Despite the gyrations of the stock market and the ailing tech economy, lots of people are building new houses and renovating old ones. Builders continue to create luxury apartments and condos on spec. Yet despite their of familiarity with granite countertops, designer whirlpools, central air-conditioning and low-voltage halogen lighting systems, most builders and electricians have no idea how to wire a new home for a home network.

Recently I was in a friend's luxury apartment, a penthouse unit in a newly-constructed building overlooking Puget Sound. The view was fabulous. But the wiring was abominable: as required by code, each of the rooms had a single duplex wall outlet every 12 feet. There was a cable TV jack in each bedroom and another in the living room. Finally, there was a phone jack in each room, with a single four-conductor that connected the jacks together in one big "daisy-chain."  This is a wiring plan that might have made sense in the 1980s; today it is a recipe for frustration and added expense for anybody who wants more than two telephone lines.

It doesn't cost a lot of money to properly wire a house or an apartment for use with computers and other high-tech gadgets. On the other hand, it can cost a fortune to go back and fix things after-the-fact. And if you don't rewire, you can even create a fire or safety hazard by relying on too many power strips and extension cords.

So here, then, are my recommendations if you are wiring a new house, engaging in major renovations, or simply ripping open a few walls to put down some cables.

* POWER

Modern computers don't require a lot of electrical power, but they do require a lot of electrical outlets. Four summers ago I ran six PCs with screens, two inkjet printers, a laser printer, and sundry network equipment off a single 20-amp circuit. Everything worked great --- except we needed more than a dozen power strips to accommodate all of the plugs!

I was probably cutting things a bit close to the edge, but the moral of the story is that you can't go wrong by having your electrician installing lots of extra outlets.

Most electricians are in the habit of installing two-outlet duplex plugs, for no good reason other than those are the outlets that they've always installed. But these days, we have so many appliances that every outlet that installed in a home or office should be a double-width quad outlet.  With a quad outlet, you'll rarely need to use a power strip to get additional sockets. Another advantages of quad outlets is that they work well with those wall-mounted transformers that come with so many cordless phones, scanners, and inkjet printers. For a room that's going to be an office, I recommend using multiple quad outlets mounted in a row (for an illustration, see http://www.simson.net/quad.jpg ).

Many people think that it's a good investment to purchase power strips with built-in surge suppressors. In theory, these devices should be able to protect your expensive computer equipment from sudden electrical spikes. Although surge suppressors made sense a decade ago, these days most modern power supplies have built-in surge suppressors; if you want more protection, get an uninterruptible power supply (a UPS), which should protect you against both spikes and outages. I simply equipped my house with a whole-house surge suppressor made by Leviton; I purchased mine from Smarthome for $189 (http://www.smarthome.com/4860.html) and had it professional installed by my electrician.

* TELEPHONE

To wire a residential telephone, most electricians will snake a single cable from room-to-room throughout your house. Every place you want a telephone jack, they'll strip the wires and splice one in. This simple approach has two overwhelming problems. First, if there is ever a break in your telephone line --- perhaps because you put a screw through the wall in the wrong place --- every telephone after the break will stop working. The second problem is more subtle: using a single cable practically condemns you to a life of just two residential telephone lines.

Having two residential phone lines may not seem like a problem to most builders or new-home buyers, and low-cost cell phones are reducing the demand for additional lines.  Nevertheless, you would be surprised how many families end up wanting a third line for a home-business, or for a fax machine, or a chatty teenager. Because of poor planning, many of these phone lines are rarely run through walls where they belong. Instead, you'll find them tacked on the outside of homes or taped along floors. I know of many families that have bought cordless phones because they simply don't want to pay for an electrician to come in properly run a new wire. Cordless phones have their place, but they generally lack the sound quality, the sound quality, and even the safety of wired instruments. (For example, cordless phones don't work during a power failure, while hardwired phones do.)

