Linked by JoanneRodgers on Thu 15th May 2008 23:02 UTC
In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest. 
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Member since:
2006-04-14
When I moved into the place I reside in now, wireless was already pretty pervasive, but I decided to go with the wired approach.
In each of the eight rooms here, I have a dual CAT6 cable and an RF COAX cable terminated in a wallbox. These run upstairs to my office where I have a wall-mounted comms cabinet that contains my DSL modem/router (which also contains my ISDN phone system), my GigE Ethernet switch (unmanaged - pretty cheap), a patch panel for patching in any room in the place, and a StarSwitch which is connected to my dual Quadro-LNB satellite dish.
I can hook up a TV in any room just by connecting a digital SAT receiver to the RF jack in the wallbox. Of course I can patch in Ethernet everywhere via the RJ45 jacks in each room, but I can also patch through my ISDN telephones anywhere.
I expect to eventually set up a video on demand server, which can be expected to run flawlessly over 1GB Ethernet connections. I have very fast, glitch-free, and very reliable network capability throughout my place using a wired approach. I would not have that using wireless alone. However, wireless does have its place, and I can support that here too if need be.
In conclusion, I have to say that if it is practical and affordable, every permanent facility, be it at work or at home, should be wired. But that's just my opinion...