[TomHMeredith]

Ok, I'm new to the networking scene, so not too sure what to do!

My question is this: I have just bought a house which I plan to move into sometime early next year, renting the other bedrooms in the house out. I want to be able to offer the internet to the people renting the rooms. The house needs quite a lot of work doing, so now is the ideal time to lay cables. I'd like to have a broadband connection.

What equipment will I need? How do I go about setting this up? Anything I need to be wary of?

Any help much appreciated,

thanks

Tom

[BobW]

You could do it wireless with a router at the cable modem location, or run Cat5 cables to each room from the location where the modem will be. Plug each room into the router and cable modem into the WAN port on the router and all rooms will have the interent.

[Macola]

If running Cat5, try to keep it away from electrical wiring. Try to avoid the temptation to run it through existing holes in the studs that were drilled for electrical cable

[ghporter]

The cheaper and more stable way to go is by wiring the house with CAT5 cable. The previous advice is absolutely correct-run the wiring completely separately, and never NEVER through a hole that has a power line through it-that's a violation of the National Electrical Code, and it'll be expensive and time consuming to undo. I'd go with "plenum" cable throughout-that's CAT5 that's rated for installation in air spaces used for ventilation. It's slightly more expensive, but by using it throughout you avoid having the wrong kind of cable in the wrong place.

You'll need a good switch to connect all the rooms. You can get 8-port switches fairly inexpensively at places like BestBuy and CompUSA. With all the rooms connected through a switch you'll need some sort of broadband connection and a way to share it. In this case a gateway router is a good buy. There are even 8-port gateway routers available for not too much more than for a 4-port version. However keep in mind that when you offer this service YOU become tech support for all of your renters. Not my idea of a good time in some situations...