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Terminology
| Wires |
The wires that
carry these electronic services are a lot different than
the electrical wires that feed electricity to outlets around
your house. Think of these wires as the highways that allow
information to travel within your house. |
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| Bandwidth |
The professionals at OnQ Technologies
have helped us understand the concept of bandwidth. A wire
carries information like a pipe carries water. Just as
a bigger pipe can carry more water, a wire with a broad
bandwidth can carry more information into your house than
old-fashioned wiring. Old-fashioned phone wires (known
as "Category 3") were designed to only carry
voice conversations. A phone line consists of two thin
strands of insulated copper that are twisted around one
another to form a single line. Phone lines are prone to
interference, while modern-day wires are better shielded
to avoid interference.
Structured wiring systems utilize two types of broadband
wire, called Category 5 and RG6 Quad Shield. |
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| Category 5 Wire |
Cat 5 wires carry all telecommunications
information - phone, fax, modem and computer networking.
There are actually eight individual strands of copper inside
a Cat 5 wire, twisted into four pairs that are then wrapped
around one another to form Cat 5 cable.
This design gives you four separate phone lines within the
Cat 5 cable. Each individual phone line in the Cat 5 wire
has a high resistance to interference from the other lines.
This happens because each phone line (made of two twisted
strands of copper) has a "twist rate" different
from the other three lines. One of the four pairs will have
a high number of twists per inch, one will have a low number
of twists per inch, and the other two will have twist rates
somewhere in between. That difference in twist rates prevents
signals from bleeding across phone lines. Cat 5 wires have
more than twice the bandwidth of old-fashioned Category 3
copper phone lines. |
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| RG6 Quad Shield |
RG6 Quad Shield coaxial cables
handle all video traffic, including cable TV, digital satellite,
whole-house video distribution and cable modem service
- that's a new form of ultrahigh speed Internet access
provided by local cable companies over coaxial cable lines.
RG6 works as a super-video cable that can support hundreds
of channels of cable TV, digital satellite signals, cable
modem and high-speed interactive video services. RG6 will
give you a much clearer TV signal than standard coax cable,
because the jacket that surrounds the cable utilizes the
best available shielding technology.
Professional
installers run wires in bundles from the central hub
to each room in your house. They use color-coded wires
to keep track of the variety of services they'll run
to each room. OnQ Technologies uses thick black RG6 wires
to bring satellite and cable TV signals into the house
from the outside. Then they run wires from the central
hub to all the rooms in the house. They use blue RG6
wires to carry video; blue Cat5 wires for low-voltage
lighting control; green Cat5 wires for phone lines and
yellow Cat5 wires for data transmission and computer
networking within the house. |
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| Outlets |
Outlets work as the off-ramps
that let information exit the electronic highways in your
house (the wires) and arrive at your computers, TVs and
telephones. If you're lucky, the house you're in now may
have a single coaxial outlet in each room for a cable TV
hookup. Structured wiring professionals offer multi-port
outlets that can provide access to services in any combination
(phone lines, data, video and audio) to meet the specific
needs of every room in your house. |
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