Will Home Automation & Data Cables be Part of Standardized Electrical Wiring

[jonovid]

will future electrical wiring rules include standardized data & home automation cables?
for example requiring central CAT6 junction box with its cables running to all rooms in new buildings regardless of need.
or will we continue to rely on overcrowded wireless network protocols.
be interested to know-

[Zucca]

Surely if I will build my future home I will put >=CAT6 everywhere.

I doubt it will become main stream:
1) Average Joe don't see the advantage of cable ETH vs WIFI
2) 99% Home builders wants to go as cheap as possible

That said my cheap and horrible built 2013 USA home have CAT5 as telephone cable spread in almost all rooms. I re-used it for my 1GB ETH connections, mainly for mesh WIFI AP 

[DimitriP]

So many countries, so many standards  and probably twice as many opinions :

A)

Will Home Automation & Data Cables be Part of Standardized Electrical Wiring

If you mean "will the house get bult with home automation and data cables" preinstalled....If it costs more it won't. If it will increase the sale value it will. So it will depend

B)

will future electrical wiring rules include standardized data & home automation cables?

current "electrical rules" probably already include "rules" or guidelines on cable type etc you can run with / without conduit etc -

C)

will we continue to rely on overcrowded wireless network protocols.

WiFi is a huge market. Will Cisco and the other players give it up?  nope.
...and since we ain't gonna get a mobile phone with an RJ-45 plug any time soon (meaning never)....it's still a huge market !!!


But what is the current issue you are facing ?

[themadhippy]

If you mean "will the house get bult with home automation and data cables" preinstalled....If it costs more it won't. If it will increase the sale value it will.

or as is common over here,can we make it an optional add on with a hefty mark up.

[coppice]

Huge numbers of people would stare an an RJ45 socket on their wall and simply wonder why the house has been wired for a land line in 2024, and doesn't that phone socket look larger than usual.

[globoy]

I think a fair number of higher end homes, at least in the USA, come with some amount of built-in wired network connections.  Stuff like POE is nice for things like outside security cameras (and personally I think it could be used for a lot of smart LED lighting but that doesn't seem to be a thing).  But beyond ethernet, what standardized home automation wiring is there?

Most HA protocols are wireless.  Seems to me that wireless is the future.  Wifi is undergoing continuous improvement and things like congestion are lessening as time goes on.  It's also a lot more convenient.

I'm not betting on it but maybe someday in the future someone will figure out safe and reliable wireless power delivery and then many gadgets can cut cords altogether.  I could see that becoming a selling point for houses.

[DimitriP]

I'm not betting on it but maybe someday in the future someone will figure out safe and reliable wireless power delivery and then many gadgets can cut cords altogether.  I could see that becoming a selling point for houses.

...and once we figure out how to handle gravity, we can do away with mounting TVs on walls..the future is bright ( to compensate for my dark sarcasm )

[soldar]

My guess is copper will be displaced by fiber.

[pdenisowski]

Huge numbers of people would stare an an RJ45 socket on their wall and simply wonder why the house has been wired for a land line in 2024, and doesn't that phone socket look larger than usual.

I was visiting someone in a hospital not that long ago and saw an old style (non-RJ45) Token Ring jack on the wall.  I always wondered what happened to the person who made that decision

[jonovid]

I guess we will only be truly wireless when home appliances are self powered by micro cold fusion & defy gravity at sea level. like affordable silent flying cars.

anyway back to reality- electrical & data wiring is still with us . I use CAT6 cable poking through walls between rooms for better security & phantom power but it looks messy as its not running inside wall cavitys. 
thank you all for responding

[themadhippy]

surprised data over mains never really took off,guess the cost to profit ratio wasn't good enough.

[coppice]

surprised data over mains never really took off,guess the cost to profit ratio wasn't good enough.

Do you mean domestic LAN service over mains, or long distance? Short distance power line LAN modems sell in quite large numbers. Long distance power line communications modems aren't that fast, but for a time looked like they were going to be big business for smart metering. In reality most of the is now being done by radio.

[nctnico]

will future electrical wiring rules include standardized data & home automation cables?
for example requiring central CAT6 junction box with its cables running to all rooms in new buildings regardless of need.
or will we continue to rely on overcrowded wireless network protocols.
be interested to know-

As home-automation doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, it makes no sense to use a wired protocol. Keep in mind that a wired data connection requires galvanic isolation. Another downside is that it typically isn't allowed to mix low-voltage data wiring with AC mains wiring. This makes a wired protocol very expensive compared to using Bleutooth LE. The BLE transceiver in a bulb or socket can be directly connected to mains without safety or regulations issues.

[themadhippy]

Do you mean domestic LAN service over mains, or long distance?

local ,reversed POE if you like.

[coppice]

will future electrical wiring rules include standardized data & home automation cables?
for example requiring central CAT6 junction box with its cables running to all rooms in new buildings regardless of need.
or will we continue to rely on overcrowded wireless network protocols.
be interested to know-

As home-automation doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, it makes no sense to use a wired protocol. Keep in mind that a wired data connection requires galvanic isolation. Another downside is that it typically isn't allowed to mix low-voltage data wiring with AC mains wiring. This makes a wired protocol very expensive compared to using Bleutooth LE. The BLE transceiver in a bulb or socket can be directly connected to mains without safety or regulations issues.

