Hey.
1. Outdoor Cat5 is available. It comes looking pretty much like cat5 except that it has a thick PVC sheath, shielded or unshielded. If you buy it shielded you can ground the shield making it a better solution.
2. Running metal cable between buildings with difference earthing levels can be hazardous, you may be inadvertantly earthing one building into the other! Bad.
3. Speak to a cable retail specilist company (email me for a shortish list of British firms), you buy it by the metre (or foot) on a reel. Buy it twice and lay both runs slightly apart for redundancy, you don't want to do this again! Buy each considerably longer than you expect it to be, you don't want to pay for it again!
Buy the right plugs for the job, or buy it pre-terminated at extra cost.
4. Think about using patch-panels. This cable is not intended for plugging-unplugging-plugging-unplugging. Protect your investment, protect the terminations.
5. Dig it deep, this will depend, in part, on the use of the grounds. You never want to find this cable unintentionally, if its a garden and all you'd do with it is fork it over then it should be over a fork-prong deep. Try to follow natural perimeters or edges.
6. You do own the land, right? You'll need permission or a long dark night to do it otherwise, go for the Winter Solstice!
7. Think about running fibre. Speak to the cable retail specialist company (See point 3.). Buy it pre-terminated, if you've any sense(!) and DO use fibre patch-panels, essential. You may be suprised how cheap and pliable fibre is. If you need 100Mbps this really might be a good idea for you. Think about point 2.
8. Anyway Cat 5 is dead and buried, now. Cat5e can theoretically give you upto 155Mbps. Perhaps you could use Cat5e at both ends with a fibre backbone, nice.
9. Or you could wait for Cat6 to be ratified and see what goodies that brings, as it will surely make Cat5e obsolete.
10. Print this out and use it as reading material in the Gents.
Good luck.
Pritch.
pritch5000@altavista.com [sig][/sig]
