 If your house or your landlord's house isn't wired for networking, there are a variety of ways to get an internet connection to the place where you need it. Powerline, Wi-Fi... The problem with these solutions is that they're just not as good... as a good old-fashioned Cat 5e. The problem with a good old-fashioned Cat 5e is that sometimes it is nearly impossible to get it from where your internet connection comes into the house and your network switches to where you want it to be without creating either a tripping hazard or, in my case, a wife hazard. Corsair boasts unrivaled comfort and universal compatibility on its Void Surround Headset, featuring a genuine Dolby 7.1 headphone USB adapter. Click on the link in the video description to learn more. So the objective today is to run an ethernet cable from my networking closet on the second story down to the first story where my media center and my TV are. In order to eliminate the tripping and wife hazards, though, we're going to be taking it outside, so to speak, and running the ethernet cable along the siding on the outside of the house. However, before you embark on a project like this, there are some considerations. Number one is mapping out where exactly your entry and exit wounds are going to be, and we'll show you some simple tricks for how to find exactly the right spots to drill. The next one is figuring out how long your run needs to be to find a balance between the shortest possible run, which is always good for signal integrity, and optimizing your aesthetics as well as the durability of the cable. If your run goes way across a very sunny, south-facing patch, it might not last as long even if you're using a UV-rated exterior cable. We'll show you how to anchor your cable to wood as well as brick or concrete, and finally we'll show you how we're terminating the jacks on both sides so it not only works well but looks professional. Let's begin with a rundown of everything we're going to need for our job today. First of all, we've got a hundred feet of Cat5e cable that we paid about 50 bucks for. Why did we pay that much? I'm glad you asked. It's because this is outdoor rated Cat5e, which means that if it is in direct sunlight, it's not going to pretty much immediately break down the way that an indoor cable would. Next, we've got the wiring diagram for our twisted pairs as well as some RJ45 connectors to terminate both ends of the cable. We've got a crimper to make that whole thing happen, and then when it comes to actually putting holes in the house to run the cables through, we've got an impact drill with a couple of bits. So the larger one here, and this is a 3 eighths inch bit, is going to be for the cable itself, and then we've got ourselves a caulking gun, you know, what job is complete without the caulk, to make sure that the hole seals and doesn't actually leak water into the house, which would be bad. And then we have a second bit, and this puppy is a 3 sixteenths inch bit, and this one is for the plastic inserts that we're going to use to run our cable straps. So these are little cable management ties on the brick and concrete where needed in order to make our run nice and clean. Now we've also got some regular wood screws here, these are just some Robertson head wood screws, as well as some more straps for where we're running the cable along the wood. And finally, we've got ourselves an electric screwdriver, as well as one of these handy dandy little mounting plates for where we're going to put the jack that is going to come out of the wall. The one thing we are missing, because we need to do a run to the store, is a female to female piece that goes on here, where we can run our terminated jack into the back of it, and then we can plug our jack into the other side, and run it to the TV or a network switch or whatever else. As we went along, we realized there were a few more things we needed. A measuring tape, a marking pencil, a drywall saw, a hammer, and of course, safety glasses. Now we know that the downstairs connection needs to go through this wall, but if we were to measure it from the outside, it would be easy to overlook things like that my living room has a sunken floor, and we could end up at completely the wrong height, or the wrong distance away from the wall. So to make sure that we're drilling at the correct height, we actually need to take things inside for our measurements. So from in here, we can decide exactly where it is that we want our jack to come out. So I'm kind of thinking a little off to the left of this power outlet, right about there. So the first thing we need to know is the height. So we go, okay, a standard wall jack has its bottom about 12 inches off the floor, exactly 12 inches off the floor in a perfect world. So we're going to aim for about 14 inches here. So we go ahead and make a little mark on our wall at 14 inches. Then we find a landmark that is common to both the inside and the outside of the house. So in our case, we can use the bottom of the glass on this window and measure that to our 14 inch mark. So it looks like about 19 and a half inches. The next thing we need to know is the distance along the wall. Fortunately, once again, we have an easy landmark because we can actually see the brick on the outside of the house, which is what we'll have to measure from when we're out there. So doing some somewhat approximate, yes, this isn't quite perfect, but is good enough for our purposes eyeballing. We can line up the edge of our measuring tape with that brick and then kind of go, OK, we need to go across about, oh, I don't know, 28 inches. So there you have it. Nineteen and a half down from the window, 28 inches over from the edge of the wall. And we should pretty much hit that spot. OK, so now that we're out here, we can see about 18 