Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires • Hacker News Board

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#191

Post by irl_zebra » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

raddan wrote: post #175

wffurr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas my 2009 condo conversion was wired with coax to every room instead. I've been using the coax drops to pull Ethernet cables.

Ahh! Don’t replace your coax with Cat5e/6! Coaxial cable has excellent noise rejection—better than Cat5e. Instead, get a MoCA adapter like this one [1]. You can get 2.5Gbps over coax! [1] https://a.co/d/e2FYGWj

I was resigned to running cat6e up three floors because there was only coax and I needed a wifi AP up there. Came across the moca solution and it's great. I get flawless 2.5gbe from the basement switch to the third floor over coax. It's basically a little device that connects at each end of the coax and cat6 goes in and out.

Cat 6 would be better though so I could run POE from the basement switch to power the wifi AP, and instead I need to go do a much more complicated switch (cat6) -> moca adapter + power brick to power moca adapter -> coax -> moca adapter + power brick (cat6) -> POE injector (with power brick) -> wifi AP. SO I'm adding at least three power bricks to the setup, which is annoying. Otherwise it would be one cat6 drawing POE from the switch and powering the AP.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#192

Post by hdgvhicv » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

mig39 wrote: post #171

davidwritesbugs wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloody poor people deciding for themselves what they want. Shouldn't get a vote unless you have a degree and property. If only they'd had the sense to listen to their betters.

And those poor people are objectively poorer because of Brexit. But as long as there's fewer foreigners coming in, then they're happy?

There’s more foreigners coming in. Which was “project fear” back in 2016.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#193

Post by lukevp » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

I had cat5e in my house but for phone line usage. It wasn’t daisy chained here, it was all tied in with a punch down panel in the master closet. I re-terminated the punch down side of each cable to ethernet and same with the keystone jacks in each room, and after switching to hardwired gigabit, I got into higher performance networking. I wanted to upgrade to at least 2.5 throughout the house, but maybe 5 or 10 if possible. Everything said cat5e isn’t shielded enough for 10 gig, but I tested every run with iperf3 at both tcp and udp and was surprised that everything was able to handle it! So I added a 10 gig switch to the master closet and now I have 10 gig throughout my house. Upgraded the internet to 5 gig. My NAS speeds are fantastic now and it’s really great to never have to wait on anything. The limiting factor now is the hard drive speeds!

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#194

Post by j45 » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

ninkendo wrote: post #96

tialaramex wrote: post #78

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…

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…

There were a lot of tech enthusiasts who put them in.

I know more than a few who did this, ethernet cable pricing had just fallen at some point to make this more accessible.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#195

Post by Fizzadar » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

Damn I ripped all our telephone lines out and ran cat6 up through the house to my office and I could have just done this?! Well shit.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#196

Post by car » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #145

gnfargbl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 &…

Maybe cut a slit across your concrete driveway with a diamond concrete saw and drop fiber in, seal with some polymer afterwards?

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#197

Post by amluto » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

Fiveplus wrote: 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…

I know nothing about DSL. But G.hn uses OFDM, and OFDM can do a cute trick in which it learns a complex number to multiply each subcarrier signal by. Since the subcarrier signals are literally just Fourier coefficients of the signal, this can equalize all kinds of linear time invariant signal issues so long as they’re reasonably compact in the time domain as compared to the guard interval. And I imagine that G.hn has some way to figure out which coefficients (subcarriers) are weak and avoid using or relying on them — there are multiple ways to do that.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#198

Post by dmitrygr » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

If you are in the US and need to get networks into various rooms, MoCA 2.5 is amazing! Since most US houses are wired for TV in all rooms, it works out well.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#199

Post by jonah » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #183

jasonkester wrote: post #149

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 do…

"across a nice poured concrete driveway" I've worked with DB people and running lines under driveways for telco and cableco is BIG business and they will not find your request to bury fiber or cat5 to be even remotely unusual. The bad news about directional boring is they usually want "like a kilobuck" just to show up. Its a lot of heavy equipment and a lot of dudes to operate it all. The good news is if they're alre…

There are simpler ways to get a conduit under a driveway than a huge DB machine. I'm boarding a flight, but look up using water (dig a pit on either side of the road, attach water hose to piece of conduit, and push the conduit under the driveway using the water to erode a hole as you go.)

The there are also smaller hydraulic ram tools designed for pushing a pipe under a driveway.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#200

Post by larusso » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

larusso wrote: post #52

You are a god send! I have the same issue. My house (2013!!!) is fully phone wired but has zero Ethernet. I have 3 floors which each running on a different phase (the electrician wired it like that). I have a power line adapter in my fuse box to connect directly to the three phases. But I can’t stream content or large files. Even worse the power line adapters bring noise into my power sockets. A guitar amp gets groun…

I see that they also offer a coax solution. Which would fit just as well I have a tv connection in every room which also connects in the second box in the utility room. And I don’t need it ;)