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Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

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Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#41

Post by retired »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #24
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…

Pulling cables through walls is really easy for some construction styles and really difficult for others. Can involve taking up floorboards and drilling horizontally through beams, plumber style. Or cutting slots in masonry with angle grinders. Sometimes there are existing wires you can tie to and pull through, sometimes the existing wires were stapled to the walls. On the bright side everything about the ethernet wi…

Agreed. I tugged on each phone wire a to see if they were free. And I got lucky on all of them.

One of the problems I had was a kinked conduit where concrete was poured on top, or at least that is what I assumed. Was a bit difficult to get the “knot” (where the phone wire was connected to the CAT5E) through that spot.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#42

Post by wtcactus »

My current apartment also had a bunch of phone sockets spread around... In a couple of hours, I've removed the existing wires and passed Ethernet wires. Quick, easy, ubiquitous and cheap.

Ok, the writer could be renting a house and not wanting to do that. But sincerely, in Portugal, the landlords couldn't care less. Maybe in the UK, they really, really love their phone sockets and don't want to replace them, don't know.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#43

Post by consp »

forinti wrote: post #27
pzmarzly wrote: post #10

The apartment block I live in in Ireland has converted phone sockets into Ethernet using similar converters, except (a) it was in 2004, so 10Mbit base, (b) they ordered whole socket replacements, eliminating the need for separate box outside the walls, (c) the goal was to buy 1 business high speed line, and split it across all apartments, which became obsolete when ADSL, DOCSIS, and later FTTH became affordable optio…

This wouldn't be legal in my country unless all the apartments had one owner, because the telcos have a monopoly on communications. The law says one person can't stretch a cable over to his neighbour, because they would need a licence for that (although if you did do that, who would know?).

My parents shared coaxiale television for years with the neighbors. Technically illegal but there is no way to know with analogue television.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#44

Post by mattmanser »

forinti wrote: post #27
pzmarzly wrote: post #10

The apartment block I live in in Ireland has converted phone sockets into Ethernet using similar converters, except (a) it was in 2004, so 10Mbit base, (b) they ordered whole socket replacements, eliminating the need for separate box outside the walls, (c) the goal was to buy 1 business high speed line, and split it across all apartments, which became obsolete when ADSL, DOCSIS, and later FTTH became affordable optio…

This wouldn't be legal in my country unless all the apartments had one owner, because the telcos have a monopoly on communications. The law says one person can't stretch a cable over to his neighbour, because they would need a licence for that (although if you did do that, who would know?).

I think our phone lines must work differently, the entire infrastructure is owned by one company (BT) who must lease it to other companies. So they can do things like this, as everyone needs a router at the end to access it and that's how they charge per customer.

There is a separate cable network, again one operator (Virgin), who don't lease it out.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#45

Post by consp »

yetihehe wrote: post #25
bflesch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Someone at Davos commented "It took you 7 years to negotiate your way out, it will take you 7 years to regret and then 7 years to negotiate back in".

All while losing all goodies and setting the economy back a decade.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#46

Post by Nextgrid »

bjackman wrote: post #37

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?

Peering between your ISP and Valve is likely saturated.

Considering Valve has an incentive to make downloads fast (= more revenue), it's likely your ISP is being stingy in this case.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#47

Post by a022311 »

I wish I knew about this when I lived in a house without Ethernet sockets! I needed it in the attic for my PC and servers and all I had were slow, unreliable TP-Link Powerline adapters. My first speed test gave me 37.1Kbps (after painfully loading Cloudflare's test page). On a really good day I could get 3MBps. I'd get disconnected multiple times a day and I had to try all sorts of methods to get the adapter to connect again. I had to write a program in the end to tell me if I didn't have internet because the Powerline broke or my DNS server broke (normally it's always DNS but turns out it wasn't) :D

I had a phone socket in that room and I had already discussed the possibility of converting it into an Ethernet socket but decided it's not worth it because everything ended up in a cupboard far away from my router. These adapters would have solved the problem nicely!

By the way, I have more fun stories. The cabling in my current house (which has Ethernet sockets) is still miserable. I spent a year working with my PC over USB tethering to my phone until I finally called an electrician to find which of the 11 dangling cables in the cupboard went to my office...

One day some wires in there were slightly moved and the internet got disconnected because they were badly crimped. Nothing was working so in the end I got an RJ45 connector and managed to get the wires in there.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#48

Post by Nextgrid »

consp wrote: post #45
yetihehe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at Davos commented "It took you 7 years to negotiate your way out, it will take you 7 years to regret and then 7 years to negotiate back in".

All while losing all goodies and setting the economy back a decade.

But the remaining wealth of the country has successfully been extracted in the form of overpriced and not-fit-for-purpose utilities, transport companies, taxes, and so on and given to corporate interests. From their perspective it's a resounding success.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#49

Post by retired »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #26
jedilance wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Relatively successful was slotting the cat5 jacket, cutting off two or three of the pairs, twisting/tying the remaining pair to the old wire, then sliding the jacket back over the join before wrapping in a conservative amount of electrical tape. You want the join to be similar width to the cable and preferably flexible. I have a suspicion that pulling fishing line first is the right play if you can manage to connect…

In addition, in one room I ran two CAT5E cables as there was conduit along the entire way. So I took a CAT5E cable double the length of the conduit, stripped the outer sheath in the middle, folded the cable to get a loop and then attached the phone cable to that using the individual inner wires. Plus tape.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#50

Post by jakedata »

I connected self powered crank telephones to my home phone wiring for use as intercoms. Crank one and the others ring. Pick up to engage the battery powered talk circuit and you're chatting with Mabel like it's 1915. I did replace the old dry cell batteries with lithium camera cells so I don't need to think about them for a decade.
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