(FORTUNE Magazine) – In late March, if all goes well, I'll move into a new house. In humble service to my faithful readers, I offer this new house--let's call it Digital Manor--as a test case of the new digital society.

Now, Digital Manor needs a lot of work. It needs new plumbing. New heating. A new roof. Most important, new wiring. Since Digital Manor requires this kind of overhaul, I can install whatever wires I want. All I have to do is choose the wires, pay for them, and find someone to install and connect them.

You'd think I've timed this perfectly. The buzz in Silicon Valley is that the next great business is wiring the home--connecting homes to the big network out there; connecting devices inside the home; selling the devices and services we will use in the home.

But I'm discovering that wiring Digital Manor is no simple task. I want a setup known as home-run wiring. Networking types I've talked to use this term to describe a system in which all wires start at a single point, home plate--say, the basement--and fan out to all bases in the building, the bedrooms and living areas. The wires interconnect at home plate. It turns out that my architect and my contractor, who are working their magic on other parts of the home, know less than I do about digital wiring. So getting this right is up to me. But first I have to choose wires. There are four kinds:

Telephone wires. A phone line is actually two relatively thin copper wires twisted together inside plastic shielding. Once upon a time, every house in America had one such line that came in and went directly to one telephone. (Telephone people call such basic service "POTS," which stands for plain old telephone service.) These days many people have two or more such phone lines, and telephones in almost every room. I'm planning to buy a PBX (private branch exchange) to interconnect all Digital Manor phones. This way I can call my daughter in her bedroom from my home office and tell her to finish her homework.

Category 5 network wiring. This is a fancy name for a more expensive phone wire--two pairs of copper wires twisted very tightly together. Category 5 is overkill for telephones, since it has four wires and your basic phone line uses just two. But I need those extras for an Ethernet network to connect all the PCs I have at home. The network will let those computers share printers and modems.

Coaxial cable. This is the cable in cable television. I have no idea what "coaxial" stands for, but the term has something to with the fact that this consists of two strands of wire, with one strand wrapped around the other, and with both strands insulated. Coaxial cable carries a lot more television than what we get broadcast free through the air. In my present house, I have one cable that runs into a set-top box sitting on a TV in my family room. Since I get to wire up Digital Manor however I choose, I want to be able to get cable in any room. More important for my trip into the digital future, I want to also be able to plug that cable into the back of any computer in the house.

Fiber. Everybody out here in Silicon Valley tells me I should have fiber. I don't have the foggiest idea why. None of the people who insist I should install it can give me a very good reason. I guess it's the principle of the thing: Computer-industry types always think you should have as much of anything digital as you possibly can.

Fiber is basically a thread of glass encased in plastic. Pulses of light travel really, really fast along this thread. So fiber handles many more bits per second than either copper or coaxial lines. Fiber is used for the highest-speed connections: the extremely high-speed trunks for telephone calls traveling across country and under oceans; the backbone of the Internet; and the lines between most commercial buildings and the Net. According to Silicon Valley principle, I should put fiber into my walls, while I have them open, because eventually the computer industry will figure out how to stuff so many bits into my house that I'll need high-speed wires. If that happens before the next time my house needs to be rewired (and replumbed and reroofed), I'll be ahead of the game. And if I sell the house before then, I might be able to get an additional $10,000 to $20,000 for the place.

I could choose another option: no wires at all. No, I'm not talking about becoming a Luddite. I'm talking wireless. A wireless solution to the problem of moving bits around a house seems attractive, given that most existing houses won't be rewired in the next decade. Unfortunately, the wireless solutions I've come across are less reliable and more expensive than wire.

Wireless isn't ready for prime time. And I'm going to take my chances and leave the fiber out. So I'm going for home-run wiring with Category 5 and coaxial lines. My home plate will be in the basement, and I will have 70 pieces of wire, ranging in length from ten to 100 feet, snaking around under the floors. Home plate will be connected to the incoming phone lines, including four POTS lines and an ISDN line, as well as to the cable wires and a satellite dish on the roof.

My next step is to find a subcontractor to hook all these wires up. Here's where the rubber really doesn't meet the road. There are all kinds of wiring people. You've got telephone wirers, who are often repair people retired or laid off from the telephone company. You've got security contractors, who can install a security system and hook it up to the alarm company. You've got audio-video installers, who know how to string speaker wire and install home theaters. Television-wiring people know how to run cables around a house for cable or satellite TV. And there are computer-wiring experts, often people who have worked in information-systems departments of large companies.

What there is not is this: someone whom I can rely on to do all these kinds of wiring. Even if one kind of wirer has learned about other kinds of wiring, he still carries the bias of his first expertise. I need help, for instance, trying to figure out phone wiring. Do I really need a PBX? Or should I use the telephone company's Centrex system, a service that emulates a PBX? Will a phone wirer know how to properly route the television cable, much less know how to terminate the computer network? And will he know how to install a router on an ISDN line?

The angst of the digital future makes my head spin! So what I've done is learn enough to tell my contractor how to install the wire under the floors and inside the walls. He'll leave the wires disconnected. Then I'll get specialists to come in and interconnect the different wires.

The problem with this approach is that everything that goes wrong will be my fault. Once I move into Digital Manor, when I can't get the television in the bedroom to play channel 6 or I can't print from the computer in the sitting room on the printer in the home office, it will be my fault. I'll have to figure out where the problem is and decide whom to call to fix it. If I could find a good networking specialist, I might pay him to come visit on a regular basis. He'd just be a digital version of the gardener and the maid.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. Alsop may be reached at stewart_alsop@fortunemail.com

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Liz Smith