Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

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.

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.

This is why there are two wiring standards, T568A and T568B, with A being compatible with multi-line telephone systems:

> The T568A scheme is based on the older USOC (Universal Service Order Code) standard, which was used for telephone wiring before the advent of high-speed data networks. The USOC standard assigned the green pair to the first line and the orange pair to the second line of a two-line phone system.

* https://www.comms-express.com/infozone/article/t568a-and-t56...

> As of 2018, ANSI/TIA still [recommended] T568A for residential installations for plug-in backward compatibility with old technology like fax machines or a plug-in base station for wireless phone handsets. If you are not using any such devices, or have no intention of plugging ancient RJ11 plugs into RJ45 wall jacks like you would a “phone jack”, then it comes back to personal preference again.

* https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/t568a-vs-t568b

* https://www.flukenetworks.com/knowledge-base/application-or-...

As long as both ends of the cable are the same, it does not practically matter which variant is used.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI/TIA-568#Wiring

There are also A-B crossover cables (though a lot of NICs can do auto-crossover nowadays):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_crossover_cable

Real cat5 and ethernet connectors just work and phone cable and phone plugs just work, but if you mix them you'll get all manner of expensive labor costs trying to figure out jury rigged solutions.

At one client they used two pair for business phone system, we're on a cable pulling team and one guy punches down the blue and green pairs the other side punches down blue and orange pairs (essentially a 568A vs 568B violation) and we spend SOME EXPENSIVE TIME trying to figure out why the cable toner "proves" we are on the same cable so it can't be a wiring fault.

Or the stereotype of the halfway colorblind guy at the far end working in the ceiling, on a ladder, in the dark, swaps the orange and brown pairs as happens sometimes.

Oh even funnier is there's always "that guy" who is too lazy to pull an additional cable to a new phone, so he steals some pairs from a nearby phone, somehow knocking out both phones in the process. Such a headache.

Labor for troubleshooting miswired cables/jacks is SO expensive its just cheaper at work to install phone lines using phone line parts and ethernet using ethernet parts.

The arrival of VOIP phones around Y2K, somewhat after my time, must make life so much easier. And now nobody uses wired phones everyone has a smartphone.

At home if you're doing one line and its a hobby so your time is free, then your strategy does work.

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 is 100Mhz over four pairs (100 meters). It either works or it doesn't.

* The G.hn device here is up to 200 MHz. It automatically detects what can be done on the medium.

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.

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) when you have tough constraints, unless you want them to be.

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 already down the road they'll come by and bore for like $20/foot because its a small job (usually they only charge $10/foot for long runs)

Permitting depends a lot on where you live, some places treat it as a cash cow and they will brutally milk you, others don't require a permit at all. The equipment takes up a fair amount of space on each side, probably more than you'd expect. Scheduling is like dealing with an arborist. "OMG I need this partially collapsed tree removed immediately its an emergency I have homeowners insurance please arrive in the next hour" well thats multiple kilobucks "Meh please remove this tree sometime and I don't care when" well thats like $250, probably less if cash.

I've seen people spend thousands of dollars on DB or crazy laser/wireless comm gear to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a stone mason. Try not to pay someone to DB under a stone wall, its usually cheaper to hire a stone mason twice and he will leave the wall in better condition than before you started. All masonry is temporary unless its maintained. Similar logic might apply to driveways, most concrete cracks so if you're hiring a guy to fix the crack you may want to bury a conduit before he fixes it. Replacing an entire driveway is expensive, replacing a sidewalk sized path is surprisingly cheap. If you want sidewalk poured (like for a walkway in your garden or around a swimming pool) its about $50/foot and a driveway would have to be thicker and better prepped, but the section could be narrower than a sidewalk. The point being don't accept a DB bid over $50/ft because its cheaper to replace the concrete at $50/ft.

It’s no coincidence those that championed Brexit are those that wanted a weaker Europe and weaker U.K.

That’s why the majority of tax payers were against it, the majority of educated people voted against it, the majority of working people voted against it, the majority of people alive today who voted voted against it

Yet we still got it.

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 that ships over a certain volume of products to New Zealand is required to implement this.

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.

My guess is that the nature of them being in a power plug means that they struggle to isolate things from the mains for safety in a way that doesn't also make them hotboxes.

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 their cabling but want to enable their kid to play Fortnite.

But... there is no clear patent protection available, so as soon as someone successfully creates and markets that device, the Tiktok Shop clones will appear.

Unlikely, they’ll probably be delighted that you went to the effort at all. While not ideal, Cat5e is usually good enough for 10 gigabit over shorter lengths. It’s not unusual for it to work perfectly on wires as long as 20 or 30 metres.

I tried the same approach to replace COAX cable with CAT but the tie just broke off like 10cm before the socket exit [1], and CAT is stuck there now.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/myW6IIq.jpeg

The law says one person can't stretch a cable over to his neighbour, because they would need a licence for that (although if you did do that, who would know?).

