New Home Construction: How much Cat5/6 cable for phone and LAN?

mipmap said:

How much Cat5/6 cable is needed to wire a new home for phone and LAN, say 2500 sq ft? Is 1000ft enough? I'll probably go through the exercise of figuring this out on paper, but thought I'd ask in case someone has already been through this.

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Depends on how many rooms, location of jacks, and where the central punchdown is. I just did my house, which is 1500 sq ft, but only needed about 300 ft due to the proximity of the runs.

Give yourself a pretty large service loop within the walls. It's a biatch to splice in extra length later on.

a pretty good rule of thumb is that each home run will average around 80ft... (this is usually an overestimate) and remember... coax & STP cable is cheap! you can never have too much in your home! (but if you have too little, doing wall fiches after the fact is a PITA) pull at leat 2xc5e and 1 or 2 coax at min to each room... you will be happy you did...

saunders45 said:

Depends on how many rooms, location of jacks, and where the central punchdown is.

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Seems like the only general rule that could be helpful is what kind of error correction factor. I'd start with the height to each jack from the location of the punch down (e.g., hte basement) plus the length from the wall of the jack to the location of the punch down, and then add some error factor (e.g., 20%) to account for slack, extra to trim, need to go around obstacles). And then figure how many such runs. I could easily see getting over 1000 feet in a modest size house if you have 15-20 jacks.