I just put the finishing touches on an apartment renovation in a house that’s been in my family for years. Every night for the past week I’ve been lugging my tools and supplies to the house with the expectation of finalizing the rehab by the end of that visit. However, like a lot of projects in old houses, every small job uncovered another small job that needed completion.
One of the last projects before closing up the walls was making sure there were adequate cable and phone outlets in each room. If you’ve ever rented an apartment or house then you can probably relate to not having enough outlets. If you’ve ever been a landlord then you can probably feel my frustration of tenants running their own wires. We wanted to make sure neither party became frustrated.
I currently live in an apartment and understand the agony of being technologically impaired. What I should have said was more along the lines of not being able to setup my quarters the way I wish. I can either be one of those unruly tenants who drills holes in walls and runs his own cable; or, I can simply deal with what I have and ‘work around’ the rules.
Though I live alone I still have many networked devices like a couple laptops, a tower or two, my tablet, and finally the phone. With the exception of the latter two devices, I would be best running wire from the router to each. In a perfect world I would drill small holes in my floors and walls and run new wire. But, I live under the rules of someone else so I’m bound to restrictions.
Over the past year I’ve dealt with slow internet and network speeds because of the technological impairments. With a little creativity I’ve been able to boost both my internet speeds as well as data rates between computers. If you follow my articles then you may remember that I have a pretty big movie collection and stream movies within my house. I also access my data from a centralized server within my house.
One of the hurdles I had to overcome when I was setting up my services was whether or not to keep my satellite television provider. Keeping the service meant the possibility of drilling holes and running new wire. Changing to my cable television provider for both internet and television would mean no additional wires. I reread my lease and decided I was well within my limits of using the current holes and running new cables through them.
Older apartments and homes may not have adequate cabling for modern digital cable television and satellite services. Coax cable that was installed more than ten years ago may not have enough insulation to handle the frequencies of modern signals. DSL provided by the phone company can run on very old copper phone wires because of the type of signal.
Many people have moved away from traditional phone service and have opted to either use cell phones, the cable company’s service, or another third party line. I know only two people who still use a traditional telephone because they live in a remote area. Because I only have cell phones I certainly didn’t have to interrupt my landlord’s restriction on drilling more holes. The apartment I’m in has only one phone outlet.
Although my back is pretty much hunched in one position, we have a really nice apartment that’s all set for the next tenant. Each room is outfitted with enough jacks to make even the biggest techno-geek happy. On my suggestion, we made a decision to install an outlet specifically for networking equipment. Apparently the apartment’s already rented and it’s been spelled out that the new tenant can’t run new wires. I don’t know if this has been a technical article or a very long advertisement for an apartment.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him directly at (978) 919-8059) or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.