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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

#51

Post by consp »

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…

The twisted pair (should be two but one pair is broken...) installed in the 60s in my home are so stuck you will never, ever, get those out without ripping the wall apart. Originally the coaxials should have gone through the same pipes, as there should be enough space, but there is so much gunk in there it was impossible and they layed out a new tube though the floors and ceilings in the corner. For fun and because institutional knowledge is for suckers, they tried the same with fiber and simply gave up so now we are in limbo because computer says we have fiber but we don't.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#52

Post by larusso »

You are a god send! I have the same issue. My house (2013!!!) is fully phone wired but has zero Ethernet. I have 3 floors which each running on a different phase (the electrician wired it like that). I have a power line adapter in my fuse box to connect directly to the three phases. But I can’t stream content or large files. Even worse the power line adapters bring noise into my power sockets. A guitar amp gets ground crackling etc. will look into this solution!

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#53

Post by djhworld »

> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets. There is still no regulation that requires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).

I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.

This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...

But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#54

Post by michaelt »

gambiting wrote: post #9

>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything. As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer…

Honestly, most UK houses start out with a single ISP-provided wifi router, situated somewhere close to where the data cable enters the building.

For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building.

The issues arise when you've got a larger building, thick walls, lots of things competing for the same frequency band, a less great router, or you need the very lowest latency.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#55

Post by Nextgrid »

gambiting wrote: post #9

>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything. As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer…

When it comes to wireless, top speeds are misleading and the wrong way to look at it.

You can have the shittiest link possible with lots of dropouts and still get a decent speed test result because in between the dropouts you get max speed and TCP/etc is designed exactly to smooth over such packet loss, and browser-based tests aren't able to get low-level UDP access to defuse that.

Yet such a connection will be unusable for anything real-time, think gaming or videoconferencing. That's why so many people's connection still stutters on Zoom/etc calls - the "good" connection and super fancy router their ISP sold them isn't actually that good despite speed test results being satisfactory.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#56

Post by Nextgrid »

michaelt wrote: post #54
gambiting wrote: post #9

>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything. As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer…

Honestly, most UK houses start out with a single ISP-provided wifi router, situated somewhere close to where the data cable enters the building. For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building. The issues arise when you've got a larger building, thick walls, lots of things competing for the same frequency band, a less great router, or you need the very lowest latency.

> For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building.

It often isn't - it's just magic like TCP/etc that is doing its job and making it feel that way for bulk non-interactive transfers. But get those people on a Zoom call or anything real-time and it'll be painful (double pain if they've subsequently got terrible bluetooth headsets and/or accidentally use their laptop's internal mic).

Doesn't help stupid ISPs split their 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on separate SSIDs so now devices can't switch automatically and you've either got people constantly hogging the 2.4 band or barely trying to hang onto the 5GHz one in conditions where falling back to 2.4 would be appropriate.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#57

Post by cjs_ac »

> 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. This makes the UK simultaneously one of the cheapest and one of the most expensive countries to get Internet.

Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.

[0] https://www.aa.net.uk/

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#58

Post by alimbada »

> It’s not uncommon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sockets in the living room and 2 phone sockets in the bedroom and a master socket in the technical room. It’s ridiculous.

This sounds a bit farfetched to me. I'm 40+ and lived in the UK all my life. Growing up we only had 1 phone socket in the house for the first few years until my dad got an extension put in upstairs. I've lived in multiple cities since then and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#59

Post by stefan_ »

Nextgrid wrote: post #46
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.

And ISPs in most of the western world have no incentives to fix it, instead trying to scam Valve and others to get paid twice.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#60

Post by michaelt »

wtcactus wrote: post #42

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 kn…

UK landlords also don't tend to invest anything in their properties.

But in the UK case, that means the old phone cables are stapled to the skirting boards and painted over with gloss paint, and the sockets were wallpapered around in the 1990s. Pull the old cables and sockets off, the paint chips off and you've got holes square holes left in the wallpaper.

And although UK landlords don't give a shit about upkeep that costs them money, they rarely miss a chance to deduct money from the deposit.

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