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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

#101

Post by hnlmorg »

alimbada wrote: post #58

> 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 an…

I’m a similar age and have also lived in a few houses over the years. I’ve never lived in any place that didn’t have more than one phone socket.

Though I have noticed multiple sockets are less common in really old houses which haven’t seen much modernisation, and less common in really new ones too (since builders expect most people will just use the master socket for broadband and people use mobiles for calls).

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#102

Post by mprovost »

jimnotgym wrote: post #82

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…

Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#104

Post by bloomingeek »

Here in the states, when we moved into our house that was built in the late 60's, every room had a phone jack. The exterior of the house had cabling strung onto the back and one side with lines installed, through the brick, into the separate rooms. There was also a line or two in the attic. Sometime in the early 90's, after I fired Southwestern Bell, I striped away all the wiring. Two of out kids had new homes built, both were wired with Ethernet cable only for communication.

My wife and I rented a flat in Amsterdam a few years ago. I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room, which I thought was strange. Now I know. (I was looking for the broom, BTW.)

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#105

Post by Reason077 »

jakub_g wrote: post #4

> Basically, you need to follow the tracking regularly until the package is tagged as lost or failed delivery, which is the cue to pay import fees. > It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years! Wow.

> "Paid the fee online, 20% VAT + a few pounds of handling fees ... It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020."

Why don't Amazon and other online retailers just charge you the UK VAT when you order and ship it "VAT paid", so it doesn't get held up at the border?

That's how it works in New Zealand. You pay New Zealand's GST when you place an order, not after it arrives. Any online retailer that ships over a certain volume of products to New Zealand is required to implement this.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#106

Post by maccard »

stephen_g wrote: post #86
maccard wrote: post #33

And here I am struggling to get gigabit Ethernet over brand new cat6 cabling with devices bought in 2025…

Over what distance? Sounds like something is broken… Sure all the pairs are punched down in the right order, cables aren’t crushed, etc.? I’ve had 2.5GbE running over old in-wall Cat5 in old buildings on short to medium (15-30m) runs with no issues…

Roughly 15 metres. Almost certainly a cabling issue, although frustratingly the electrician who installed it says that they think it's fine. I've got a ubiquiti U7 AP connected to a USW lite 8 via POE, and it negotiates GbE, but then falls back to E.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#107

Post by wtcactus »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #91

I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets. We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that…

Right, but where do you live?

I live in a 100m^2 apartment and the signal in the main bedroom is quite bad.

In most European countries, houses are built out of brick and concrete. The signal doesn’t easily reach the all house.

In my parents house, built out of granite, it’s even worse.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#108

Post by guenthert »

Latty wrote: post #68
omnicognate wrote: post #66

I've been using this for a couple of years in my home now, with the same German Gigacopper devices. It's rock solid, very much unlike my attempts at power-line ethernet in the past. I used ethernet over coax in my last house too, which was also great. I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to…

My experience with powerline is they can work well for low activity, but they all overheat if you actually use them continuously, and the advertised speeds are extremely misleading as they are before error correction (which is very significant) and for the whole network. My guess is that the nature of them being in a power plug means that they struggle to isolate things from the mains for safety in a way that doesn't…

I didn't notice overheating, but there are a quite a few different products on the market.

The modest speed (~50MBps at my place) was then ok-ish, but the (variable!) latency of a couple of ms was annoying (it tended to break pacemaker/corosync cluster communication). And every once in a blue moon they stopped working altogether and needed to be un-plugged.

Worst, for someone interested in analogue electronics, they emit (of course) a huge amount of electrical noise into the power lines.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#109

Post by simondotau »

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…

> The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.

Unlikely, they’ll probably be delighted that you went to the effort at all. While not ideal, Cat5e is usually good enough for 10 gigabit over shorter lengths. It’s not unusual for it to work perfectly on wires as long as 20 or 30 metres.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#110

Post by bloomingeek »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #21
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.

We need a whole generation to die off before that becomes likely. In the mean time we should move closer when the opportunity rises.

I'll bite on this one. I've been saying to anyone who will listen here in the states: my generation, the Boomers, needs to die out and/or get the hell out of the way. We're trashing almost everything because of a cult of hero worship.
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