I want to know who’s responsible for the giant portrait of what looks like Yvonne Strahovski.

Is there Moe Szyslak moe?

Ok thanks a heap for that picture, because that’s an aspect I was actually confused about. So the patch panel will end up connected through at the front instead of being flush with the wall? And the wires would just be run out of the wall through to the front of the panel?

Here in europe I could buy a panel with 24 CAT.6a ports for about 55€ on ebay

Yeah without looking very hard I can find multiple options around $50 in Australia, and even lower. The $150 figure is pretty much the most expensive option I found in my quick search, and was really meant to contrast with the seemingly-excessive $567 the builder is quoting. (Basically, my goal is to “steel man” them, and point out that even if I take the prices in the most extreme way at every option, it still ends up way cheaper than they’re quoting.)

I would recommend to use keystone modules, because they are more flexible

Out of interest, what’s the alternative? Is it that the cables would be hard wired directly into a particular port of the patch panel and not be movable?

I’m actually not looking to do anything very complicated at all. Just connect the internet box directly to the router (via the patch panel). Router itself connected to a switch, and then all my other devices connected to the switch (with every connection to the switch going via the patch panel). I don’t have any plans to do anything with different networks, just the one local network.

The reason for having the patch panel is so I have a simple plug-and-play way of connecting everything up. I didn’t think it would be any different to having a standard walk jack, but with 24 ports instead of 1–4.

Interesting. So you’d suggest just getting the conduit put in? How hard and/or expensive/cheap would it be it run 4 or 8 cables through that conduit later on, compared to (a reasonable charge for) getting it done while the rest of the wiring is being done?

Yeah I’m definitely willing to pay to get it done, because I’m sure I’ll be the same if I don’t.

But the cost they’re suggesting for the patch panel is (including the cabinet, which I was expecting to be my own after-the-fact expense not budgeted as part of this) about 4x what I would have expected even after budgeting things at the high end of what I thought might happen. $150 instead of <$100 for the hardware, and $150 for the labour was my expectation.

And that’s without even getting in to the cost of the actual cables. I didn’t put it in this post because it was already long enough and I figure it’s a basically separate issue. But they’re wanting to charge me $266 per cable. No modification for the fact that more than half the cables are going to just 2 locations, and all the others are two cables to the same location. Just a straight $266 for every individual cable. It’s meant this whole thing has blown out way beyond where I was expecting it to be.

Out of interest, if you do just get them to lay empty conduit, how easy/hard would it be to run 4 or 8 cables through that conduit and fit it to a faceplate later on?