Wired Wins Every Time
Wednesday morning and another Smart Home Blog with Speed. I attended a late night appointment for a client last night, it’s a recent project we completed, fairly large home with a good amount of pre-wiring of Cat6 and coaxial cabling. Last night that cabling came into play.
Sky TV had sent an engineer round to install and setup a Sky Q box with 3 Sky Mini boxes system. The main Living Room had the Q main box and the other boxes for Mini boxes were for multi-room and TV in other rooms. The Sky engineer connected the main box to the Living Room TV and connected the device to the home wi-fi. The Mini boxes are then meant to wirelessly connect to the Q box to receive their content but none of them were able to because of the construction of the house and distance between devices. Modern construction and insulation methods are not conducive to wi-fi signal strength. The Sky engineer tried in vain to get a connection and installed a number of wireless boost boxes to get it working. The client was not enamoured about this wireless setup and called us to come and connect it to the wired network. Sky would not attempt this.
All our projects benefit from labelled and clearly identifiable network outlets at all TV locations. As a general rule we would always install a minimum of two network cables at every TV point, as well as coaxial cable.
We wired the main Q box via Ethernet cable and disabled all wi-fi functions built in to the box. We then wired in the three Mini boxes and also disabled their wi-fi output. The system synchronised all the boxes in less than one hour and the Sky Q system is now hard wired together and will not be susceptible to poor wireless signal strength and outages if the boosters are unplugged.
The final message in this blog is; wired wins every time. If you are building or renovating a property and have not got Cat6 wiring going into the infrastructure of the home then you are wiring the property no different from a house wired in 1990. We wire for 2020 and beyond. Wired wins every time.