I have a client wanting a fast network for his variety of apple computers, primarily for video streaming/ video over IP etc. We will wire his home with cat6, coax and fiber too.

I have two questions as I most certainly am not the expert with apple.

Is there any difference in requirements from a PC-based network? Isn't an IP network simply just that or will I need apple specific devices?

Is Gig-E a realistic and viable proposition to sell him. From my limited research it seems that very little is available unless he moves in to the many thousands of dollars for routers and so on.

I will probably outsource this portion of the job but want to know some more info before I say the wrong thing...

I have allways ran both Apple and PC's on the same cat-5 network.. Once again the whole Gig-E thing comes down to whether or not the hardware supports it. I have run into alot of people who think that because they buy a Gig-e router that their whole system is now faster when in reality your PC's network card is only going to do what it is rated to do.

Which Gig-e router have you used? How much retail?

Linksys 0041 is a pretty good value for a gigabit router. you will want to use a good gigabit switch with it, however, if you are going to have more than 4 clients or appliances.

make sure you don't have any very long runs of CAT-5 or you might deal with reflections corrupting packetized data... use fiber optic segments to connect nodes that are physically far apart ( greater than 300+ feet? )

there is no such thing as an Apple network, but on the flip side, there is no such thing as a PC network either... (unless you are talking about Appletalk, which has way too many disadvantages to even consider, unless it is a legacy setup. if you have a lot of clients with different speeds, i would recommend that you use 1 1000baseT switch for all gigabit clients and then buy another 100baseT switch for everything else. in the linksys admin settings, you can assign priority to the ports that need it, in this case, the 10000B switch. without going further into establishing static routes and policies, this is the easiest way to prioritize traffic bandwidth to your fast devices.

The basics of the network will be the same, configureing the machines will be different, obviously.