Yes, for what it’s worth, a lot of electricians who do “line voltage” (120v in US, 230v in UK) don’t like to do “low voltage” (Ethernet, other applications). There’s a bunch of reasons, but most come down to the fact that it’s much fiddlier to ensure that there’s no interference and the cables are terminated (there are those plastic ‘jacks’ put on the end correctly). If you can get them to literally just “pull the Cat5 (or Cat6) cable” you can learn how to terminate it yourself with YouTube and a $20 part. Any electrician knows how to pull cable, and some of the folks who said no might say yes if you said “all I need for you to do is to pull the cable and put in a couple junction boxes and leave the Cat5 hanging unfinished and I’ll take care of the rest”. Or you can search for someone who will do it and leave you with nicely terminated and finished Ethernet jacks in the wall - who might easily be an audio/video outfit.
My only point is that mucking about in walls, especially in older housing stock, is not for the faint of heart and I don’t encourage it for those who aren’t comfortable. The stuff that happens on the ends (crimping RJ45 jacks onto the cable and screwing in wall plates) is what intimidates/puts off a lot of electricians, and it’s actually easier to learn how to DIY than you might imagine. But I would not want to encourage you to get in over your comfort level - you have to be the judge of whether you want to get involved in that.
In my younger more flexible days I would have done it myself, but at 69 crawling around in the attic staying on the rafters and not breaking through the ceiling is a lot harder. Also depends on the structure of the house.
That’s why I suggested getting someone to pull the cable (I don’t enjoy crawl spaces or falling through the ceiling nearly as much as I did in my younger days, and you’ve gota couple decades on me), leaving just the ends to deal with. Which one can do while seated in a chair, and so long as you practice a bit and leave enough slack in the cable I promise you can learn to do. Which doesn’t mean you have to do it - like anything else it’s perfectly sane to outsource and pay someone else to do the fiddly bits too - just that you can really learn to do that bit yourself. It’s not magic, just fiddly.
+1 on hiring a reputable network of A/V installer, which I’ve done with good results. Sometimes the solution requires some creativity: the construction of our city place would make it very expensive and disruptive to run new cables in the walls or under floors, but the original designer/owner had run coax to every room from a central point, so we repurposed it with MoCA adapters for our LAN.
Agreed, I had mine done in 2 stages, a year apart, and it was expensive at 1900.00 total for 9 drops. Cant get from one end to the other in the attic and the home runs had to be fished through the inaccessible areas. Had them do the whole thing, end to end, using their meters to verify the connections. Worth it to me but would not be for everyone.
