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 some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.
You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.
Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.
When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?
So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.
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.
I pulled several thousand lines as a kid starting out in Gen-X era and you are completely correct with one scalability and labor cost issue:
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.
> Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair.
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.
> 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.
Gigabit Ethernet require 4 twisted pairs i.e. 8 individual cables. 100Mb Ethernet requires 2 pairs i.e. 4 individual cables. At least in standard configuration
I have converted 'RJ11 phone plugs' to Ethernet in multiple rentals to the delight of the landlord. One should also not that event Cat 5 can carry 1Gbps (instead of 100Mpbs) and Car 5e can carry 10Gbps (instead of 1Gbps) depending on the length and other factors such as which switch is used.
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.
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 or the frequency diversity on these chips must be lightyears ahead of standard DSLAMs. Does the web interface expose the SNR-per-tone graph? I suspect you would see massive dips where the wiring splits to the other rooms, but the OFDM is just aggressively modulating around them.
It's been many years since I implemented G.Hn hardware, but if memory serves the chipsets are typically able to split the available bandwidth into 1 or 2 MHz wide bins and choose different symbol densities and FEC levels for each bin. If you have a bin that has horrible reflections, you don't use it at all.
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.
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.
You're right, G.hn will have the same issue as DSL here; all of the tiny bridge taps from the extra jacks will create small dips in the bitloading.
That being said, with 200MHz of spectrum to play with, the impact on rates should be negligible. With the 200MHz G.hn phone line profile (48KHz tone spacing), we get about ~1.5Gbps, so you can take some lumps and still get ~1Gbps throughput.
One big advantage though, G.hn is natively p2mp and each jack could have it's own G.hn endpoint.
> 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!
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
> "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 that ships over a certain volume of products to New Zealand is required to implement this.
Weird, I've never needed to do that - Royal Mail or whichever courier is handling it will either put a note for customs payment through the door (Royal Mail/Parcelforce), or send me an invoice via post or email (any of the other couriers).
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.
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) 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.
> 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 got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...
But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.
My new build (2023) would have had 0 ethernet if I didn't request it. It's so cheap to wire it in and so useful for the future I don't know why it's not just standard.
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.
When looking at new build houses a year or two back (in the UK), I saw some stuff that made no sense to me: they installed some by default, but ran it to only the lounge and bedroom 1, the house also had a dedicated study (labelled as such by them) which did not have an ethernet run to it, and they refused to let you option in any more, very weird.
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.
I've been using this for a couple of years in my home now, with the same German Gigacopper devices. It's rock solid, very much unlike my attempts at power-line ethernet in the past. I used ethernet over coax in my last house too, which was also great.
I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to get, but powerline ethernet modems are sold everywhere despite barely working in most houses.
My experience with powerline is they can work well for low activity, but they all overheat if you actually use them continuously, and the advertised speeds are extremely misleading as they are before error correction (which is very significant) and for the whole network.
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.
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 over the home.
The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.
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 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.
> The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.
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.
>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything.
As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer to and from it. And it wasn't like an inch from the router either - it did it while in my hand, on the other side of the room with me sitting on our sofa.
When it comes to wireless, top speeds are misleading and the wrong way to look at it.
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.
Honestly, most UK houses start out with a single ISP-provided wifi router, situated somewhere close to where the data cable enters the building.
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 wish I knew about this when I lived in a house without Ethernet sockets! I needed it in the attic for my PC and servers and all I had were slow, unreliable TP-Link Powerline adapters. My first speed test gave me 37.1Kbps (after painfully loading Cloudflare's test page). On a really good day I could get 3MBps. I'd get disconnected multiple times a day and I had to try all sorts of methods to get the adapter to connect again. I had to write a program in the end to tell me if I didn't have internet because the Powerline broke or my DNS server broke (normally it's always DNS but turns out it wasn't) :D
I had a phone socket in that room and I had already discussed the possibility of converting it into an Ethernet socket but decided it's not worth it because everything ended up in a cupboard far away from my router. These adapters would have solved the problem nicely!
By the way, I have more fun stories. The cabling in my current house (which has Ethernet sockets) is still miserable. I spent a year working with my PC over USB tethering to my phone until I finally called an electrician to find which of the 11 dangling cables in the cupboard went to my office...