and a half inches down is right on this mortar line, which is really handy because it means that as long as you've got brick or wood siding or something along those lines, you can actually follow it along, assuming that it is probably pretty level. And then take your second measurement, 28 inches, which and this is more good luck, lands us right on this point right here. So that means we can drill through mortar rather than the brick, which is going to do less damage to the look of the wall and also has less of a chance of cracking something. As you go through, we can put our cable through and then run it right down here under this metal flashing and cable management along the concrete here at the bottom. So then without further ado, we've got our drill set to the hammer drill setting. Bear in mind, you don't necessarily have to have a big old rugged one like this. A lot of just normal hand drills will have a hammer setting. You can just check yours. And it's off to the races. Actually, our masonry bit didn't end up being long enough to punch through the plywood. So we've got a spade bit here. And while I could, you know, try to use my landmarking to make a hole on the other side exactly where this one is, and if I measured perfectly, that would work. It's a little bit easier since I'm in here anyway. To just punch through the drywall now and I'll know exactly where I made my hole from the outside. So for the next step, because we want a socket in there, we're going to expand the hole we made with a drywall saw to just the size of the perimeter of the inside of this wall plate. Then what we're going to do is screw the wall plate in, which will make these little flanges here grip onto the drywall, holding it into place. This gives us somewhere to mount that plate that we're going to add later. So with our hole complete, we take one end of our ethernet cable and run it through the hole. Pretty self-explanatory. Now you're going to want to leave yourself a little bit of extra cable in the wall because the next step, crimping the end onto the cable, is the most likely reason that your cable run might not end up working. So you want to have enough extra that you can cut off what you did and redo it. So here we are with the cable on the other side, and this won't be by any means the world's most comprehensive how to terminate your own ethernet cable's guide, but basically you strip the outer sheathing. Then because this is an outdoor cable, there's going to be some goop in there, don't worry about that. You still, as normal, separate all your twisted pairs, align them in the correct order according to your diagram, place them into the cutting tool on the crimper with the length such that you will have the outer sheathing sticking into the connector about this far, then feed all the ends without any need to strip them, insert the whole thing into the slotted part of the crimping tool, crimp, and remove. It actually shouldn't take longer than a minute or so per end, once you get the hang of it. So the next step here is to break out that smaller masonry bit. Remember, you won't need that if you're running along wood, you can just use your screws and put them right into the siding for the cable straps, but we're going to be using the masonry bit as well as our little plastic inserts to every 12 to 16 inches or so, place one of our cable straps for a nice tight cable management line under the metal flashing so that it's not visible from a person's eye level. Then we're going to remove the downspout and run the cable up the corner where the downspout is, making it, other than the entry hole and a small hole up in the top of the soffit, basically invisible. Someone up there? Oh, hi. Ha! Well, that worked out. So now that we've got our wire in the wall, we need to put some caulking in there to keep moisture from seeping in along the wire. This will dry clear once we're done. Now, if you were doing a project with a longer run, it's possible that you would be stuck with more cable visible from the outside of the house, but the limit is pretty much your own creativity here, and the best practice is to generally speaking follow the lines of the house, whether it's siding or whether it's a vertical, you know, end piece or finishing piece, and keep it in corners as much as possible. Okay. Oh! So this is it. Home stretch. We've got the wire out of the crawl space, and all that's left to do is cut it to the appropriate length here. There we go. We're not going to bother with, you know, nice wall-mounted jack or anything like that, so I just got to crawl over here, put it through that same hole that everything else is using. You get this nice shot of my butt in the meantime. Did I get it, Brennan? So I got to pull this baby out here, terminate it, and that's it. That's the run. That's running an ethernet cable on the outside of the house for a not only tidier, but crazy shorter run, it turns out, depending on where it is you're trying to get from and where it is you're trying to get to. Wasn't that fun learning how to do something for ourselves? Well, you know what you can do for yourself? Get better deals on stuff over on Massdrop. Massdrop makes the connection between manufacturers and authorized distributors and customers. They say, hey, if a bunch of you are willing to buy the same thing, hey, would you be willing to give them a sweet deal on it, and we'll act as an intermediary here and make sure everyone gets their product and gets their money? And that is how it works. But recently, they've actually branched out a little bit into exclusive products, not just the same knives, headphones, keyboards, camping supplies that you can get just anywhere. And the featured product today is the Massdrop FosTex THX-00s. 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