Do you need an ethernet cord and worry about concealing it? Companies make a flat ethernet cable and I just got one on Amazon.com which performs really well. I never used a flat cable and I was surprised how tiny it actually is. The one I got was Cat 6 and for home use that’s all you really need right now. Since I wanted to try out this design and I can see why the vast majority of the 11,000 people left positive reviews.
It’s a cable so at the end of the day it’s just moving data which it did flawlessly. The cable is biggest plus after that is the slim shape. If you are trying to extend an ethernet line you can slide this thin cable at the edge of the carpet and you won’t see it. The cable is that thin. I get pieces of junk mail that are thicker. And they give you a 2-year warranty. But who’s going to return a cable?
I picked up a 50-foot cable which was way more than I needed. But when I opened the Amazon box I thought they forgot the cable. The spool was tiny and came with nails on clips which I used since I routed this through my basement. Personally I wouldn’t put it underneath a carpet which they mention you can do in the video on the product page on Amazon since to me that would just cause wear.
I actually used this cable to extend an ethernet line from one room to another. You could just go to Lowes or Home Depot and buy a box of Cat 6 cable with the keystones and wall jacks for a more professional look. Well this is hopefully a short term thing for me, but I was also thinking of moving anyway so why get into that big a project? I can remove this flat ethernet cable fast when I need to. A box of Cat 6 cable comes in boxes of 500 to 1,000 feet which would be great if I were stringing Cat 6 lines to multiple rooms in my house, which I am not. And all that cable would cost a lot and for just extending ethernet to just one room didn’t make a lot of sense.
Looking at hiring someone to put in one short line was a royal pain. I called cable companies. Either they only work commercial jobs or they want like $240 per hour to do this kind of work. We installed phone lines over the house and ethernet, although more complicated, aren’t that much harder to do. It’s even easier. The way I did it. I don’t know about you but paying hundreds of dollars for something this simple ticked me off. One company actually wanted to do a virtual estimate with doing video conferencing with me providing video. And that person was talking in the background saying this would be complicated. Give me a break. This was rather easy.
The hard part would have been if I was cutting into drywall or plaster and drilling down (or up) to another floor to route the line. Connecting the jacks called “keystones” is actually straightforward since these jack or keystones are color coded. The hardest part is for me, being a novice, is getting the wire to and from these rooms. A pro has the tools and expertise to get this job done fast. But these contractors feel they can charge whatever they want to and we are faced with choice of paying what they want, haggling, or just doing it yourself.
I chose to do it myself and I am happy with my flat ethernet cable for my home office saving a few hundred bucks!
