Structured Wiring Options

In one sentence Structured Wiring can be described as combining all of the communications wiring in your home and treating it as one wiring system. This can include wiring for a home network, telephone, video, audio, alarms, infrared remote control and anything else you choose to throw in. Structured Wiring is very different than the older way of doing things.

Daisy Chain Wiring	Structured Wiring

Daisy Chain

Cables are run from one outlet or jack to the next outlet or jack and then on to the next and so forth. Splices were often used in the telephone wiring. CATV splitters would be stuck away deep inside walls or in attics somewhere. Little attention was paid to good wiring techniques - as long as the wires were touching every thing would be ok. The signal quality and strength at the end of the chain would be seriously degraded and inconsistent. If one of the connections were to fail all of the devices connected further on down the chain would fail as well. With this method the phone lines follow different paths through the home as the video which are different again from the network. And each of the wiring types usually has it's own separate outlet plate. The wiring paths and the location of splices and splitters was rarely documented. Adding to or troubleshooting or documenting this mess was nearly impossible.

Structured Wiring

One of the main features of this is having a central location and how all of the cables from the outlets go back to the central location. This is commonly called a Home Run configuration. Typically one outlet plate is used for all of the wiring types - phone, video, network or whatever. And the wires are typically run in bundles containing ALL the types of wiring. No splices are used.