Barratt Homes - Media Panel/Ethernet Connections

coldjim

Hi there,
Has anyone bought a Barratt home? I wanted to know if the Media Panel or the Telephone points upgrade will carry ethernet/internet connections.
I want wired ethernet around the home, but the sales rep doesn't seem to know what I'm talking about and the barratt upgrade site doesn't mention anything to do with carrying internet connections.
Can anyone help?

Cheers

pinkteapot

[deleted] 

davidw123

Bought a barratts new build home in August. Been great, although had to chase for a few snags they eventually get things sorted

The media points are usually in both the living room and the master bedroom, and both should contain a ethernet port for internet connections - mine does.

foxy-stoat

Get the sales rep to read one of their Operation and Maintenance manuals for the houses that they are selling.  I would speak to their area manager and inform them that their "sales staff" do not know about the product they are selling.

iampetesmith

If Barratt only put it in the living room & bedroom and you want network cabling throughout the house (as in every room), then it's not too difficult to do yourself afterwards. A decent drill, a couple of reels of Cat6 cable, punchdown tool, some wall sockets and trunking should do it.

I bought a 1930s ex-council house and cabled the whole joint, I went a bit further and put double sockets in each room with a 24 port patch panel and 24 port switch in a cabinet under the stairs. Mine looks like this:

The silver box is a NAS that shares all my media on the network so that it can be accessed in every room. It all depends how far you want to go with it, but for streaming video and large data transfer it works a lot better than wifi.

gr7ace

I have a new Barratt house, which has RJ45 ports (ports for ethernet cables) in the kitchen, study, master bedroom and a second one in the lounge (as well as the media plate). When I moved in non of them work.
Barratt sent out an electrician (straight away I knew it wasn't going to be resolved). They managed to fix the main media plate to get it to work, but when I inquired as to how they'd wired up the house, as you need a patch panel next to the broadband router to make connections from one cable to one socket or a one to many (like the picture posted by iampetesmith), the electrician told me that they daisy chained the cat5 cable  .

The onsite team and boss of the electrician came out and after I explain it was all wrong, they back tracked and said their technical build diagrams only require them to enable one ethernet port and that's in the media plate.

So long story short, if you want to use all of the ethernet ports then you'll need to pay someone or do it yourself.

gr7ace

iampetesmith said:

If Barratt only put it in the living room & bedroom and you want network cabling throughout the house (as in every room), then it's not too difficult to do yourself afterwards. A decent drill, a couple of reels of Cat6 cable, punchdown tool, some wall sockets and trunking should do it.

I bought a 1930s ex-council house and cabled the whole joint, I went a bit further and put double sockets in each room with a 24 port patch panel and 24 port switch in a cabinet under the stairs. Mine looks like this:

The silver box is a NAS that shares all my media on the network so that it can be accessed in every room. It all depends how far you want to go with it, but for streaming video and large data transfer it works a lot better than wifi.

How easy was it to run the cable? It was toying with doing it myself, but was put off by having to run new cables to the rooms.

iampetesmith

gr7ace said:

How easy was it to run the cable? It was toying with doing it myself, but was put off by having to run new cables to the rooms.

It wasn't too bad, it's just best to plan where it's all going first before you start drilling holes. I used an SDS drill and it went straight through the wall in about 10 seconds, punching down the sockets can be a bit time consuming as there are 8 wires for each if you want the fastest speed.

I stuck all my trunking and sockets to the skirting board as it's not in the way when you want to change the wallpaper, so I've now got double gigabit sockets in each room (living room has 2x doubles behind the TV and a double behind the stereo) and all of my devices are plugged in with cable except for the phones.

scottishblondie

In a new build house I would want the cable run before the plasterboard goes up rather than doing it after the fact with trunking, but I guess that's down to personal taste.

I bought a Springfield new build in 2012 and had them install ethernet cable to all rooms, terminating in a patch panel in a cupboard where I also had them install a phone socket.  The sales person had no idea what I was requesting, and once I moved in I had to re-terminate all the cables at both ends as they weren't very well installed, but afterwards it was great.