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Running cat5 wire over ventilation / heating ducting

5K views 7 replies 5 participants last post by  xxPaulCPxx 
#1 ·
I am sick of hanging cat5 and telephone wires hanging out my basement window and or running over my head in my basement or on the floor. The obvious choice would be to go wireless but with our house being formed concrete and the basement ground floor not only seperated by a steel plate, concrete is poured over that plate (not sure how thick) but I can barely get a cell signal down stairs. So... I am not sure if I want to shell out for a high powered router and network adapters.

I do have a wireless router, a G and it sits downstairs. Our laptop CAN get on it as can my netbook, they are slow, my netbook is painfully slow.

So as it is set up right now, I have 50' cable going to the router and modem in a spare bedroom and another 50' of phone cord going from the router as well as 50' ethernet cable going upstairs since the phone jack don't work in the spare bedroom and so my sister upstairs can have internet. Another shorter cable is connecting my PS3 and Wii to the router in the downstairs spare bedroom. My service is through comcast.

I have noticed the PS3 (both of them) have trouble downlaoding wirelessly so I am not sure if its the router or what so we wired them.

Problem is? I got cables running out side and in side and they are getting on my nerves. I want to runt he wires up the wall and into the celing to get rid of some of them downstairs... the issue? The forced air heater ducting I would have to run the cat5 over. I am assuming this is against code?

The cables that are running outside I think I can tuck into the wall and drop from upstairs to downstairs, provided I can find the hole where the old phone wires went in.

Sorry, long winded I know so here is the question:
Running cat5 over the heating / ventilation ducting (plenum?) against code?
 
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#4 · (Edited)
Just a note here, you could just simply run one wire from the router to an additional router upstairs. Most good routers will automatically communicate to each other and this should save you money and tons of time (prevent running wires through additional walls etc etc etc). I believe that's how big office enterprises do it so that they all share the wireless network.

If you are concerned about that not working, just buy one from a store you can return it to if it doesn't solve your problems
 
#5 ·
Just a note here, you could just simply run one wire from the router to an additional router upstairs. Most good routers will automatically communicate to each other and this should save you money and tons of time (prevent running wires through additional walls etc etc etc). I believe that's how big office enterprises do it so that they all share the wireless network.

If you are concerned about that not working, just buy one from a store you can return it to if it doesn't solve your problems
I actually do have two routers, one down stairs and one up. I thought I could get away with one, but we needed the router upstairs for the other PS3. It would have been 3 wires going from top floor to basement. It was much simpler when I left the router and modem upstairs and kept the wireless router in the spare room in the basement.
 
#7 ·
I wouldn't worry about plenum rated if outside where the air moves. and I'd go for the idea of multiple access points. you don't want multiple routers. you would only want one router ... routers give out IP's and even if you have one not set to dish IP's out, I have seen where they get reset to factory settings "all by themselves" and start dishing out ip's.
 
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