I have a bad feeling, but hope dies last.
You do know exactly what was agreed with the electrician, right, or did you really only say "one network please"?
I rather suspect the order was "once as usual". If the electrician doesn’t look retirement-age yet, unfortunately many builders wrongly assume he knows which decade we're currently in.
So nothing else caught our attention during the discussion.
A site visit only makes sense with a script, otherwise you might as well spin a wheel blindfolded.
Guess: Maybe it’s not just about quality, but also that WLAN might fail more easily than LAN?
If there’s decent WLAN, it can work well. But there’s a reason for the saying "those who know radio, use cables".
I couldn’t have said it better. A cable is simply the "shortest" and most stable connection to a fixed endpoint. Direct, continuous, repeater-free. The risk of failure is equal for both insofar as they are often managed by the same TriplePlay AllInOne box.
But I still don’t quite understand what the should do there or what that has to do with his professional liability insurance? Was he actually the proper contact person for that? And “prying open” sounds rather drastic ...
I will first try to get the details regarding the empty conduit from the electrician.
Yes, that presupposes knowledge of my way of thinking, according to which a house planned with an architect covers the entire scope of services from phase 1 to 8, so the architect also does detailed planning, tendering, and construction supervision. This should essentially provide multiple safeguards against an electrician later installing a doorbell wire old-school style under the plaster as in Schmidt’s era. "Prying open" was just said casually; with a wall chaser it’s quick and nearly painless (the undersized cable may be damaged in the process, it won’t be reused anyway).
We obviously hadn’t thought about the fact that a slightly bigger area inside the house has to be covered (that’s what the access points are for, right?).
(WLAN) Access Points (which for LAN you would simply call network sockets) provide wireless network coverage. Mark all users in the floor plans, fixed and nomadic separately. For example, you access the internet with a laptop from the living-dining room and sometimes walk with it into the home office. For half an hour you don’t unplug it there, but for a full home office day you do. You rarely surf at the dining table but often on the sofa. So you are
only one user in the floor plan but
represented by several symbols: sitting as "x" and roaming as "!", specifically in this example: "!" at the dining table, "!!" on the sofa, "!" in every corridor from the living to the home office, and in the home office then "!" and "xx" (you) as well as another "x" (scan fax). Now you see where which sockets and access points belong (the latter preferably on the ceiling).
Back to solving the original question: the classic wired doorbell intercom can certainly be done by wire, and the video function parallel and independently (possibly also on other cable or wireless paths). The problem is multifaceted: architects delegate planning to electricians, and electricians let the manufacturers do the thinking for them. Unfortunately, manufacturers mostly have ONE philosophy (and they stick to it to the bitter end; innovation is for girls and other couch potatoes). For “grown reasons,” some manufacturers are very proud to manage with as few wires as possible. But there are others (also with the same attitude towards philosophy, Catholic or Protestant, ecumenism is considered devil’s work by both camps). A competent planner, however, always installs network cables*, because that is fully backward compatible, i.e. the cable doesn’t care if you leave three pairs of wires unused. The electrician is usually brand-loyal to the death: if he swears by Grothe, he couldn’t care less if Siedle works with it.
So I would definitely consider having the doorbell intercom “planned” by the electrician, and a set of, for example, two webcams addressed separately via smartphone, whose motion detectors also call you when someone is lurking in front of the door. These can very well be people who wouldn’t even intend to ring.
In the (W)LAN topic, every electrician who took his master craftsman exam after the euro change feels “modern enough.” His actual contemporary relevance depends on how often he looks into his apprentices' vocational school booklets (and whether he dares to ask them what is shown there). The average village electrician calls every Western connector “digital.” He never needed to know more, and that was the case even with his grandfather. He leases his Toyota HiAce from Ismairwilfried (I assume Gerhard Polt’s Sportpalastrede is known) and that’s it – that has to last until retirement.
*) dear readers at the “child in the well” stage: 1x 10DA or 2x 4DA are never too much on the line between door and opener