Hi everyone.
This is the type of work that I do everyday. Being an A/V guy, there really is no standard to how a house gets wired; it's usually up to the homeowner or builder. The basic pre-wire that I do (for cookie cutter homes and apartment buildings, or condos) consists of a cat5e used for phone and an rg-6 for CATV home-run to each location. Usually in this type of a pre-wire, the cat 5 and the rg-6 are pulled to the TV location, and a "jumper" of cat 5 is "looped" to a location near where the bed is going to be for a phone jack. There are tons of other types of pre-wires, including "structured cable" (consisting of (2) different colored cat5e cables, and (2) different colored rg-6 cables) which I believe is what Jay8 is referring to. The nice thing with structured cabling is that you are covered (for the most part) as far as everything is pulled to one location in one pull (phone, data, CATV, satellite or terrestrial antenna of fm antenna). Even using structured cabling sometimes just isn't enough. I just finished a retrofit pre-wire that had structured cabling, lots of speaker wire plus 9 different colors of cat 5 all totaling about 5 miles worth total.
Hope this helps!
