Is wired networking still worth it when Wi-Fi is this good?+
For the things that matter, yes — and the reason is consistency rather than peak speed. Wi-Fi shares a medium with every other device and every neighbour, so its performance varies through the day in ways you cannot control. A cable does not. For video calls that cannot drop, for a desktop that stays in one place, and for the access points serving everything else, wired is the difference between usually fine and reliably fine. For a phone on a sofa, Wi-Fi is obviously the right answer.
What is structured cabling?+
Running a dedicated cable from each outlet location back to one central point, rather than daisy-chaining between rooms. Every drop is its own home run, terminated on a patch panel at the central end and a jack at the room end. It costs more in cable than ad-hoc approaches and it is the reason the system is still usable in ten years when you want to change what plugs in where.
Cat5e, Cat6 or Cat6a?+
Cat6 is the sensible default for a house being wired today. Cat5e is adequate for a lot of current use and is hard to justify choosing new when the cable is a small part of the total cost. Cat6a matters for long runs, for higher speeds over distance, and for power-over-Ethernet devices where its construction handles heat better. Since the labour dwarfs the cable cost, upgrading the category is usually the cheapest future-proofing available.
How many cables should I run to each location?+
Two as a minimum, at every location you bother to wire. The cost difference between one and two is small because the labour and the route are shared, and the difference between two and going back later is enormous. Two lets a location serve a device and an access point, or a device and whatever you have not thought of yet.
What is PoE and why does it matter in an old house?+
Power over Ethernet carries both data and power on one cable, which means an access point or a camera can go where it should go rather than where there happens to be an outlet. In an older house, where adding an outlet in a hallway ceiling is real work, that is often the single most useful property of a wired network — it decouples device placement from the electrical layout entirely.
Where should the central point be?+
Somewhere with power, some ventilation, and access you will not resent. A garage wall, a utility closet or a laundry area usually beats an attic — attics get very hot, and equipment lives shorter lives up there. Consider noise if it is near a bedroom, and consider that you will want to reach it occasionally. Where this ends up also decides cable routes for the whole house, so it is worth settling early.
Can data cable run alongside electrical cable?+
Not in the same bore or the same enclosure, and separation is maintained where they run in parallel. This is a real requirement rather than a preference, and it is also good practice for signal quality. Practically it means data and power routes are planned together rather than one being retrofitted along the other, which is why doing both at once in an older house is more efficient than doing them separately.
Does a home office need its own circuit?+
It often should, and this is the part of the question that is genuinely electrical. A room whose lights dim when the heat pump starts is a room where a desktop and a monitor share a circuit with something large. A dedicated circuit for the office removes that interaction, gives you clean capacity for equipment, and is trivial to add while other work is happening — much less so afterwards.
What makes older houses harder?+
Plaster and lath is slower to open and to make good than drywall. Fire blocking between floors interrupts the obvious vertical routes. Insulation added later can fill the cavities a cable would otherwise drop through. And in a house that has been added to repeatedly, the framing behind a wall is often not what the room suggests. None of this makes the work impossible; it makes route planning the part that determines the cost.
Is there anything that would stop the work?+
In very old houses, materials that need assessing before anyone opens walls or ceilings. That is a specialist question rather than an electrical one, and the honest answer is that it gets established before work starts rather than discovered during it. We will say so if we think it applies rather than proceeding and hoping.
Should I do this at the same time as other electrical work?+
If any is planned, yes. Both jobs want the same access — open walls, attic and crawlspace routes, drilled paths through framing — and the making-good is a substantial part of each. Doing them together means paying for that access once. A rewire, a panel replacement or a remodel is the natural moment.
What about a UPS?+
Worth it for the network equipment at minimum, and often for the desk. A short outage that would otherwise drop a call becomes invisible, and equipment that dislikes abrupt shutdowns gets a graceful one. It is cheap relative to everything else here and it is the piece people most often add after their first bad week.
Do I need a permit?+
Which authority issues one depends on your address rather than on the work: the City of Santa Cruz, Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville each run their own, and everything unincorporated goes through County Planning. Live Oak, Pleasure Point, Soquel, Aptos and Felton are all unincorporated county despite the mailing address. Where a permit applies to work we do, we pull it and coordinate the inspection.