When I first moved into my house, I used long (30m) patch cables to get Gigabit ethernet around the house. This was fine, and I managed to hide it quite well, however I was never quite happy with it.
I had a conversation down the pub with a friend who was lucky enough to move into a house which was pre-wired for network. His immediate question was "but why don't they do external ethernet cable?"
Good point.
I thought I'd investigate whether there was such a thing, and as it turns out, there is (although it's hard to buy in less than 100m reels). I bought some from this site (there are others) and decided to leap into the unknown of terminating network cabling myself.
A day's hole drilling, fiddling, and patching later, I have a panel in the loft which runs external cable down to each of the rooms that require ethernet connectivity. No messy wires on the inside, as the cables all run down the walls externally. A long hole is required to get the wires into the house, but then with a neat ethernet socket on the inside, it looks very tidy indeed.
On top of that it seems the throughput is far better than before, which is an added bonus. Yes, it took a bit of network know-how (follow the colour coding, don't think you know better) but it all worked perfectly. Wired might be a bit last century, but it still beats wireless for reliability and performance and homeplugs by cost.
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