Why Bother, When WiFi 7 Exists?

Fair question, and worth answering honestly rather than just insisting cable is better. Modern WiFi is genuinely excellent. In an open-plan flat with a decent access point in the right place, you may never need a data point at all.

The catch is that WiFi is a shared medium. Everything in range takes turns on the same airtime, and the further a device is from the access point, the slower it transmits, which means it holds the airtime for longer and slows everything else down with it. One laptop streaming from the bottom of the garden degrades the whole network, not just itself.

Cable sidesteps all of that. A wired device gets its own dedicated path and takes nothing from anyone. So the goal isn't to wire everything, it's to wire the things that sit still and use bandwidth, and free the airwaves up for the things that move.

There's a second reason, and for us it's the bigger one. Every access point wants a cable back to a switch. The thing that makes WiFi good is wired infrastructure behind it. A mesh node relaying wirelessly to another mesh node roughly halves its throughput at every hop, which is why mesh kits disappoint in exactly the stone-built, thick-walled houses across Yorkshire where people buy them out of desperation.

How Many Points, and Where

The usual mistake is wiring too few, not too many. The cable is the cheap part. The labour to lift a floor, drill a joist and make good afterwards is what you're really paying for, and that cost is nearly identical whether you pull one cable through a route or three. So when you're running to a room anyway, run two.

Rough guide for a typical family house:

Two per TV position. The television and whatever sits next to it, a console or a set-top box. This is the single most common regret when people only run one.
Two to four in a home office. Desktop, docking station, printer, and one spare that will get used within a year.
One per access point position. Usually a hallway or landing ceiling, one per floor as a starting point.
One per camera position, if CCTV is on the cards now or later. PoE cameras take power and data down the same cable, so there's no separate spur needed.
One to the garage or garden office, and fibre rather than copper if the run is long or crosses open ground.
One or two spares somewhere central. You won't regret them.

For a four-bedroom house that usually lands somewhere between twelve and twenty points. It sounds like a lot written down. In practice it's a day or two of work and you never think about it again.

Cat6, Cat6a or Cat5e?

Cat5e still carries gigabit perfectly well, and if a house already has it there's often no case for ripping it out. For anything new, though, Cat6 is what we run as standard. The price difference in the cable itself is small enough to be irrelevant next to the labour, and it gives you headroom for multi-gigabit later without touching the walls again.

Cat6a is a step further and worth it in specific cases: long runs, business premises, or anywhere you already know 10-gigabit is coming. It's thicker, stiffer and less forgiving around tight bends, so it's not a default choice for a domestic retrofit.

The honest summary is that for the vast majority of homes, Cat6 properly installed will outlast the equipment you plug into it. Cable specification is rarely where a network disappoints. Installation quality is.

The Patch Panel, and Why It Is Not Optional

This is the part people skip to save a couple of hundred pounds, and it's the part they regret.

A patch panel is where every cable in the house terminates in one place, in order, labelled. From there, short patch leads connect each one to the switch. The alternative is every cable ending in a bare plug hanging out of the wall or crimped straight onto a connector, and it causes three problems:

Solid-core cable wants punching down, not crimping. The cable that runs through your walls has solid copper conductors, which are excellent in a fixed run and poor in anything that flexes. Solid-rated plugs do exist, but a crimped plug on a fixed run is a weaker joint than a keystone module, and it fails intermittently a couple of years later in a way that looks like a WiFi problem rather than a cable one.
Nothing is labelled. When something goes wrong, or you move the office, you're tracing cables by unplugging them and shouting up the stairs.
You can't change anything. Want to move a camera onto a different switch port, or split the office onto its own network? With a patch panel that's a thirty-second job. Without one it's a call-out.

A patch panel, a small rack or cabinet, and a PoE switch usually live in a loft, a cupboard or a garage. It's not glamorous and nobody visiting your house will ever see it. It's the difference between a wired house and a house with some wires in it.

