I am in the process of building a new house and just found out that digital cable or cable in general is not available in the area. Right now I have comcast digital cable-internet-phone all together. We are going to have 5 televisions in the new house. What do you guys suggest? What is a good company to go with to get phone/cable/tv from? We just got DVR around Christmas time and do not think we can live without it.

When a dish is installed do you just need a box for each television or does there need to be a seperate run for each tv?

lilred,

What part of NH are you in? I know a company that can possible help.

Ed

it is in antrim southern central

So I just found out there needs to be a seperate run for each tv. I guess I need to check the wiring at the new house. Hopefully the split for all of the cable outlets is easy to get to and in the basement. Otherwise, it will be a lot more difficult to run the satellite in lines.

Now that I know Direct TV doesn't offer any type of high speed internet, do you know of any good companies to go with that? I'm thinking maybe I can put my local and long distance phone service on the same company.

How about DirecWay, (formerly DirecPC)?

Or....

http://www.getdway.com

or wildblue.com

Or find a local microwave wireless high speed internet company. You can ussually pay less per month than Satellite internet. Plus you have to buy all of the equipment for satellite internet. With the microwave around here, there is no equipment to buy.

Yes, every location where you want a TV needs to have a cable, and all the cables should run from one location, which I call the head end (as do millions of others). From the head end, every location should also have at least one CAT5, either for a phone line, a phone system extension, or a LAN port.

We recommend an absolute minimum of two RG6 cables and two CAT5 to every TV location, a CAT5 to every phone location, and at least one CAT5 to every possible computer location. (Wireless is wonderful but wires are better -- they ALWAYS work.) The occasional second run of CAT5 is often used up by a network printer that it never occurred to you that you would want.

Overdo the cabling. The walls will never be as open again, and the installation labor never so cheap. As a matter of fact, the wire itself will cost more later, won't it?

Run speaker wires, too -- and that is another subject.

I suggest you search this site for New Hampshire. I was born in Laconia, although am now in California, and in the past have bantered with other installers in NH. You should be able to find two or three if the site search engine will look at profiles as well as articles.

walls are already up, they went up this past week after we already found out there was no cable in the area. we were told by comcast that there was, but their service stops about a mile away.

on the walk through with the electrician, we just said we want an outlet here.. there.. etc. Hopefully the head end is in a location shortly after entering the house, which it should be. if i were doing the work it would be. That would make it easier to get out to the location of the satellite.

as far as the cat 5 and all of the other wiring. i thought about it, but ended up not going with it as this is our first house and we're not too interested in chenneling sound through the house and only have one room where we plan on making it an office, we just had regular phone line installed there.

i ran the wiring for the flat screen plasma- i ran one component video w/waudio cabling as weel as one rca video cabling for the playstation. i also ran all of the speaker wires for the surround sound.

hopefully all of this is gonna work.

Trusting an electrician to do the LV wiring correctly is like trusting an electrician to do the LV wiring correctly!(appologies to Larry F.) Most electricians do not understand what you require, and will just tell you no problem, and then wire it how they have been for 20 years. Make sure that all the phone, RG-6 and network wires are home run to a central location, and not daisy chained.

That was a terribly irresponsible answer for them to give you, because ten years ago it was probably ten miles away, and within two years it might be ready to go into your house, now inconveniently not wired for cable!

When you say walls are up, I guess you mean drywall, too? Otherwise it is not too late to run more wires.

Did a DirecWay a few years back. Be careful of location, make sure not to mount it on post in ground. Trust me, did so once during a test, walked in front of it during install and got warm. Did some research and after that a little test, holding a hershey bar in front of the thing it starts to melt pretty fast. Don't want kids to get hurt.

I'd only recommend DirecWay if you don't have DSL service available in your area. If you're really looking for high speed, the ping times for DirecWay are quite long. Forget online gaming with DirecWay. Even other than gaming, I find the delay in getting pages to be objectionable.

I also believe good 911 service is important, and getting that with anything other than a hard wired phone line is questionable. These two issues made me go to DSL in the new subdivision I'm in. (The cable company had run the lines for the subdivision, but hadn't yet put in the amp's, etc. It took them about an extra year over the "about 1 month" they told me when I was looking at the property.)

That leaves you with DirecTV or DISH for satellite. With the changes both providers are making, I'd put off your decision as long as possible. Preferable run 6 RG6 from the dish location to the distribution closet, and at least 2 RG6 to each TV (That will let you do HD and TiVo) If you plan on putting an antenna up for HD either outside or in the attic, I'd suggest running one more RG6 to each TV location. There is some question right now regarding if you will be able to diplex the antenna onto the sat coax. If you still have a chance to correct or add to wiring, this might be a good idea.

lilred, I actually have 2 projects coming up in Antrim, and would be glad to take a look at your place while I'm down there... Shoot me an email. Bobby...