Monoprice Small Patch Panel in Living Room

Monoprice Small Patch Panel.

A few blog posts ago, I wrote about the monoprice patch panel in the “nerve centre” of the house (i.e. study room lah)… Where my PCs, NAS, Modem, Network Switches are. Of course, there must be the opposite side of this nerve centre, right. From the “nerve centre”, data flows to and fro to different parts of the house for specific reasons. So here’s sharing two parts. One part is the living room where the gadgets for entertainments are.

For the living room, I had a TV cabinet built with thoughts given to the needs of a cable TV point (for Starhub), a telephone point (for that Mio TV in the future) and many electrical plugs (for all your gadgets, TV, BluRay players etc). Then also enough space for a small patch panel. For this case, I chose the Monoprice Mini Patch Panel (with 12 ports) as it is small, nice size and has 12 ports (more than enough) and yes, because I have a soft spot for cute cute things.

To start off, I had designed the TV Cabinet and they built the cabinet to my needs (You need think through what gadgets you have, what cabinet spaces you need, always remembering the technical parts like electrical plugs, network points, cable tv points, telephone points etc).

So here’s my instructions to the contractor on where to place the technical needs. Cute right ? My contractor and his workers laughed and laughed at this… Sigh, very funny meh???…..

Anyone looking to hire an interior designer for networks. ME ME ME !! :p

And how it looks at half way point of renovation. A photo tells it all. The left side (blue cables) are the CAT6 cables that is ran from the “nerve centre” to the living room. I ran 6 cables from there to the living room. The middle cable is the SCV cable. Next to it is the Singtel telephone line and then the start of a long chain of plugs.

So I then start to install the 6 cables to the patch panel. As usual, you need to label carefully the cables and write them down to avoid any confusion. So patching the cables take place next.

So here’s how it looks when done inside the TV cabinet. You can see the cables on the left side going into the patch panel. The patch panel has white parts for you to label them as you need but I did not. I just wrote down the numbers in a small note book or Evernote.

A close up. There are also holes for you to screw the whole patch panel tightly to the cabinet.

The electrical plugs when done:

The starhub cable and telephone point:

So I am very happy. I now have 6 CAT6 points in the living room for wired connections between the living room and the “nerve centre”. So far I am very happy. Streaming of MKV, RMVB, AVI are flawless via XMBC on Apple TV2 or AC Ryan etc. In the future, when I upgrade my TV, I am sure there will also need for a network point to the TV and I am thinking of buying a PS3 (or Wii or Xbox etc) all needed a cable point too. Then there are always the possibilities of BluRay and also even things like sound systems that needed network connectivity nowadays !

I guess my point is that even 6 are not enough and there are always growing needs for such cables points in your living room. You will never have enough cable points 🙂

And since we are already on this topic (and I dun wish to write a separate post), let’s also show photos of how the rest of the cables ran to the rest of the small flat. As I said, I had 12 cables laid from the “nerve centre”. 6 goes to the living room as above. 3 goes to the master bedroom and 3 goes to the spare room. So that’s 12 altogether.

This is how it looks:

Then as usual, I did the patching of the cables to the CAT6 heads:

And installed face plates on them. You can get them cheaply at many hardware shops but I got mine from Ang Mo Kio Industrial Park:

So you have network points in the bedrooms too. What can you do with them is you can, of course, run wired connections from your PCs (in bedrooms ???) to the network points. But come on, most of us don’t do that right ? Most of the time you will be using a laptop or a iPad table or an Android tablet wirelessly. If your wireless router is not in your bedroom, sometimes wireless network reception cab be weak and not what you want.

In which case, this article will be great use to you. I did exactly what he suggested and my reception is perfect in the bedroom and even the living room (yes I installed a wireless router there). I made use of the TP Link Wireless Router I bought initially for hacking but never did it in the end. It is now my wireless router in the bedroom and in the living room.

Try it ! It is better than wireless repeater