We’re about to get the first floor of our house rewired, and it’s made me have to think about what we do today, and what we might do in a few years time. The house was built at the turn of the last century, and then had extensions added in the 1920s and the 1980s. The net result is a hotch-potch of electrical wiring, unreliable TV aerial sockets dotted about the place, and most of the cabling along the exterior walls rather than neatly under floors and within walls.
Lots of power sockets seems to me to be a given for our needs for the next 10 years. I’m not sure that co-axial TV aerials are really worth the effort, as within a couple of years I think that for particularly our kids’ rooms, standalone TVs will be an anachronism and they’ll probably have computing devices that can stream video. Already, our eldest struggles with the idea of scheduled TV channels as he has become used to TV on demand with access to BBC iPlayer on our SmartTV in the main living area.
The question that this leaves is whether to put ethernet across the top floor. My overriding gut feel is that ethernet sockets in the bedrooms will be like video sockets that you see in the boardrooms of companies – something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but ultimately never get used. Will we, in the next few years, see a return to wired, rather than wireless network devices in the home? I have a couple of cables run (slightly amateurishly) so that I can set up WiFi hubs to give coverage front and rear and top to bottom across the house.
I think I’m going to take the gamble that wired ethernet in every room isn’t worth the clutter…
mmitII 