81–90 of 288 posts
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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.
I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.
If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.
As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
In the UK, pull the socket front off and look what the wires actually are. I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think. If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it. As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is comin…
And here I am struggling to get gigabit Ethernet over brand new cat6 cabling with devices bought in 2025…
I’ve had 2.5GbE running over old in-wall Cat5 in old buildings on short to medium (15-30m) runs with no issues…
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A view from the the debugging tools since you asked https://thehftguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/screenshot_... I don't think there is anything too fancy compared to a DSLAM. It's just that DSLAM are low-frequency long-range by design. Numbers for nerds, on top of my head: * ADSL1 is 1Mhz 8Mbps (2 kilometer) * ADSL2 is 2Mhz 20Mbps (1 kilometer) * VSDL1 is 15Mhz 150Mbps (less than 1 kilometer) * Gigabit Ethernet i…
Gigabit Ethernet uses four pairs per direction. It uses the same four pairs in both directions at the same time.
> 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 aut…
This is due to advertising standards. They are required to advertise "average speed", although how this is actually calculated is nebulous. A&A not advertising can just say what the link speeds actually are on the product pages. Other ISP's could do this too, but it would cause confusion having one figure on the advert and one figure on the product pages, and they might get in trouble if they link to the product page…
In the UK, pull the socket front off and look what the wires actually are. I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think. If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it. As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is comin…
If it plugs into your card the card goes "OK, lets see if 1000baseT fits on this?" the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.
At the turn of the century I was putting new Cisco gear into a building (which has since burned down, not related) that had been built a long time ago and so it didn't have Cat 5e cables. I was fitting switches which were state of the art at the time (IPv6 experiments), and they didn't have a 100Mbit option because that was legacy, so you'd plug this ancient looking 1980s cable designed for 10baseT into a switch, and in most cases once it's connected the switch and the network card at the far end both go "Aha link, can I do 1000baseT over this?" and conclude yeah, Gigabit just works. There is a setting to say "No, only do 10baseT" but why set it? Users don't want slow Internet.
Unless somebody went very cheap and strung literal bellwire (which was never rated for a telephone but would probably work) or your distances are very long, you will almost certainly get 100Mb and if there actually are four pairs you will most likely get Gigabit.
> 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.