# New Network - Home Run vs Switches?



## dahomes555 (Dec 17, 2011)

My business is going to be moving to a new office in a February. Growing from 2200 sq ft to 6000, and boy can we use the space!

I'm looking forward to actually having a dedicated IT room and actually having the network setup in a way that makes logical sense, instead of the hacked together, screwy configuration that I've been stuck with for the last 3 years.
I will have 30 work stations/cubicles, 8 offices, a conference room, reception area, and break room/presentation room. For each work station I would like to have at least 2 network connections (phone and data.) When all is said and done there will probably be 120 total cable drops (60 x 2). Over the course of 6000 sq ft, that adds up to a lot of cable.

I will have a T1 connection for my phone system and a cable or fiber (if I can get the local cable co to drop me a fiber line!) for the data. 

My business is an alarm company that installs and services alarm systems, video surveillance systems, and access control systems so I'm pretty familiar with low voltage wiring and I have a steady crew of installers that I can assign to wire this place up for me.

So here's my questions:
1) Is it better to run each wire back to the IT room, or could I use switch/hubs to group together specific areas and cut down on my cabling?
2) It seems to me that I should set up two completely separate networks for my phone and data. I think I'm more than fine to run my voice on a 10/100 setup with cat5. For my data, would I be better off with Cat6, or will Cat5e do the trick? I want a zippy data network and plan on installing 10/100/1000 network.
3) For my gigabit network, do I need any different patch panel? Or are all patch panels essentially created equally?


Thanks in advance for your responses!


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

1. always home run to a central location where your switch and server(s) are going to be
2. can5e or 6 should be the standard throughout. cost of the cable is minimal compared to the labor to install it.
3. need a patch panel that supports cat5e or 6 which in turn supports gigabit.

You would want one patch panel for voice and one for network. Plan your switch for each in a location that has plenty of air flow. both switches would connect to the router.

next big question you need to consider is your ip addressing and how you are going to provide that to phones/computers.


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## cablingguys (Dec 17, 2011)

Hi...
1)you absolutely must run homerun cabling for each indivudal data and voice jack.
2)I agree Cat5e or Cat 6 should be standard for all locations. I would suggest using Cat6 for all locations and putting everything on patch panels. This will allow you to easily transition to a VOIP phone system when needed. It sounds like your company is growing and you may eventually go to VOIP.

120 cables at 150'/avg is 18K of cable. There is a difference of about $150 per 1K between Cat5e & Cat6. That's about $1350 if you used Cat5e for voice. I would stick with Cat6.

Thanks
Cablingguys


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## dahomes555 (Dec 17, 2011)

Thanks for both replies. I had planned on doing a home run on each cable, but wanted to make sure that wasn't overkill. 

I actually do already have a VoIP phone system. That's what I have the T1 for and plan on running a separate voice network for. 

As far as ip addressing, I haven't really got to that step yet. To be honest, I currently have a dlink wireless router that is handling all my ip addressing via dhcp. I have about 8 switches to distribute the network. Like I said its a mess. However, is there anything wrong with using a router like that for my ip addressing and connecting each router (1 for data, 1 for voice) to my rack mounted switches? I don't have infinite resources to do this project, but I also don't want to do something that will be difficult to manage.


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

doesn't make much sense to connect two routers to the T1.

You do understand a T1 at 1.5mbps is considered not so great bandwidth these days?
DSL or cable will give you much more in my neck of the woods.

You would not connect multiple switches. That would be a huge mistake. Don't be frugal by trying to reuse all the equipment you now have.
In your situation I would get two 48 port switches. This will allow you expansion from 30 to 48 [increase of 18 phones/pcs]
chaining a bunch of switches together will drag down your performance compared to single switches with enough ports.


48x2=96 which is way below the 254 possible ip addresses available with a class c address range. You would use a class c address range like 192.168.0.1-254. If you phone system is working fine now with dynamic you could continue to use dynamic ip from the router for all.

Only issue I see here is prioritizing the voice traffic over the data traffic at the router/T1. This is where you need a router that supports QoS and a way for it to read the voip tagging.


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## Signify (Jan 6, 2012)

Hang on a second he said he would use the T1 only for voice and a new dedicated Internet via copper or fiber so there should be no issue of prioritizing traffic on the WAN side.
The rest of Wand3r3r's reasoning is spot on. Dump your old switches and buy new. If 48 ports is not enough for the PC or voip net (you mension 2x60 cable drops) find a switch model that is stack capable or make sure the switches can be connected with LACP. I'm most familiar with HP and Cisco but I know D-link has a good enterprise product family as well.
Unfortunately most switches with high performance stack capability are rather expensive. To save money you could go for something cheaper but live with "only" having a 1-2 GE interconnect between the switches. Normally users wont be able fill that interconnect anyway. Specially not if most of the traffic is to and from Internet.

If you feel you are up to it you could get Vlan and QoS capable switches and mix the traffic but I would not recommend it unless you are willing to do some fair amount of studying. That would include figuring out how to set up QoS parameters properly in switches, phones and PBX.
What I absolutely would do if the phones support it id buy switches with PoE (Power over ethernet). That way you can get rid of the hopeless power adapters for the phones. Also if you make sure your PBX, SIP gate and phone switches are on UPS you make sure the phones work even if you get a small power outage.

Speaking of the PBX. Is it placed somewhere else or at your office? Some of these voip pbxs can act as dhcp servers for the phones. How is the T1 connected to your phone net today? To a SIP gateway or through a router?

You have not mentioned if you have a server of some sort. If you have that it might be a good place to place the DHCP service. Else see below

Replace the router for the computer net with a smaller high quality firewall. Even if a device like a D-Link DIR-655 theoretically can handle 60 PC I'd get something like a Cisco ASA 5505 or Juniper SSG5 unless you are on a really tight budget. Both these can act as DHCP servers. The 5505 has a total throughput of 150mb/s
the SSG 5 175mb/s.

Note that the max length you should have for any cable you install should be 90meters. The standard for twisted pair ethernet between 10-1000 mb/s is 100m. If you don't go over 90m for the installed cables that will leave you 5m at each end for patch cables. You can often get away with a tad longer total cable length then 100m but I would not exceed 110m

If you don't hire a company to install the cables make sure you read the instructions on how to install everything. Also try and hire a cable analyser and measure every drop once you have it installed. There is nothing as irritating as trying to troubleshoot a network problem and find out that it was due to a poorly installed cable.

Do you have a total budget for the new net? It's so much easier to recommend something if one know how much one have to spend :wink:


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