Linked by David Adams on Wed 21st Jan 2004 22:52 UTC
If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion. 
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In my house, we had a small wiring closet. It was big enough for an 6U rack chassis that ended up with a 19'' 3Com 24port 10/100/1000 switch I got on Ebay for $90. I put this on the bottom, then used it as a shelf for my DSL modem and router/firewall/DHCP server.
I didn't put AC/Data directly into my ceilings, but each room had a ceiling fan, so we put an AP in the middle of the house and a $50 AP extender onto each ceiling fan. Yes, the world is going wireless, *BUT* there are still many good reasons for using wired solutions. Consider that I can't browse the web faster than my 2MB DSL, but with all tower systems wired, I can play games and copy files at 1Gb.
Related, be careful what your kids know about your wiring. When my 15 year old discovered we had 1Gb networking and data in every room, he mounted a webcam in his sister's bathroom and bedroom and would watch her friends from his room when they had sleepovers. Definitely not appropriate and open for a potential lawsuit (he has no computer for 6 months, btw, and no more webcams til he turns 18 and moves out).