Are you wiring for a smart home?

Introduction

If you are building or renovating your home, we recommend you follow the latest consumer guidelines approved by NZ Telcommunications Forum (TCF) in September 2015. The latest version of the Guidelines can be accessed on the TCF's website.

Two main services you should plan for in your home are:

your home phone line

your broadband service

You can use your broadband service for a variety of activities like watching television content, making video calls, home automation, email and web browsing. We advice that you check your fibre readiness and get ultra fast fibre broadband to take advantage of all online services available. To understand more about the fibre installation process, check our article here.

Some equipment or services like medical or other monitored alarms require special connections with your network so they work properly. When placing an order for fibre, you should notify us if you have any such equipment so we can advice the installation technician to install the equipment to specification to work correctly. Please ensure that your equipment is fibre compatible.

How should you wire your home?

We recommend that you use a qualified installer to set up your home wiring and that you install only good quality equipment that is independently tested and certified. You should also ask your cable installer to provide a qualified test report confirming that the wiring has been installed correctly and that it will operate as expected.

Having all outlet positions in your home wiring connected directly back to a Home Distributor, via star distribution is the most flexible way of setting up your home. The Home Distributor may be located in a garage, a central cupboard or some other location. Inside the Home Distributor, a "patch panel" will have an RJ45 socket corresponding to each socket in each room in the house. Wiring in the house should be Cat6 cable, with 2 cables run to a pair of RJ45 sockets in each outlet position.

Note:

Cat6 cables are a high quality copper cable designed to deliver Ethernet-standard devices with performance to 250MHz to support 1Gb/sec Ethernet network, with a maximum allowed length of 100 meters.

RJ45 sockets are standard connectors on the end of computer (Ethernet) network cables.

Star wiring assembly allows wiring to be fed from a central point, usually in the home distributor with the cabling provided to RJ45 sockets in the room of the house.

Installing ducting when building or renovating your home can be a good way of preparing for future upgrades and services. Once ducting is installed, completing an upgrade can be as simple as feeding a new cable along it.

Connecting your home

The connection between your home and the street is called the "lead-in". This is owned by one of the Local fibre companies (LFCs). The LFC install an External Termination Point (ETP) outside your building. The lead-in cable will then enter your home and be terminated in the home distributor.

If you're building a new home, you should talk to the LFC to understand their specific requirements for your home lead-in to make sure the ducting or trench requirements are positioned correctly and are of correct dimensions. You may additionally also require consents to have fibre installed if you live down a Right of Way or have a shared building. Refer to our section to check the consents process for fibre installation.

Fibre is terminated on the ONT in your home distributor which is then connected to our home gateway to provide our network. You can then connect a router to provide Wi-Fi throughout your house. A list of routers provided by MyRepublic is available here. We also provide voice services and can retain your existing number. Refer to our section for getting voice services here.