[timsoles]

Thanks very much for your helpful comments.

The majority view seems to be a single cable up to the loft with a switch to the various rooms, although I accept Rob's comment that the running costs would be slightly higher over a period of time.

It might get a bit hot in the loft for a mains powered switch but it wouldn't be a problem to drop that down into a bedroom and perhaps locate it in the top of a wardrobe.

From what I have read elsewhere Cat6 does not offer any significant performance improvement over 5e at the present time, but with Virgin already offering 100mb broadband, and the likelyhood of faster speeds in the future, it seems to make sense to try and future-proof any installation now with the best spec available cable.

With that in mind, I will also get a Gigabit switch, as my desktops have Gigabit cards, and I anticipate any increasing transfer of data between my PCs and probably a Media Player when the house is properly wired up.

Tim