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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

#141

Post by somehnguy »

dobroezlo wrote: post #62

I've noticed this company also has coax modems. I wonder if they will work better than MOCA adapters. I've tried MOCA at my house and the quality of the signal is not good, connection keeps dropping every 10-15 minutes for no apparent reason...

You may have had filters on your lines or just really poor quality connections/cables. I’ve been using MoCA in my home to bring internet up from my basement to the second floor for a few years and it’s been flawless. Consistent 1gbps, no drops, 1-2ms extra latency compared to Ethernet wired devices.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#142

Post by bjackman »

Nextgrid wrote: post #46
bjackman wrote: post #37

Wait, 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?

Peering between your ISP and Valve is likely saturated. Considering Valve has an incentive to make downloads fast (= more revenue), it's likely your ISP is being stingy in this case.

I would have assumed valve use some third party CDN but yeah this would make sense I guess

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#143

Post by wizzwizz4 »

blibble wrote: post #125
LightBug1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't strictly put all of them at the feet of the EU. While what you say is true, the Conservatives were frothing to privatise whatever they could. Labour just went along with the process (and I'm no Labour supporter either). The one I won't forgive was our water. I believe we're the only developed country to have privatised our water, with disastrous consequences. And that one can be squarely laid at the feet o…

> The one I won't forgive was our water. I believe we're the only developed country to have privatised our water, with disastrous consequences. 100% agreed there's no market or competition at any level (even RAIL had somewhat competitive bidding for franchises) they're just Henry VIII style granted monopolies, with the results are the same as they were 800 years ago (well, other than the civil war bit) > And that one…

If the government couldn't figure out a way to fund their implementation, then either the government was insufficiently-wily (in which case, they could've hired wily consultants), or it was genuinely impossible without taking money from another pot. If the latter, then selling to a for-profit corporate structure was the worst possible decision they could've made.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#144

Post by mnurzia »

jorvi wrote: post #133
ninkendo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think electrical/phone sockets were placed at that level because many telephones were designed to hang on the wall (docking onto and covering up the faceplate) for easy access. My childhood home had one that we used this way before we got a landline.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#145

Post by jasonkester »

gnfargbl wrote: post #8
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…

You're the reason why the author's assertion that there is a huge untapped market for this in the UK is probably wrong; most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables. There might be some market for a simple point-to-point device sold by the likes of Argos, zero config and including all the right cables already, aimed at people who can't or won't upgrade th…

most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.

"Technical" isn't the issue. 200 year old stone houses are the issue. If you can't punch through it with wifi (and thus have this issue), I expect you're not going to be able to poke a cable through either.

For an example, to get from my house router to my office, you'd need to punch through a 3 foot cobble & mortar wall, trench across 30 feet of poured concrete (and tidy it up somehow), punch through another 3 foot thick stone wall, then "pull cable" up to the office. There's an old phone line from A to B that went in 30 years ago when the place was first renovated, but you can tug on it all you like and it's not going anywhere.

If I'd seen this article a few years ago, my life would have been a lot easier.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#146

Post by theragra »

bjackman wrote: post #37

Wait, 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?

For me it varies a lot. Sometimes I get 800 Mbit and sometimes like 80 Mbit. Mostly closer to 800, tho.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#148

Post by neilwilson »

Reason077 wrote: post #105
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…

It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.

The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#149

Post by jasonkester »

Ah, mate. I sure wish you'd figured this out and told me about it 10 years ago. I fought with this exact same issue for years.

I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.

Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.

When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.

My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.

Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.

Thanks for the writeup!

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#150

Post by blibble »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #143
blibble wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one I won't forgive was our water. I believe we're the only developed country to have privatised our water, with disastrous consequences. 100% agreed there's no market or competition at any level (even RAIL had somewhat competitive bidding for franchises) they're just Henry VIII style granted monopolies, with the results are the same as they were 800 years ago (well, other than the civil war bit) > And that one…

If the government couldn't figure out a way to fund their implementation, then either the government was insufficiently-wily (in which case, they could've hired wily consultants), or it was genuinely impossible without taking money from another pot. If the latter, then selling to a for-profit corporate structure was the worst possible decision they could've made.

I'm absolutely certain mountains of useless consultants were involved
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