These days home automation includes things like moving video from security, doorbell and other sources around the house. Also BTLE is very much a line of sight protocol. I don't know how it behaves in wooden houses, but in brick homes, or steel and concrete apartment blocks it goes around very few corners.

[madires]

My guess is copper will be displaced by fiber.

I don't think so. We need both, i.e. Ethernet TP cable for telephone, door intercom and LAN (<= 10GBase-T) and glass fiber for FTTH and LAN (>= 10GBase-xx). For TP I would go for CAT5e or CAT6 which are quite easy to install (CAT7 and above are finicky). For glass fiber I'd recommend to go for single mode which covers FTTH and high-speed LAN. This might require attenuators in some cases but is future-proof.. A mix of multi and single mode would make things only more complicated for a residential building.

[CatalinaWOW]

The empirical evidence is no. 

Here in the US proposals for a standardized interface were made sometime about the late 1980s.  There were two fairly solid proposals, and the description makes fairly clear what one of the fundamental problems.  They included power, ethernet, telephone and cable TV in a cable, and standardized outlet boxes.  At the time these were proposed including POTS and cable connections made sense, and are now laughable.  Cable cost per unit length was obviously high relative to simple power wiring.  And having two competing standards hurt adoption of both.  After a few years I never heard any more about these.

The same general issues apply today.  At least with WIFI the retrofit issues are pretty minor and obsolescence doesn't mean walls full of dead conductors.

[John B]

I am building my future home and have factored in conduits in all interior walls to allow for the ease of threading and removing ethernet cabling, along with CAT5 as generic 8 core wire for my control panels. No need to be locked into any standard that will probably become obsolete.

I decided that any control system for the core controls, eg lighting, should be able to operate independently of any router or network connectivity in general.

[Halcyon]

I would say Cat 6 (or at least Cat 5) has been a standard inclusion in new home and apartment builds in Australia for the past 15-20 years, in one form or another. In reality, that seldom means 1 or more ports in each of the rooms, usually it's 2 or 3 ports scattered "where ever". In more recent builds, I have seen more wall jacks appearing, which run to Krone terminal blocks, and while you could use them for Ethernet, I don't think that's the intention. Most apartment buildings here have fibre to the basement, then VDSL2 up to each unit. In newer homes, you generally see ethernet cable running to a central point, such as Clipsal's "StarServe" product (which is just a plastic cabinet mounted in/on a wall, with enough space to squeeze some basic networking gear inside).

I ran 40 ethernet cables around my house when it was being built about 10 years ago, but I think even today, unless you're a hardcore IT or technology enthusiast, that would be considered overkill in homes.
The vast majority of people don't really care about having a central switch and wiring their devices in, particularly as wireless ethernet just keeps getting better and faster. 6 GHz has already been ratified and is in-use, which opens up even more possibilities, particularly in RF congested areas.

[madires]

Structured cabling is really great when you rearrange things or a tenant changes. Just change the patch cable in the distribution panel and plug your router, phone or whatever wherever you want. I ask new tenents where they want their DSL/phone, do the patch, and crimp an RJ45 or make new cable for their device. And everyone is happy.

[ajb]

Building codes are generally concerned with safety and efficiency more than anything else.  Even requirements for the locations of receptacles aren't really about convenience for the occupants, but about reducing the risk of fire due to overloaded receptacles or improper use of extension cords.  Even if a standards body wanted to, the proportion of people who need/want data wiring in their home is probably too small, with too much variation in what kind of wiring they want where and for what purposes, to be able to build a standard around. 

[Kjelt]

will future electrical wiring rules include standardized data & home automation cables?
for example requiring central CAT6 junction box with its cables running to all rooms in new buildings regardless of need.
or will we continue to rely on overcrowded wireless network protocols.
be interested to know-

As home-automation doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, it makes no sense to use a wired protocol. Keep in mind that a wired data connection requires galvanic isolation. Another downside is that it typically isn't allowed to mix low-voltage data wiring with AC mains wiring. This makes a wired protocol very expensive compared to using Bleutooth LE. The BLE transceiver in a bulb or socket can be directly connected to mains without safety or regulations issues.

But adding a tiny plastick fiber would be ok. So for existing homes that would be a cheap and neat solution.

[CatalinaWOW]

Just two more examples of how technology change fights against this.

1.  In older homes in the US (and probably worldwide) you can find the connectors for a long wire antenna used for AM broadcast reception.

2.  In somewhat newer homes you can find connections for broadcast analog TV.  The antennas are either in the rafters and may still be there, or were on the roof and are usually gone.

The people who installed these things thought they were worthwhile and maybe even thought they would last "forever".  But the golden age of AM was perhaps forty years.  Analog TV lasted a little longer.  Wired ethernet seems destined to have a similar lifetime.

Houses, even in the US, last for decades.  The technology we want for home control seldom lasts much more than a decade.  Combine that with all the regulatory, cost and standardization issues and I just don't see it happening. 

[NiHaoMike]

Wired ethernet seems destined to have a similar lifetime.

I don't see that going away anytime soon. Unless you mean CAT6 eventually getting replaced with fiber, 10Gbps over UTP is testing the practical limits with the transceiver chips needing more voltage and running quite hot.

[Kjelt]

So in short it makes the most sense that when building a home you foresee the use of some cabling whatever it might be and install some extra empty pipes from the central point where all utilities enter the home to each room.