Digital Home Thoughts: Once You Go Wired, You Will Never Look Back

"We've shown you how to go completely wireless in your home, but as we mentioned recently, wireless is a good deal slower than a hard wired connection. Wi-Fi is undoubtedly useful and convenient for a lot of networking needs, but it can also cause a lot of frustration: interference, dropped connections, lag, and worst of all, slow speeds when it really counts."

Lifehacker has an excellent primer on how to turn your home into a networking wonder. While most people usually opt for a wireless solution, going wired can make a huge difference in how your network performs. Wired has always been the default preference for me; the performance and reliaibility of cables over radio waves more than makes up for the effort required to lay cable around the household.

While wired will offer superior performance, there is a right and wrong way to go about setting up your home network. Lifehacker does cover some of these points, like avoiding hubs in favour of switches. Another consideration should be things like the quality of cable you use, especially if you are going with long distances. I would also recommend that if you have the opportunity, get networking built into the house while it is being built, instead of doing it afterwards. It will save you money, unless you want to have cables snaking along your floors all over the place.

Do you have any tips from your experience in networking your household? What to avoid? What to use?