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Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
131–140 of 288 posts
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#132> 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.
Ah yeah I quoted too much. I meant the phone sockets thing. Zero ethernet seems to be the norm still unfortunately because most people do just use WiFi.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#133Worth 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…
I had the same thing in the house I bought, it was a nice surprise… there were 6 different phone jacks around the house in great locations for Ethernet (WiFi access points or just for a computer), and they all led down to the furnace room where they attached to a punch-down panel (basically they were all spliced into each other.) To my surprise they were all cat5 cables. With the house being built in 2003 this was su…
The only problem with this is that for some god-afwful reason, anything built before the 2010s (?) placed electrical and phone sockets at hip level instead of ankle level. So you're staring at ugly sockets all day.
So sadly you still have to punch holes.
Then again, it isn't that much of a bother if all you have to do is punch a lower hole, relocate the socket and then plaster both holes up and repaint. Especially if you make it a weekend job to do the whole house at once. Or rather, the way I look at it is that it's a weekend job that will improve how the house feels for decades. Doing blind wiring (gutters) for all the ceiling lights falls in the same category.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#134Earlier 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…
Virgin actually have upgraded a huge swath of their footprint from cable to XGS-PON (probably coming up to 10million homes now, with the full program due to finish in a couple of years).
However, due to their comically bad billing systems (i believe they licensed a billing system off the cable modem headend provider) they do not allow their existing users to switch from DOCSIS cable to FTTH. This has been a problem for a couple of years now. They've spent billions on civil engineering work to blow fibre everywhere but existing customers can't order it because their billing system is tightly coupled to their cable modem system. They offer up to 2gig symmetrical over XGSPON FTTH.
Re openreach I think it's a bit of protecting leased line revenue, a bit of faster upload speeds actually being quite niche - the market is driven by headline download speeds - but most importantly they rolled out GPON not XGSPON.
GPON "only" has 2.5gbit/1.2gbit available to the entire network slice it's on, which can be up to 32 homes (theoretically many more but openreach have that as the maximum I've seen).
This means one gigabit uplink can nearly saturate the entire link for the network slice of 32 homes.
They do have plans to upgrade to XGSPON (though I suspect they may skip that and move to 50GPON instead). XGSPON has 10git/10gbit and 50GPON 50/50 available to the same 32 homes.
They are just about to start a pilot of XGSPON in Guildford which has up to 8gig symmetrical available.
It's not a huge amount of work to upgrade PON versions, it just requires new line cards, and new ONT boxes for each house and can run side by side with existing GPON.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#135Earlier 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…
Fibre rollout in London was (is?) really, really patchy. If your building had it you were lucky. If you hadn't had it already you may well have found it impossible to get at retail.
It's actually very well covered now. The problem is apartment buildings. The buildings owner has to give approval to allow openreach/virgin/hyperopic to run new fibre thru the building, and it's extremely time consuming for network providers to negotiate these individually per building.
If you're not in an apartment building you'll almost certainly have FTTH coverage from someone in London.
The govt is consulting on new laws which would give apartment building residents the power to demand the freeholder of the apartment building allow fibre installs, which would make this far easier.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#136I've been eying the phone sockets too wondering what I can do with them. Think i'll end up running fiber though because internet is 1.6 so gigabit would be a bottleneck. As a side note - it's quite difficult to find white fiber cables. They're all bright colour so that nobody cuts them accidentally but I don't want a pink line running along the walls haha
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#137Another option is invsilight (https://lightera.com/invisilight-home-fiber-kit/).
It's very thin fibre cable that can be glued across skirting boards etc and is very hard to see.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#138[dead]
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#139> 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…
As others have said, Fibre is a postcode lottery.
A&A is expensive for me. 1Gbps down and 115Mb/s up with a 1TB/mo quota for £75/mo. I get similar speeds (with no download limit) from BT for £34.99/mo.
Community Fibre is £63/mo for symmetric 5Gbps and "unlimited data".
I'm locked into a contract with BT for another year but I don't have any real need for anything faster than 500Mbps right now.
I'm focusing on making my homelab network 10GbE to cover the day that I do manage to get >1Gbps broadband.
Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
#140Worth 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…
> Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair.
This is why there are two wiring standards, T568A and T568B, with A being compatible with multi-line telephone systems:
> The T568A scheme is based on the older USOC (Universal Service Order Code) standard, which was used for telephone wiring before the advent of high-speed data networks. The USOC standard assigned the green pair to the first line and the orange pair to the second line of a two-line phone system.
* https://www.comms-express.com/infozone/article/t568a-and-t56...
> As of 2018, ANSI/TIA still [recommended] T568A for residential installations for plug-in backward compatibility with old technology like fax machines or a plug-in base station for wireless phone handsets. If you are not using any such devices, or have no intention of plugging ancient RJ11 plugs into RJ45 wall jacks like you would a “phone jack”, then it comes back to personal preference again.
* https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/t568a-vs-t568b
* https://www.flukenetworks.com/knowledge-base/application-or-...
As long as both ends of the cable are the same, it does not practically matter which variant is used.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI/TIA-568#Wiring
There are also A-B crossover cables (though a lot of NICs can do auto-crossover nowadays):