Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

thehftguy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 288 posts

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#11

Post by Quarrel »

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Wild to me that this developer has no access to a device with gigabit ethernet. Time really does fly.

He claims:

> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet.

Which might well be true where he is (ie he's limited to the equivalent of shared HFC or xDSL), but certainly isn't true everywhere.

I've had gigabit fibre (full duplex) in London since 2016, and the building had it before I arrived. It also has incredibly low latency to the major data centres of London, and not a lot more to most of western Europe.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#12

Post by mortenlarsen »

userbinator wrote: post #7

It sounds like his phone lines were already cat5, which is not surprisingly capable of 1Gbps. However, I wonder why it seems G.hn is only available in the form of adapters, and not as e.g. a PCIe NIC.

Then they would need to deal with drivers.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#13

Post by bflesch »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #6
jakub_g wrote: post #4

> Basically, you need to follow the tracking regularly until the package is tagged as lost or failed delivery, which is the cue to pay import fees. > It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years! Wow.

Another Brexit bonus It’s no coincidence those that championed Brexit are those that wanted a weaker Europe and weaker U.K. That’s why the majority of tax payers were against it, the majority of educated people voted against it, the majority of working people voted against it, the majority of people alive today who voted voted against it Yet we still got it.

It's never to late to rejoin, we've all learned a lot about foreign propaganda in the last decade.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#14

Post by user5994461 »

Quarrel wrote: post #11
Roritharr wrote: post #2

Wild to me that this developer has no access to a device with gigabit ethernet. Time really does fly.

He claims: > One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. Which might well be true where he is (ie he's limited to the equivalent of shared HFC or xDSL), but certainly isn't true everywhere. I've had gigabit fibre (full duplex) in London since 2016, and the building had it before I arrived. It also has incredibly low latency to the major data centres of London, and not a lot…

Full quote. The problem is the price.

> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps – 75 Mbps – 150 Mbps – 300 Mbps – 500 Mbps – 900 Mbps, each one costing a few more pounds per month than the last.

Gigabit is so much more expensive (obviously it's gone down a lot). In London 2016, I had ADSL broadband at 16 Mbps for £12/month. That building didn't have fiber at the time. When fiber finally happened... it started as 30 Mbps fiber for so much more money.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#17

Post by JonChesterfield »

Lots of sympathy with this plight. Great to hear that someone has done the needful and rendered MoCA style modems over pairs of copper. I'm probably a customer for that.

I'm currently running MoCA over spliced coax as part of the local connection and not amused by the 5ms latency on it. Also running 100mbit over cat3 I found in a wall which does work, but cat3 in another wall can't hold 10mbit. That link actually can hold 70mbit of vdsl but after a nearby lightning strike slagged various hardware I've moved the vdsl modem back to the BT wires entry point and run the output through some fibre.

And there's a wifi bridge between two other points. And some ethernet running outside the building. Previously also ethernet-over-mains that I might bring back now that I've learned what spanning tree protocols are so the periodic reboots they inexplicably require can be tolerated transparently.

Also the connection to the internet itself is crap so bonding vdsl, starlink and 5g through the openmptcprouter project. Just lots of redundancy and self healing hacks all over the place to give an observably solid connection.

Which is a rambling way to say that if you're in Britain and your network connection brings you sorrow, it can be forced to be acceptable with application of more time and money than other countries require.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#18

Post by jedilance »

retired wrote: post #5

I had a similar issue but instead I opted to replace all the wiring with CAT5E. I used the old phone wiring as a pull-wire to get the CAT5E through the walls very, very slowly. CAT5E was used as I needed all the flexibility I could get and 1Gbit was enough at the time. The RJ11 panels on the wall were replaced with RJ45, crimped everything. Took a full day of carefully pulling wires but in the end I got gigabit all o…

I am curious if you have some tricks for attaching pull-wire and CAT cable. Also, did you use any lubricant for the CAT?

I tried the same approach to replace COAX cable with CAT but the tie just broke off like 10cm before the socket exit [1], and CAT is stuck there now.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/myW6IIq.jpeg

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#19

Post by user5994461 »

gnfargbl wrote: post #8
retired wrote: post #5

I had a similar issue but instead I opted to replace all the wiring with CAT5E. I used the old phone wiring as a pull-wire to get the CAT5E through the walls very, very slowly. CAT5E was used as I needed all the flexibility I could get and 1Gbit was enough at the time. The RJ11 panels on the wall were replaced with RJ45, crimped everything. Took a full day of carefully pulling wires but in the end I got gigabit all o…

You're the reason why the author's assertion that there is a huge untapped market for this in the UK is probably wrong; most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables. There might be some market for a simple point-to-point device sold by the likes of Argos, zero config and including all the right cables already, aimed at people who can't or won't upgrade th…

> most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.

It's really not that simple when you realize that the average UK flat has 3+ sockets and the average house has 5+ sockets (speaking from my own experience). Some daisy chained and some direct.

Besides, a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#20

Post by timthorn »

Quarrel wrote: post #11
Roritharr wrote: post #2

Wild to me that this developer has no access to a device with gigabit ethernet. Time really does fly.

He claims: > One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. Which might well be true where he is (ie he's limited to the equivalent of shared HFC or xDSL), but certainly isn't true everywhere. I've had gigabit fibre (full duplex) in London since 2016, and the building had it before I arrived. It also has incredibly low latency to the major data centres of London, and not a lot…

It's possibly because of a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority back in the ADSL days: https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/broadband-speed-claims-guida...
Post reply on HN