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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

#91

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

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, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.

That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.

In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.

Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#92

Post by arwineap »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #91

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…

Surely your access points are hard wired?

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#93

Post by FloatArtifact »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #91

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…

Wireless is just fine for devices connected to the internet but as soon as you want to connect multiple devices to do a heavy load, backing up or those kinds of things, wireless really does still take a hit depending on access point density.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#94

Post by VorpalWay »

Nextgrid wrote: post #35
mortenlarsen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they would need to deal with drivers.

Yeah the era of non-Ethernet/Wi-Fi NICs died off decades ago with the last ADSL cards. Nowadays I'm not sure if OSes even support creating drivers for anything non-Ethernet (especially where to provide the config UI for your non-standard protocol). What I've seen done recently to work around this is to combine your custom chip with a standard Ethernet NIC on the same board. The computer just sees an (off-the-shelf) N…

Linux would support it for sure. It even still has support for several old NICs (it was only the other day I saw a news item about some old protocol from the early 90s finally being removed). But I can imagine no one wants to develop a new such driver.

And if you want to sell to consumers you need Windows and Mac support, and then it easier to just adapt to existing interfaces.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#95

Post by mschuster91 »

What I did in all my rentals (in Germany) was to outright run new cable. All you need is a bunch of drills - if you want to pull Ethernet, a 10mm drill will be sufficient, if you want pre-fab LC fiber you'll need a 15mm drill (better 17mm), and if you want to pull pipe (which I prefer) a 27mm drill for a DN20 pipe. And when you move out, take out the pipe, put some plaster over, smooth and paint, and no one can ever tell what has been there.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#96

Post by ninkendo »

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 surprisingly forward-looking.

I capped all the cables that were on the punchdown panel and put a switch in there instead, and replaced all the wall jacks with RJ45, and bam, working gigabit around the house, including PoE for my WiFi access points. Still haven’t had to punch any holes in the walls.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#97

Post by davkan »

Havoc wrote: post #28

I'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

No need for fiber for 1.6 gigabit, Cat5e can do 10GbE over short distances, 2.5GbE over longer distances.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#98

Post by estimator7292 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #69
user5994461 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A view from the the debugging tools since you asked https://thehftguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/screenshot_... I don't think there is anything too fancy compared to a DSLAM. It's just that DSLAM are low-frequency long-range by design. Numbers for nerds, on top of my head: * ADSL1 is 1Mhz 8Mbps (2 kilometer) * ADSL2 is 2Mhz 20Mbps (1 kilometer) * VSDL1 is 15Mhz 150Mbps (less than 1 kilometer) * Gigabit Ethernet i…

Gigabit Ethernet uses four pairs per direction. It uses the same four pairs in both directions at the same time.

1000Base-T uses two pairs per direction, actually. It's full duplex. Each port sees two TX and two RX pair.

There are four pair of wires in the cable. If you use all of them for TX, you can't receive.

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#99

Post by blibble »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #81
Nextgrid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the remaining wealth of the country has successfully been extracted in the form of overpriced and not-fit-for-purpose utilities, transport companies, taxes, and so on and given to corporate interests. From their perspective it's a resounding success.

Didn’t need Brexit for that - it’s been going on for decades.

with most of the privatisations triggered by EU law!

Re: Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

#100

Post by bflesch »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #21
bflesch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never to late to rejoin, we've all learned a lot about foreign propaganda in the last decade.

We need a whole generation to die off before that becomes likely. In the mean time we should move closer when the opportunity rises.

Don't be so sure that the next generation automatically gets less indoctrinated.

Facebook at least documented content interactions out in the open. With tiktok you don't notice what kind of content someone consumes.

There are tens of thousands of people working a full time job just to influence people in democratic countries to act/vote against their interests. Then we have hundreds of thousands more in advertisement industry with their own interests, mainly in line with goals of US companies.

There is reason for optimism because if everyone is on tiktok it becomes "uncool" again but still it is a very dangerous tool.

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