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Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

thehftguy.com

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Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#151
post #147
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with most of the privatisations triggered by EU law!

You must have forgotten Thatcher

she was certainly a fan, but the spark for the match for almost all of the privatisations was EU/EEC directives

if the UK had never joined the EEC those industries would likely still be under government ownership

(for better or worse, water certainly was a disaster, but telecoms and airlines seem to have gone reasonably well)

and rail was done post Thatcher, with her on record as saying it is "a step too far"

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#152

Worth 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…

Gigabit Ethernet require 4 twisted pairs i.e. 8 individual cables. 100Mb Ethernet requires 2 pairs i.e. 4 individual cables. At least in standard configuration

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Right, but where do you live? A 200 sqm apartment in Vienna, mixture of think walls and drywall. The signal goes everywhere with three well placed mesh things.

This has been my experience as well. I did have signal issues with cheap consumer router+AP combos, but after switching to Ubiquiti hardware coverage and signal have been great.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#154
post #57

> 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…

It's not just A&A either. I know I'm lucky as I live in an area that's had a relatively new CityFibre XGS-PON install, but I've got 2300Mbps symmetrical and 5000Mbps is coming Q1 this year.

Virgin Media also do Gigabit plus speeds and you can upgrade to symmetrical (they don't seem to advertise this though). That's definitely a household name.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#155

> 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…

My new build (2023) would have had 0 ethernet if I didn't request it. It's so cheap to wire it in and so useful for the future I don't know why it's not just standard.

It had phone sockets though, for whatever reason.

When I was configuring the house the person I was with to do it didn't even know what ethernet was.

One thing I wished I could have picked was where all the ethernet terminated. It's all gone to a little cupboard where the fibre enters the house. That's convenient I guess if you had just one socket in the living room where you stick your Wifi router. But when I've got ethernet to all the rooms, I'd rather have it all in a back bedroom so I can stick a server rack in there. I guess I can still do that, it just means I need 2 switches now.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#156
post #3

This is a fantastic result, but I am dying to know how the G.hn chipset creates the bit-loading map on a topology with that many bridge taps. In VDSL2 deployment, any unused extension socket in the house acts as an open-circuited stub, creating signal reflections that notch out specific frequencies (albeit usually killing performance). If the author is hitting 940 Mbps on a daisy-chain, either the echo cancellation o…

It's been many years since I implemented G.Hn hardware, but if memory serves the chipsets are typically able to split the available bandwidth into 1 or 2 MHz wide bins and choose different symbol densities and FEC levels for each bin. If you have a bin that has horrible reflections, you don't use it at all.

I also recall that the chipsets don't do toning automatically, and so it's up the the management device to decide when to re-probe the channel and reconfigure the bins.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#158
> 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!

Just click "reconnect" and re-join to the EU (and Schengen area)

I am saying this because I have some friends living in UK, but I do not have the Visa for UK. Although I am on a work/residence-permit in EU, it is just extra hassle to get the visa. I am instead waiting for my years to finish to apply for citizenship...

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#159
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lived in two apartments with the setup OP described, and they were both built 2003-2006. But I’ve not had it anywhere else, so it does seem constrained to a specific window of apartment developments

Interesting. Every place I've lived in has been older than that so that makes sense.

It's a setup seen in a lot of new builds flat from the 2000s and 2010s, which is a very large amount of the housing stock in London for flats (There has been so many constructions!).

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#160

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…

I'd like to mention that the cat5e cable present in your walls is rated to 2.5Gbps, and would often still work at 5 or 10Gbps over shorter runs in a home. 2.5gb equipment is very cheap nowadays. I got a couple of no-name switches under $40 each and they all work perfectly. Wired networks will always have better consistency and latency characteristics, too, if that matters to you.

It used to matter to me a few years ago but somehow I just no longer care enough.
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