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Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

thehftguy.com

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Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#31

Post by Nextgrid »

user5994461 wrote: post #19
gnfargbl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Nobody's going to complain about a backwards-compatible upgrade (you can put phone sockets back when you leave - nobody has to know there's cat 5/6 behind it).

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#32

Post by Nextgrid »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #17

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…

> the periodic reboots they inexplicably require

I've had powerline adapters with uptimes measured in years (basically in between power cuts). I think yours might be defective. They absolutely do not require reboots.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#34

Post by IshKebab »

> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets.

That's nonsense. Not in a new house. Maybe one from 20 years ago.

Anyway nice find. It's always annoying when there's a product that you know should exist but simply doesn't.

I'm currently trying to find a reasonably priced Bluetooth Auracast receiver so I can play audio to multiple rooms from my phone (no way am I investing in Sonos after all their bullshit).

There should be loads of these but the only ones I can find seem to be battery powered wearable devices aimed at tour groups, or hundreds of pounds.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#35

Post by Nextgrid »

mortenlarsen wrote: post #12
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.

Yeah the era of non-Ethernet/Wi-Fi NICs died off decades ago with the last ADSL cards. Nowadays I'm not sure if OSes even support creating drivers for anything non-Ethernet (especially where to provide the config UI for your non-standard protocol).

What I've seen done recently to work around this is to combine your custom chip with a standard Ethernet NIC on the same board. The computer just sees an (off-the-shelf) NIC that's always connected, and all configuration happens via IP by browsing to a specific private IP (this kinda insists on NAT though).

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#36

Post by maccard »

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…

One of the big problems with pulling cable in the UK is the abundance of solid internal walls. Running cabling in my house involves lifting floorboards or drilling through multiple 2ft thick stone walls. It’s worth doing while you’re there but so destructive if you’re not

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#37

Post by bjackman »

Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam?

My internet is pretty good, I can easily saturate my (rather dated) WiFi at about 30MB/s. But Steam downloads are extremely slow for me (can't remember the numbers but much less).

I always assumed Valve themselves were just stingy with bandwidth. Something else funny going on?

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#39

Post by iamcalledrob »

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…

Symnetric gigabit connections can be hard to come by in London.

If you're served by a niche fibre provider (e.g. Hyperoptic, Community Fibre) then you're golden.

There's Virgin (think Comcast) with paltry upload speeds due to the cable tech. Understandable though not ideal.

Then there's the OpenReach full fibre network with paltry upload speeds due to... ??? there appears to no good reason, other than not wanting to cannibalise their leased line business. Does anyone actually know why they don't offer a symmetric product like the niche fibre ISPs?

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