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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

#201

Post by mrandish »

jama211 wrote: post #181
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…

And some cat5 cables will take gigabit speeds even though they’re not rated for it if they’re high quality enough too.

> some cat5 cables will take gigabit speeds

Especially if the run is relatively short (<=100ft) and it doesn't run parallel to noisy power cables.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#202

Post by loeg »

jasonkester wrote: post #170
cjbarber wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution: run ethernet cables outdoors on the ground. You can do ethernet cables outdoors from your router in your house to your router in your office. Either thin cables that go under doors, or outdoor rated ones, both can work fine. This same approach can work inside a house as an alternative to mesh networking or running cables through walls. The cables don't have to be invisible (underground or in walls)…

The direct line across would get run over by cars. Indirect routes would still have to cross pavement and look ugly. And then there are still those six feet of stone that needs drilling through to get the cable outside and back in.

Six feet?

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#203

Post by loeg »

malshe wrote: post #167
cjbarber wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution: run ethernet cables outdoors on the ground. You can do ethernet cables outdoors from your router in your house to your router in your office. Either thin cables that go under doors, or outdoor rated ones, both can work fine. This same approach can work inside a house as an alternative to mesh networking or running cables through walls. The cables don't have to be invisible (underground or in walls)…

How about using fiber optic cables for this? I saw a few videos on YouTube showing the installation for home internet

To what end? The runs aren't going to be long enough for fiber to provide a benefit, and the transceivers are more expensive for consumer use like this.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#204

Post by globular-toast »

djhworld wrote: post #53

> 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…

It might be worth pulling off those phone sockets and seeing what the cable is. Quite often it'll be cat5e and if so it's a simple upgrade to change to an rj45 keystone. Especially if it uses Euro module faceplates.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#205

Post by hinkley »

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…

Ethernet is usually two pair, but cat5 has four. When I moved into a new apartment building I found all the phones were cat5 wiring so I was able to redo three of the outlets to do phone and an ethernet jack, then put a switch in the coat closet, which is where the wiring guys put the junction box.

I can’t recall if I put them back when I moved out. I must have, but I’ve no recollection of doing so. I think I left the junction box in the closet though.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#206

Post by user5994461 »

tialaramex wrote: post #89
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…

That's also a good point that the Network hardware does not care about cable categories. If it plugs into your card the card goes "OK, lets see if 1000baseT fits on this?" the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it. At the turn of the century I was putting new Cisco gear into a building (which has since…

> the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.

You're actually wrong on all of that ^^

The cables actually have a rating to say what they are suitable to. See the markings on the cable: category Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6 + frequency range 100/250 Mhz + insulation UTP/FTP/STP/mix.

Ethernet cards don't negotiate, they typically only check whether the pairs can transmit any signal. You could end up in a situation where they go for gigabit and it doesn't work well.

Fortunately, the main issue for signal transmission is loss over distance. Ethernet is designed to work over 100m every time in a noisy industrial environment. You've got a pretty good chance for it to work on a short run, even with poor cables.

The alternatives being discussed ADSL/VDSL/G.hn actually detect the capability of the medium and adjust the transmission rates and frequency to give the maximum possible speed. IMO they are much more advanced technologically and much more interesting. (Ethernet is doing exactly 250 Mbps on one pair, G.hn can do up to 1700 Mbps on the same pair, automatically adjusted, the article is getting 1300 Mbps which is insane!)

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#207

Post by mrandish »

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

+1 on MOCA 2 being excellent to solve gaps in wiring. We bought a 6000 sqft 2001 house built with in-wall RJ11, lots of coax runs and some Cat5e runs (but not enough). Due to the size the house, the electrical, HVAC and cabling is roughly divided into two halves with separate electrical panels, HVAC pads, etc.

Unfortunately, all the RJ11 and alarm wiring runs to a closet in one half while all the coax and Cat5e run to a closet in the other half - with no RJ11 endpoints near the Cat5e/Coax closet and not Cat5e/Coax endpoints near the RJ11 closet (sigh). I tried Powerline data and it only works well in adjacent rooms and not at all between the halves due to separate electrical panels. Fortunately, there were a lot of coax runs set up for two separate nets (18-inch satellite and a huge attic antenna for OTA broadcast). So, by repurposing the now-unneeded antenna coax, MOCA 2.5 gbps mostly saved the day by filling in where the Cat5e should have gone but didn't.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#208

Post by user5994461 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #101
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).

Old houses should have 1 extra socket in the master bedroom at the very least, because the master of the house was expected to plug a phone in there, back in the days. (my parents and grandparents all have one).

Incidentally, this is likely to be the furthest room on the furthest floor, so it can be a good place to add a wifi access point for coverage.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#209

Post by mrandish »

Some of the OP's RJ11 runs apparently only have two wires connected, which may be a UK thing (or just a 'bad contractor thing'). Hence resorting to a solution that that can put broadband on two or four unshielded phone wires (probably based on ADSL-type signaling).

In the US, houses built to code in the last 30-40 years generally have 4-wire runs to RJ-11 jacks. TFA doesn't mention it but it is possible (although hacky) to gang up two four conductor phone wires into an 8 wire Ethernet run. It's a hack because those phone wires aren't even shielded as well as basic Cat5 but it can still work for relatively short runs. With more people using mobile phones, wireless phones or IP phones instead of POTS, that's leaving increasing amounts of in-wall RJ11 dormant. It might not work, but it's pretty easy to test and much easier than running new wires.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#210

Post by anonymousiam »

mrandish wrote: post #209

Some of the OP's RJ11 runs apparently only have two wires connected, which may be a UK thing (or just a 'bad contractor thing'). Hence resorting to a solution that that can put broadband on two or four unshielded phone wires (probably based on ADSL-type signaling). In the US, houses built to code in the last 30-40 years generally have 4-wire runs to RJ-11 jacks. TFA doesn't mention it but it is possible (although hac…

My latest house, built about eight years ago, came with CAT6A cabling for all of the phones. That made it really easy to just replace all of the RJ11 jacks with RJ45 (or 8P8C if you like to call them that). They've been providing POE+ gigabit Ethernet for the past seven years, and I'm about to upgrade them to 10GBase-T.
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