Terminating and Testing

Two words worth understanding, because they're where quotes quietly differ.

Terminating is landing each end of the cable properly, into a keystone module at the wall plate and into the patch panel at the other end, with the correct pairs in the correct order and the twist maintained as close to the punch-down as possible. Untwisting an extra centimetre because it's easier to work with is exactly how a run passes a basic connection test and still drops packets under load.

Testing means every single run gets checked with a proper tester, not a cheap continuity light. A continuity tester tells you the eight wires reach the other end. It doesn't tell you whether the run will hold gigabit, whether a pair is split, or whether a staple has crushed the cable somewhere under a floorboard you're about to screw down.

We quote terminating and testing as a visible line rather than burying it, because a cable that has been tested and labelled is a genuinely different product from one that has been pulled through and left. If a quote doesn't mention testing, ask.

What It Costs in 2026

Cabling is priced per point, and the honest answer for Yorkshire in 2026 is roughly £90 to £130 per data point for a retrofit in an occupied house, including materials, terminating into a patch panel and making good afterwards.

That's a wide range because the building decides the price, not the cable. What moves it:

Route access. Suspended timber floors and a decent loft void are straightforward. Solid concrete floors, no loft access and a finished stone house are a completely different job.
Making good. Lifting carpet, easing up floorboards and putting everything back so you can't tell anyone was there takes time, and it's most of what separates a tidy install from a cheap one.
Run length. Copper is fine to 90 metres. Past that, or across a yard to an outbuilding, it becomes fibre, which changes both the kit and the cost.
How many points share a route. This is the one that works in your favour, and the reason wiring twelve points doesn't cost four times as much as wiring three.

As a worked example, a recent Yorkshire job came to £1,850 for sixteen points, with every run terminated into a patch panel. That's about £115 a point, towards the top of that range, which is what a finished job tends to come to rather than bare cables left hanging out of the wall.

On top of the cabling you need somewhere for it to land: a patch panel, a small cabinet and a PoE switch. For a domestic install that's usually a few hundred pounds of hardware depending on how many ports you need and how much power the switch has to deliver.

The Window That Halves the Price

If you're having any building work done, this is the single most useful thing in this article.

Cabling costs a fraction of the price while the walls are open. During a renovation, an extension, a rewire, a loft conversion or a floor replacement, the expensive parts of the job simply don't exist. There's nothing to lift, nothing to thread blindly through a cavity, and nothing to make good. First-fix cabling into open joists and stud walls is quick.

The same sixteen points that cost £1,850 in a finished house can be a small fraction of that if the floors are already up. And the reverse is the part that stings: people who skip it during building work and decide a year later that they want it are paying full retrofit price to open up walls they just paid to close.

So if a builder, electrician or plasterer is booked, get the data cabling scoped before they start. Even if you're not ready to buy the network kit yet, running the cable and terminating it costs very little extra while everything is open, and it's there when you want it.

What You Can Do Yourself

Worth saying plainly, because we would rather tell you than sell you something you don't need.

If you're comfortable lifting a floorboard, you have a loft you can move around in, and you only need two or three runs, this is a genuinely achievable DIY job. The tools aren't expensive, keystone modules are far more forgiving than crimping plugs, and the internet is full of good guidance.

Where it stops being a weekend job is volume and access. Sixteen runs through a finished house, drilling joists correctly, keeping data away from mains, getting between floors without visible trunking, and putting it all back so nobody can tell, is a different task from running one cable to a TV. That's the point where people call us, and quite often it's after having a go first.

Getting It Scoped

We survey the property, work out the routes, agree the points with you and give you a fixed figure before anything starts. If it turns out you need three points rather than sixteen, we'll say so.

We cover all of Yorkshire from our Sheffield base: Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster, Chesterfield, Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Halifax, Keighley, Shipley, Bingley, Guiseley, Ilkley, York, Harrogate, Hull and everywhere in between. Give us a ring on 07438 972049 or book a call below.