We all know there are many great reasons to prewire a home with Category cable and coax vs. going all wireless. It's often difficult to articulate those reasons to consumers, however.
In its consumer-friendly e-book, “How To Prewire Your Smart Home,” the integrators at Tym Smart Home provide a simple explanation that avoids the jargon and makes a compelling case. Here's the brief excerpt:
Prewire vs. Wireless
Let's tackle this question now, so you can be confident in what you want to prewire as you’re designing your system.
In general, if we cover it in this book, we think you should prewire. We have some great posts on our site about hardwired vs. wireless gear in the home, but here’s the short and skinny of it.
I heard an interview with Steve Jobs where he was asked if he thought tablets would bring an end to laptops and desktop computers. I think Steve’s response applies well to our discussion. Paraphrasing, he said that “computers are like trucks, and tablets are like cars. You’re always going to need your trucks to do the heavy lifting.” So he believes we’ll always need both. The analogy applies to hardwired and wireless tech in the home as well.
You prewire the items that do the heavy lifting. 4K video content is a lot of content to stream. It requires some heavy lifting. The “4k streaming services” are actually compressing the content – which means they’re pulling detail and information out of the content – to squeeze it into a package size that’s small enough to stream wirelessly in your home.
Wireless technology is improving all the time, but there will always be some heavy lifting to do inside the home that requires “trucks.” For those applications, we’re going to prewire. For everything else you can install all the wireless gear you like.
