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My house was built in 1991 and consequently has a hilarious early 90s intercom wired throughout the house, with it being on the never ending TODO list to remove

My house was built in 1991 and consequently has a hilarious early 90s intercom wired throughout the house, with it being on the never ending TODO list to remove and replace with something reasonable. What is so curious is that even if you want to wire ethernet through the house (and I have to some extent) there aren't readily available decent things to shove on the wall that provide equivalent functionality which you can safely assume will not need replacing in five years. * The technology ecosystem just doesn't historically mesh well with the physical structure of homes at all. The whole success of Wifi is it allows us to be non committal about things. That we use it to connect TVs and doorbells to the network is really quite insane. I would like to see something in this space emerge and evolve, but it seems to be fundamentally incompatible with the VC backed tech industry at this point. * Guess what I'm trying to build.

jaktet 3y ago
* well everything points to an intercom like system so is what you’re trying to build not related to that l? (Since you said provide equivalent functionality) Maybe whole home audio with zones and voice communication?
- fidotron 3y ago
  The wall units for doing that at least, only on digital infrastructure.
bluGill 3y ago
Before someone says conduit in all the walls, that only works if the conduit comes out where you want something. Your intercom system probably terminates by each door at around waist level - which is unlikely to be where you want Ethernet cables to come out in the room - but perfect for an intercom. In the 90s people were starting to run phones to more rooms, but not to all rooms, at least those phone jacks would be in the right place. Likewise in the 90s people were running coax to more rooms - but a TV in every room was still seen as a sign of wealth and so most bedrooms wouldn't get it (the master would. though often that coax would be near the ceiling for watching in bed and thus not a great location for Ethernet.
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  > coax would be near the ceiling I've been amazed watching contractors cut out a slice of drywall, make mods, and replace the drywall. In under an hour. But you need to paint afterwards.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be perfect. If you had an opening by the baseboard on major walls, you could run through conduit to get to the right room, and then tack a cord along the baseboard and up corners of walls until you got to the right place, the same way most people wire their TV/media room right now. The main issue is running cords through doorways, which keeps them from closing and is a tripping hazard. People can live with cable ties as long as you get most of the run hidden.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Beyond that, if you have conduit running to different rooms, you can now treat those as junction boxes instead of termination points. You can run the cable to the box easily, and then have ten feet of the old fashioned painful cable pull from the junction box to the point on the wall/ceiling you actually want to have a socket. Perfect, good, etc.
hughesjj 3y ago
I mean, we have zigbee/zwave/Lora/matter now, the wireless comms game is changing to allow low power low bandwidth devices ad not just super duper 'i'll run my data center comms over the medium of air' level wifi
nostrademons 3y ago
Something I'd like to see: internal conduit with pull lines that you can use to thread any "wire-like" material through the walls. Need to run a long HDMI cable? Open access panel, pull out existing bundle, clip your cable to it, use pull line to bring it back through the house. Same for Ethernet. In-home fiber becomes cost-competitive? Replace your Ethernet lines with it. Same for any new technologies. We should also do this for city infrastructure, eg. have conduit runs under the street that are a public right-of-way, and then any new company that invents a new telecommunications/energy/etc technology can pay the city to run its lines through existing infrastructure instead of having to dig up streets or beg the electric company for space on poles.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Smurf tubes! https://www.lowes.com/pl/Electrical-non-metallic-tubing-ent--Conduit-conduit-fittings-Electrical/4294653950?refinement=3797699817 https://www.lowes.com/pl/Electrical-non-metallic-tubing-ent-... You don't even need wire pulls, you can just push cat5 through 3/4 ENT tubes and expect it to pop out the other side.
  - hermitdev 3y ago
    Smurf tubes are great, but plugs like on Cat5 or HDMI cables get easily hung up while pulling cables. The ones you link above look smoother than the ones I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with, which were ribbed, making snags frequent & annoying, especially at any sort of 90 degree bend. It's still significantly easier (and safer) than blind runs through walls.
    - soylentcola 3y ago
      At least for cat5/6, wouldn't you be cutting and terminating once they're pulled? Never thought about pulling one of those with the connector on - for the reason you mentioned, but also just because you might not know how much cable you'll need until it's all finished. I'd imagine HDMI would be mostly shorter runs (or using cat5/6 extenders) due to the limits/requirements of the cable.
gizmo686 3y ago
Pretty much any data cable you see in homes can be made to run Ethernet at a decent rate with just an adapter at each end. Coax can easily carry data at Gigabit speed. Cat5e has been the standard for decades, and can run gigabit speeds as well.
- fidotron 3y ago
  It is interesting how all of you jumped to the wiring and conduits as the problem, when the point I was trying to make (badly) was even if the wiring was there then there is a distinct lack of things on the market to connect to it which do anything useful. We have a chicken/egg situation for home networks where normal people only see them as useful in the wifi sense, so we fail to exploit the potential we could have if things were wired.
  - jpc0 3y ago
    This is not entirely true. The things exist, you just aren't aware of it or it isn't the form factor you want. List a thing and I could likely give you a product that will solve your problem, it may just be out of your price range because it isn't mass produced or doesn't look the way you want again, it's not mass produced.
eternityforest 3y ago
I am surprised intercom-over-IP isn't a big thing. There could be plug and play UDP multicast intercoms powered by PoE, and wifi walkie talkies, there's not really any tech challenges, but for some reason there's no popular standard for how to make that happen.
- jpc0 3y ago
  SIP phones could handle this trivially. You could run a server on a raspberry pi that would be plenty and easily tie into an actual SIP telephone line, so both intercom and external calls. There are also decent products for not very expensive in this market.