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 burned down, not related) that had been built a long time ago and so it didn't have Cat 5e cables. I was fitting switches which were state of the art at the time (IPv6 experiments), and they didn't have a 100Mbit option because that was legacy, so you'd plug this ancient looking 1980s cable designed for 10baseT into a switch, and in most cases once it's connected the switch and the network card at the far end both go "Aha link, can I do 1000baseT over this?" and conclude yeah, Gigabit just works. There is a setting to say "No, only do 10baseT" but why set it? Users don't want slow Internet.

Unless somebody went very cheap and strung literal bellwire (which was never rated for a telephone but would probably work) or your distances are very long, you will almost certainly get 100Mb and if there actually are four pairs you will most likely get Gigabit.

I wonder if it was "future-proofing" for some kind of modem-based automation/monitoring system.

Everyone comes home from a day out and you have several phones struggling to sync the 4K videos you shot meanwhile someone is streaming TV, open up my laptop to check the photos and now it wants to download updates...

I was able to option in Ethernet jacks where I lounge about in the living room, bedroom... - I have USB-C power bricks with built-in hubs so I stuck in cheap 2.5 GbE adapters there. Plug in to charge as normal and I automatically get 2 Gbps to the internet with no interference from anyone else, even works on iPhones with no setup.

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.

I've had powerline adapters with uptimes measured in years (basically in between power cuts). I think yours might be defective. They absolutely do not require reboots.

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).

The article also has a constant theme of putting people down because of something he doesn't understand. The Helldivers 2 developers are "idiots" because he doesn't understand the reasons for asset duplication in games. Simple daisy-chaining of slave sockets off the master is "incomprehensible", "pointless", "arbitrary" and "a mess"; the person who did the wiring is an "idiot". It all comes across as unfortunately quite arrogant.

A&A not advertising can just say what the link speeds actually are on the product pages.

Other ISP's could do this too, but it would cause confusion having one figure on the advert and one figure on the product pages, and they might get in trouble if they link to the product pages in the adverts.

A&A is expensive for me. 1Gbps down and 115Mb/s up with a 1TB/mo quota for £75/mo. I get similar speeds (with no download limit) from BT for £34.99/mo.

Community Fibre is £63/mo for symmetric 5Gbps and "unlimited data".

I'm locked into a contract with BT for another year but I don't have any real need for anything faster than 500Mbps right now.

I'm focusing on making my homelab network 10GbE to cover the day that I do manage to get >1Gbps broadband.

I don't understand why he says it's the most expensive places to get internet. You can get 900mbit (really 1gig pre overheads) for ~£30/month on openreach infrastructure which is not the cheapest in the world but it certainly isn't the most expensive.

And if you're covered by an altnet (who build their own infrastructure instead of reselling openreach) like cityfibre, community fibre or netomnia you'll get far faster speeds for even less money.

A lot of these providers do rent the poles and ducts off openreach, but then lay their own fibre over it

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.

Now I live in a slightly remote corner of Europe and I had 6Gbps fiber installed yesterday, for €15/month. (Nominally 10Gbps, measures as 6, which is... pretty good, actually.)

It is flat and thin enough you can stick it on top of skirting boards/etc with tiny dabs of hot glue.

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

Otherwise it's just your WiFi being patchy. I think Steam is doing "friendly" bulk download, it slows down before the connection is saturated, to avoid disconnecting your wife/mum/siblings watching Youtube or on a videoconference.

I usually (but not always) saturate my downlink with Steam downloads... even back when I was a Comcast customer and paying for ~180MB/s (~1500mbit/s) asymmetric service.

I believe that I have noticed that smaller games (~a few hundred MB or maybe a GB or two) will download quite a bit slower than large games, but I'm not very confident in that observation.

You can have the shittiest link possible with lots of dropouts and still get a decent speed test result because in between the dropouts you get max speed and TCP/etc is designed exactly to smooth over such packet loss, and browser-based tests aren't able to get low-level UDP access to defuse that.

Yet such a connection will be unusable for anything real-time, think gaming or videoconferencing. That's why so many people's connection still stutters on Zoom/etc calls - the "good" connection and super fancy router their ISP sold them isn't actually that good despite speed test results being satisfactory.

For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building.

The issues arise when you've got a larger building, thick walls, lots of things competing for the same frequency band, a less great router, or you need the very lowest latency.

I’ve had 2.5GbE running over old in-wall Cat5 in old buildings on short to medium (15-30m) runs with no issues…

> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet.

Which might well be true where he is (ie he's limited to the equivalent of shared HFC or xDSL), but certainly isn't true everywhere.

I've had gigabit fibre (full duplex) in London since 2016, and the building had it before I arrived. It also has incredibly low latency to the major data centres of London, and not a lot more to most of western Europe.

But in the UK case, that means the old phone cables are stapled to the skirting boards and painted over with gloss paint, and the sockets were wallpapered around in the 1990s. Pull the old cables and sockets off, the paint chips off and you've got holes square holes left in the wallpaper.

And although UK landlords don't give a shit about upkeep that costs them money, they rarely miss a chance to deduct money from the deposit.