Abitana

[trevorjdaniel]

Hi,

Has anyone had any experience of the Abitana home network solution?

I am thinking about employing it for a development of 29 homes.

Thanks

Trevor

[toscal]

The Abitana product is excellent. The company is really helpful and so is MiniTran their UK dealer of the product.
Very well thought out. I can recomend going on the installers course in Birmingham, as this gives you a better over view of its potential and some hands on experience in wiring up the system.
For dates and more info take a look at www.minitran.co.uk

[vex]

The problem I have with it is the fact it is a proprietary cable, its individual pairs are apparently built to either a Cat5e and Cat7 standard, but the cable as a whole is pretty unique.

From experience developers don't like systems that limits their customers to what the can do with the system or where they can buy the accessories.

Personally I would always recommend industry standard, TIA approved cables rather than custom stuff as they will always be the first to see inprovements and product developements.

Chris

[trevorjdaniel]

Hi Both,

Thanks for the feedback.

To my mind, this system should be able to do more than a cat5e network shouldn't it?

At a bare minimum, we could use it as a pure network without any of the additional modules allowing it to do anything a Cat5e network could do. But, it has the advantage of having many "off the shelf" modules that plug straight in.

Isn't that a good thing not a bad thing?

Trev

[toscal]

I'm a qualified Abitana Home Networks installer in Spain.
The fact that its a proprietory cable doesn't mean its expensive, 100m costs 69 pounds + VAT. The cable is similar to Cat 5 except that twisted pair 7&8 are of a thicker wire guage and has a seperate shield on this pair. This enables you to distribute TV or composite video. On the course we distributed the aerial output from a freeview box to one TV and then the scart output to another all via the Abitana system, Oh and the audio went to another socket as well.
You can use the Omni Media Cable (as Abitana call it), as a normal Cat 5e cable. Abitana do routers/gateways. The nice thing about their boxes is that they all fit into their distribution box ( they are all DIN rail mounts) and all look similar, so it makes for a very profesional system.

If you have any more questions just send me a private message, and I will be happy to help.

[steve19]

The Abitana system is an extremely cost effective home multimedia networking solution that has been cleverly thought out! Who else can offer a single solution from one manufacturer that delivers, TV/Video, Audio, Voice & Data (Ethernet) combined? Yes it is true that there are other companies that offer similar products over a CAT7 cable, but not to my knowledge at the same performance level or a single source component supplier. The hybrid cable uses the best available technology, pushing the cable frequency levels above any CAT7 cable for these applications, easier to install then CAT7 as it is more flexible and needs less room in the back box! In my opinion the Abitana system should be the first choice for any new multimedia installation.