jaktet 3y ago

* well everything points to an intercom like system so is what you’re trying to build not related to that l? (Since you said provide equivalent functionality) Maybe whole home audio with zones and voice communication?

fidotron 3y ago
The wall units for doing that at least, only on digital infrastructure.

bluGill 3y ago

Before someone says conduit in all the walls, that only works if the conduit comes out where you want something. Your intercom system probably terminates by each door at around waist level - which is unlikely to be where you want Ethernet cables to come out in the room - but perfect for an intercom. In the 90s people were starting to run phones to more rooms, but not to all rooms, at least those phone jacks would be in the right place. Likewise in the 90s people were running coax to more rooms - but a TV in every room was still seen as a sign of wealth and so most bedrooms wouldn't get it (the master would. though often that coax would be near the ceiling for watching in bed and thus not a great location for Ethernet.

Tempest1981 3y ago
> coax would be near the ceiling I've been amazed watching contractors cut out a slice of drywall, make mods, and replace the drywall. In under an hour. But you need to paint afterwards.
nostrademons 3y ago
It doesn't have to be perfect. If you had an opening by the baseboard on major walls, you could run through conduit to get to the right room, and then tack a cord along the baseboard and up corners of walls until you got to the right place, the same way most people wire their TV/media room right now. The main issue is running cords through doorways, which keeps them from closing and is a tripping hazard. People can live with cable ties as long as you get most of the run hidden.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Beyond that, if you have conduit running to different rooms, you can now treat those as junction boxes instead of termination points. You can run the cable to the box easily, and then have ten feet of the old fashioned painful cable pull from the junction box to the point on the wall/ceiling you actually want to have a socket. Perfect, good, etc.

hughesjj 3y ago

I mean, we have zigbee/zwave/Lora/matter now, the wireless comms game is changing to allow low power low bandwidth devices ad not just super duper 'i'll run my data center comms over the medium of air' level wifi

nostrademons 3y ago

Something I'd like to see: internal conduit with pull lines that you can use to thread any "wire-like" material through the walls. Need to run a long HDMI cable? Open access panel, pull out existing bundle, clip your cable to it, use pull line to bring it back through the house. Same for Ethernet. In-home fiber becomes cost-competitive? Replace your Ethernet lines with it. Same for any new technologies. We should also do this for city infrastructure, eg. have conduit runs under the street that are a public right-of-way, and then any new company that invents a new telecommunications/energy/etc technology can pay the city to run its lines through existing infrastructure instead of having to dig up streets or beg the electric company for space on poles.

saalweachter 3y ago
Smurf tubes! https://www.lowes.com/pl/Electrical-non-metallic-tubing-ent--Conduit-conduit-fittings-Electrical/4294653950?refinement=3797699817 https://www.lowes.com/pl/Electrical-non-metallic-tubing-ent-... You don't even need wire pulls, you can just push cat5 through 3/4 ENT tubes and expect it to pop out the other side.
- hermitdev 3y ago
  Smurf tubes are great, but plugs like on Cat5 or HDMI cables get easily hung up while pulling cables. The ones you link above look smoother than the ones I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with, which were ribbed, making snags frequent & annoying, especially at any sort of 90 degree bend. It's still significantly easier (and safer) than blind runs through walls.
  - soylentcola 3y ago
    At least for cat5/6, wouldn't you be cutting and terminating once they're pulled? Never thought about pulling one of those with the connector on - for the reason you mentioned, but also just because you might not know how much cable you'll need until it's all finished. I'd imagine HDMI would be mostly shorter runs (or using cat5/6 extenders) due to the limits/requirements of the cable.

gizmo686 3y ago

Pretty much any data cable you see in homes can be made to run Ethernet at a decent rate with just an adapter at each end. Coax can easily carry data at Gigabit speed. Cat5e has been the standard for decades, and can run gigabit speeds as well.

fidotron 3y ago
It is interesting how all of you jumped to the wiring and conduits as the problem, when the point I was trying to make (badly) was even if the wiring was there then there is a distinct lack of things on the market to connect to it which do anything useful. We have a chicken/egg situation for home networks where normal people only see them as useful in the wifi sense, so we fail to exploit the potential we could have if things were wired.
- jpc0 3y ago
  This is not entirely true. The things exist, you just aren't aware of it or it isn't the form factor you want. List a thing and I could likely give you a product that will solve your problem, it may just be out of your price range because it isn't mass produced or doesn't look the way you want again, it's not mass produced.

eternityforest 3y ago

I am surprised intercom-over-IP isn't a big thing. There could be plug and play UDP multicast intercoms powered by PoE, and wifi walkie talkies, there's not really any tech challenges, but for some reason there's no popular standard for how to make that happen.

jpc0 3y ago
SIP phones could handle this trivially. You could run a server on a raspberry pi that would be plenty and easily tie into an actual SIP telephone line, so both intercom and external calls. There are also decent products for not very expensive in this market.