EIB versus CBUS

["shieldsauk" <ha@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm building an extension and am trying to decide between EIB and CBUS
and also possibly
upgrading the LD11's in the rest of the house.

I feel that I have a pretty good idea of the capabilities and requirements
of CBUS having
spent numerous hours reading the installation and configuration
documentation, however
I don't know much about EIB.

Does anybody have any experience of this and ideally CBUS as a comparison?

A few specific questions I have regarding EIB are:

1) The bus cable appears quite expensive compared to CBUS cable so I'm
guessing this
means it's not cat 5, Is this the case?  I had cat 5 run to each light
switch when we rewired
some years ago and l'd like to be able to use it!

2) Is programming of devices covered by the EIB standard or unique to each
manufacturer?
It's all very well having kit from several sources interoperate but not so
good if I have to
keep buying programming tools. Ideally I'd like to be able to purchase an
ethernet gateway
and do all the programming via that from my PC.

3) The CBUS literature makes a lot of noise about soft start on dimmers, I
would have
thought that this would be pretty much standard these days - after all
LD11's have it at
less then 30 quid a throw. Or do I need to check for each device.

4)  I'm currently looking at the Hager TEBIS TX range. Anyone know if these
are any good
or can recommend somebody else that does multi channel dimmers?

TIA
Alan Shields