The easy way to avoid this problem is to wire you home like an office. Instead of running a telephone cable wire between each room, have your electrician run a cable from each room to a central wiring closet with a telephone punch-down block. (You can buy these blocks for less than $10 from most mail order companies.) Run another telephone cable from the punch-down block to the telephone company's "Network Interface" jack on the side of your house. With a low-cost punch-down tool, you'll be able to control which telephone jacks in your house are connected to which telephone lines.

The big advantage of using a punch-down block is flexibility and expandability. You might start off with the same two phone lines at every jack in your house. A year later, you might add a fax line to your office or kitchen. For even more expandability, have your electrician pull an 8-conductor cable to each telephone location; that will give you the ability to have up to four phone lines anywhere you want.

* NETWORK

Instead of having your electrician pull a single 8-conductor cable to each of your rooms, why not spend a little extra money and have her pull three cables? The first cable will be for your telephone; the second two cables will be for data communications --- one for a desktop, and one for a laptop.

For most residences, the cable to use is the so-called Category 5 or 5e. A thousand-foot spool will cost you about $150.  You'll need to spend another $5 or so for the female RJ45 jacks in each room, $50 for a punchdown tool, and $8 for the patch cables that go from the wall jacks to the back of your computer or laptop. I've traditionally purchased this equipment from specialty mail-order firms like Micro Warehouse, although you can now find it in Radio Shack or even Home Depot! It's not hard to do punch downs, but if you can find an electrician or a friend who can show you how, you might save yourself a few cut fingers while you learn the proper technique..

All of those Category 5 cables should terminate in the same wiring closet that you use for your telephone system. In that closet you'll put an Ethernet hub or switch. Having a home network means that you can share files and printers between any computer in the house. If you have a high-speed Internet connection, you'll also put your home firewall appliance, and either your cable modem or your DSL modem in the closet as well. Once set up, you'll be able to share that single high-speed connection between all of your computers.

Whatever you do, don't try to pull prefab cables through the walls: in all likelihood, you'll bend or break the connectors, and nothing will work properly

* WIRELESS

In these days of wireless local area networks, a lot of people are saying that it's no longer necessary to pull network cables through a house. Hogwash! Compared with wireless, a good wired network is faster, more secure, and more expandable. And if your walls are open and you are already pulling cables for electricity and telephones, a wired network may even be the least expensive option.

Don’t get me wrong: I'm a big fan of wireless networks. If you have an apartment in New York City where you practically require a writ signed by the Governor to pull wires through the walls, using a wireless hub to connect the desktop in your bedroom to the cable modem in your study may be your best bet. And nothing beats the flexibility and freedom that comes with being able to carry your laptop from your couch to your kitchen while downloading a big file from AOL.

Wireless networks have their limitations as well. If you want good coverage in a big house, you might be forced to deploy two or three wireless hubs --- hubs that need to be connected together with a wire.

Over the next year, there will be two big advances in wireless LANs that may steal some of the thunder from wired LANs. The first is the 802.11(g) standard, which will roughly double the speed of existing 802.11(b) networks (also known as Wi-Fi). The second is the 802.11(a), which promises speeds of 54 megabits/sec and less interference by using a wider chunk of the radio spectrum up at 5GHz.

But no matter how good the wireless systems are, the wired systems are still faster and better --- today's $15 wired cards are delivering 100 megabits/sec, and for $60 you can buy a gigabit Ethernet card.

In my house, I actually have both: a wired network for my desktop computer, with additional ports for my laptop at the kitchen counter and my bed, and a wireless network for handheld PDAs as well as friends who might be visiting.

* CONCLUSION: A WIRED HOME IS A HAPPY HOME

Having had a home network since the late 1980s, I'm actually now on my fourth household wiring project. The most difficult part of the whole process, I've learned, is trying to decide in advance where to pull your wires. In one house I ended up kicking myself for not putting a network connection in the dining room; in another, I put two network jacks in every bedroom, and most of them were never used.

The other thing that I've learned is that having a home network doesn't add much to resale values. Because so few houses have a decent network, most home buyers have no framework for putting a price tag on your handiwork.  Just like those designer showerheads, in most cases there is little to be gained by going overboard.