am in the process of wiring up my home and looking for some opinions on cabling. cat5e seems sufficent for most applications today including gigE. but if you were wiring up your house today would you go for cat 6 just to be on the safe side? intended applications would be streaming files (audio and video) from a media server. as for future apps, who knows.

thanks

I wired every room in my house (already standing since 1958) with 2 Cat6, 3 RG6, and 1 Cat5e for phone a couple months ago. When the house is already standing and the walls are up, I decided it would be better to just do Cat6 instead of possibly having to replace the cat5e in the future. I'm glad I did it, because everyone is envious of my wired house.

Do you have the option of running conduit? Then you can pull/replace whatever you want later.

no, no possibiltiy of running conduit. that would be great. the walls are already up but i have the opp to use some baseboard space. Still. i'd prefer to invest and future proof now.

The cost of labor is probably far more significant than the cost of cable. Even if you pull it yourself, you must have some value on your time.

Cat6

It cost $3,000 to do-up my house. 6 wall plates including the outside one.