turns, tension, Staples. It's all a crapshoot, more than likely you'll be facing one if not all of the concerns. If it's not unstapled straight runs with old work boxes or low voltage brackets it will likely invoke drywall and paint work. Depending on the number of holes/mud/ paint needed, the bigger cost may be repairs.

I've done this job a number of times it can run fr $1k-$3k just in electrical costs alone depending on the number of drops, and difficulty. The paint work can cost 2x as much depending on number of holes, age of paint, and need to paint large areas

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:
Wiring most likely turns corners in various places. Makes life harder.

I'd say more likely that's as much a game-ender as staples. I think it unlikely to pull UTP cabling around corners like that without seriously disturbing the cable geometry.

quote:

Originally posted by SirBeep:
I guarantee, you just carefully reterminate what's in your walls already and if you don't have conductors broken in sharp bends or over zealous stapling, you'll have 1000.

I wouldn't go so far as to guarantee it, but I'd say the odds are good. I ran plenty of GigE over Cat5 at work--with no problem whatsoever.

Can we see a rough floor plan/layout of the home? Is it single-story, two, or more? Basement?

I covered an entire industrial building, corner-to-corner solid coverage, with four APs, properly-sited. Metal? Ha! It was everywhere--incl. metal interior walls in the production/lab area; chain-link fence around the parts crib, with a concrete ceiling; metal studs in the office area walls; metal roof; cinder block and metal exterior walls, heavily-laden steel storage racks--you name it. Then there was the cinder block firewall--with steel doors, naturally, that ran the entire width of the building.

Oh, and the building was rife with RF noise. We did electronic-y product development and testing--some of it quite high-energy.

Just to further hinder you, many old homes have fire blocking in between studs...a 2x4 turned sideways to slow fire spread to the attic or next floor.

My home in TX has ten and twelve foot ceilings,and those rooms have blocking....just running a wire to a new switch for outside lights was Less than fun....I don’t own a five foot drill it, so I had to attack it thru the opening for the old switch box....good times I say!

When I built my house, I stapled all the cable wires like the electrical no way pulling new through. But I did run conduit for new technology so I wouldn't have to be tearing things up down the road.

if it were me, I'd use the existing cat5 and not touch it. I'd just deal with the speeds I get. Most people really don't notice the difference unless they are doing something which specifically requires higher ethernet speeds.

Streaming video, routine backups, e-mail, cruise the web. Cat5 is just fine.

Thanks for all the input!

So, I cruised up into the attic to assess and dropping new cable runs is unrealistic. For whatever reason, the attic is not fully accessible throughout the floorplan--2/3 of the attic space is closed off. Weird, but hey, what do I know.

I had Amazon overnight me a new 5e patch panel for the closet, a bag of new keystone jacks, and some new gigabit switches, and then I spent a few hours replacing all the cable terminations.

As far as I can tell, and allowing for measurement error and hardware limitations, I'm getting 110-120 MB/s transfer speeds from my NAS, which is right around where I expect 1000mbps to be. I was previously getting just 30-40 MB/s through the wires.

So, I guess problem solved.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

I covered an entire industrial building, corner-to-corner solid coverage, with four APs, properly-sited. Metal? Ha! It was everywhere--incl. metal interior walls in the production/lab area; chain-link fence around the parts crib, with a concrete ceiling; metal studs in the office area walls; metal roof; cinder block and metal exterior walls, heavily-laden steel storage racks--you name it. Then there was the cinder block firewall--with steel doors, naturally, that ran the entire width of the building.

Oh, and the building was rife with RF noise. We did electronic-y product development and testing--some of it quite high-energy.

Right, I could paint the the whole house with WiFi (I had 4 Lynksys Triband Velop routers Meshed together) but I was experiencing signal loss through the wireless backhaul into one particular room (which happens to be my office). I could strategically place each node to give coverage to the house, but the nodes couldn't connect to each other reliably in one room of the house. What I needed was a wired connection to act as a backhaul.