I'm at the business end of a house build, sparky has been through and laid cat 5e with multiple runs to most rooms including study nook, home theatre, bedroom etc.
The coms panel is in thegarage, not sure on the brand etc, but looks like one of the signet ones (is only as deep as the wall thickness, (about 100mm I guess) and it has the ports neatly terminated in there with telephone going in etc, there are 2 power points at the bottom of the panel for powering router and a switch I assume.
What do people do in regards to the switch? I assume I need to get some sort of rackmount to go above the panel? (I can't see any switch fitting into the panel itself?) I imagine that I would only need 8 - 16 ports max, can't see more than that being used at any given time in the near future.
Being cat5e, I assume I should go gigabit switch? Is there any particular brand/model that I should go for?
Its a 4 bdrm house, I only have rj45 ports through the house, no separate phone points at all, so do I need it to be able to handle voice as well as data, or do I plug in the phone terminations directly to the relevant port on the patch panel?
Anything else I should consider?
The budget is by no means unlimited, infact, its already $15-30k overbudget on the build, so I don't want to waste money on fetaures etc that I simply won't need
Thanks
Sen