This seems like a lot of effort and expense to avoid either figuring out the current ethernet cable layout, or pulling new cable. It's not that hard.
Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
71–80 of 288 posts
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#72When we bought our house (1950s semidetached) it needed a full electrical rewire. I’m so glad I asked the electricians to run Ethernet all over the house at the same time, including to the ceiling in some rooms for WiFi access points.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#73I mean on fairly short runs you can run Ethernet over water pipes if you want to. I'd try the cable on its own first without any fancy chipsets.
I've been surprisingly successful with that in the past.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#74Wait, 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?
It might have detected the wrong country/city for you. Check Settings -> Downloads -> Region
Otherwise it's just your WiFi being patchy. I think Steam is doing "friendly" bulk download, it slows down before the connection is saturated, to avoid disconnecting your wife/mum/siblings watching Youtube or on a videoconference.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#75> 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…
The 10 phone sockets are pretty unlikely, true, but 0 Ethernet? Probably more common than not. If anything, modern builds are doing less ethernet than ever because they assume everyone is just using WiFi.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#76Wait, 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?
> Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam?
I usually (but not always) saturate my downlink with Steam downloads... even back when I was a Comcast customer and paying for ~180MB/s (~1500mbit/s) asymmetric service.
I believe that I have noticed that smaller games (~a few hundred MB or maybe a GB or two) will download quite a bit slower than large games, but I'm not very confident in that observation.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#77> 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…
When looking at new build houses a year or two back (in the UK), I saw some stuff that made no sense to me: they installed some by default, but ran it to only the lounge and bedroom 1, the house also had a dedicated study (labelled as such by them) which did not have an ethernet run to it, and they refused to let you option in any more, very weird.
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Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#78Worth knowing in this context:
Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone.
Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.
You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.
Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.
When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?
So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hyperoptic is niche? I thought they were available all over London.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bu…
This is actually something where you are often better off outside of cities. The areas serviced by newer providers who are using the government grants to offer fibre to places without it and are actually running new fibre tend to offer much better prices and speeds.
E.g: One of them offers 900Mbps symmetric for £40/month (with a deal for £30/month for the first year). Meanwhile the legacy providers via OpenReach will only give you 700 down/100 up for more money, and require a two year contract.
The only real downside is most of them will CGNAT you, but most do offer IPv6 too, and mine offers a static IPv4 for £5/month more.