New builds get a walk-in pantry, a mudroom, and a rough-in for a future bathroom. The network, which every device in the house will depend on for decades, gets a plastic panel in a bedroom closet if it gets anything at all. We spend a lot of service calls working around that decision. If you are building, here is what to ask for instead, and every item on this list is cheap before drywall and painful after.
Pick the location on purpose
The network closet wants to be central, indoors, and boring. A mechanical room, a basement corner, a dedicated closet near the middle of the floor plan. Central matters because every cable run in the house terminates here, and shorter runs are cheaper, tidier, and better for PoE.
Places we regularly get asked to use and try to talk people out of: the garage (temperature swings and dust), above a furnace (heat), under a plumbing stack (one leak away from disaster), and the far corner of the house because that is where the builder's panel happened to land.
One more requirement people forget: the internet provider's service entrance should reach this spot. Ask the builder to bring the exterior conduit for fibre or cable straight to the closet, not to a random wall in the garage that then needs a second messy hop.
Power, and more of it than you think
The single most common flaw we find in builder-installed panels is one plug, or none. A real network closet needs a dedicated circuit with a quad receptacle inside or immediately beside the equipment space.
Count what lives here within a few years: modem or fibre terminal, router, a PoE switch, a camera recorder, maybe a small server or NAS, and a UPS under all of it. A UPS deserves planning space of its own, because keeping the network and cameras alive through the power blips we get around here is half the point of centralizing everything.
While the electrician is there, have them keep the panel's location in mind: network equipment and a breaker panel can share a mechanical room happily, but leave working clearance and do not stack low-voltage terminations directly over the panel.
Conduit is the cheapest insurance in the whole build
Cable choices age. Conduit does not. Two or three runs of 1-inch or larger conduit from the network closet to the attic and to the basement or crawlspace mean that in fifteen years, whatever cable the future demands can be pulled without opening walls.
Add a conduit stub to the exterior for the service drop, and one to any detached structure (garage, shop, barn) while the trenches are open. The trench is the expensive part, and it is already dug.
As for the cable itself, run it everywhere now: every TV location, every desk, ceiling positions for access points, soffit and eave positions for future cameras. We wrote about choosing between Cat6 and Cat6A recently, and a new build is exactly the situation where the better cable earns its small premium. Home runs, every one of them, back to this closet.
Ventilation, because this gear runs warm
A PoE switch feeding a dozen cameras and access points produces real heat, all day, forever. Seal it in an unventilated closet and you get shortened equipment life and, in summer, thermal shutdowns.
The fix is simple at the framing stage: a louvred door, or a passive vent high and low, or a quiet exhaust fan on a thermostat if the space is truly enclosed. What you are avoiding is the sealed coat closet where the router lives under the winter jackets. Aim to keep the space near ordinary room temperature; nothing here needs air conditioning, just air movement.
Board or rack?
For most houses, a plywood backboard does the job: a sheet of painted three-quarter-inch plywood on the wall, with the patch panel, switch, and equipment mounted in a clean vertical layout. It is serviceable, expandable, and easy for any tech to work on.
Step up to a small wall-mount rack when the equipment count grows: multiple switches, a recorder, a server, a rack-mount UPS. A rack keeps heavier gear supported properly and cabling manageable. What we suggest either way is committing the wall space now, roughly a metre wide by two metres tall, so the choice stays open.
The structured wiring panels builders offer (the shallow plastic box between studs) are fine for a doorbell transformer and not much else. Full-size routers, switches, and recorders do not fit, and the cramped terminations inside are where flaky connections are born.
Say it before drywall
Every item above is a line in an email to your builder: central closet, dedicated circuit with quad receptacle, conduit to attic, basement, exterior, and outbuildings, ventilation, a metre of clear plywood-backed wall, and home-run cable to every location on your list. Sent at the framing stage, it costs little. Discovered at possession, it costs walls.
We do this coordination for clients regularly: a walkthrough with the plans, a cable and conduit schedule the electrician can price, and installation once the trades are done. If you are building in Norfolk County or the surrounding region, talk to us early, ideally while your walls are still studs.
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.