One day some wires in there were slightly moved and the internet got disconnected because they were badly crimped. Nothing was working so in the end I got an RJ45 connector and managed to get the wires in there.
The apartment block I live in in Ireland has converted phone sockets into Ethernet using similar converters, except (a) it was in 2004, so 10Mbit base, (b) they ordered whole socket replacements, eliminating the need for separate box outside the walls, (c) the goal was to buy 1 business high speed line, and split it across all apartments, which became obsolete when ADSL, DOCSIS, and later FTTH became affordable options.
I heard the state of the wiring also wasn't great, sometimes apartments had twisted pair wires, while some straight wires, some only have 2 or 3 out of 4 wires connected, etc.
This wouldn't be legal in my country unless all the apartments had one owner, because the telcos have a monopoly on communications.
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?).
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 coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
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 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.
Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.
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 ground crackling etc. will look into this solution!
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 ;)
When we bought our house (1950s semidetached) it needed a full electrical rewire. I’m so glad I asked the electricians to run Ethernet all over the house at the same time, including to the ceiling in some rooms for WiFi access points.
Here in the states, when we moved into our house that was built in the late 60's, every room had a phone jack. The exterior of the house had cabling strung onto the back and one side with lines installed, through the brick, into the separate rooms. There was also a line or two in the attic. Sometime in the early 90's, after I fired Southwestern Bell, I striped away all the wiring. Two of out kids had new homes built, both were wired with Ethernet cable only for communication.
<I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sockets. 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.>
My wife and I rented a flat in Amsterdam a few years ago. I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room, which I thought was strange. Now I know. (I was looking for the broom, BTW.)
The German suppliers they link do European centric MOCA too!
Looking seriously at these guys - the previous owners who renovated put decent CoAx absolutely everywhere, 4 BT lines for the outside office, and 0 Ethernet in.
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.
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.
I'd like to mention that the cat5e cable present in your walls is rated to 2.5Gbps, and would often still work at 5 or 10Gbps over shorter runs in a home. 2.5gb equipment is very cheap nowadays. I got a couple of no-name switches under $40 each and they all work perfectly. Wired networks will always have better consistency and latency characteristics, too, if that matters to you.
Depends a lot on your house construction. I have a fancy Ubiquiti U7 Pro (on one floor, and a nanoHD on the other) but performance is crap all over my house because all the walls are reinforced concrete. In the hallway under the AP I get 1.6 Gbps on my phone but walk a few meters away into the living room and you're way under 200 Mbps because you passed 3 concrete walls.
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.
Lots of sympathy with this plight. Great to hear that someone has done the needful and rendered MoCA style modems over pairs of copper. I'm probably a customer for that.
I'm currently running MoCA over spliced coax as part of the local connection and not amused by the 5ms latency on it. Also running 100mbit over cat3 I found in a wall which does work, but cat3 in another wall can't hold 10mbit. That link actually can hold 70mbit of vdsl but after a nearby lightning strike slagged various hardware I've moved the vdsl modem back to the BT wires entry point and run the output through some fibre.
And there's a wifi bridge between two other points. And some ethernet running outside the building. Previously also ethernet-over-mains that I might bring back now that I've learned what spanning tree protocols are so the periodic reboots they inexplicably require can be tolerated transparently.
Also the connection to the internet itself is crap so bonding vdsl, starlink and 5g through the openmptcprouter project. Just lots of redundancy and self healing hacks all over the place to give an observably solid connection.
Which is a rambling way to say that if you're in Britain and your network connection brings you sorrow, it can be forced to be acceptable with application of more time and money than other countries require.
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.
My current apartment also had a bunch of phone sockets spread around... In a couple of hours, I've removed the existing wires and passed Ethernet wires. Quick, easy, ubiquitous and cheap.
Ok, the writer could be renting a house and not wanting to do that. But sincerely, in Portugal, the landlords couldn't care less. Maybe in the UK, they really, really love their phone sockets and don't want to replace them, don't know.
UK landlords also don't tend to invest anything in their properties.
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.
Thanks for sharing this, first time I've seen such device, I'd like to add other options that I experienced and would suggest;
- Open your telephone socket, if the actual cable has 5 pairs, it's probably a cat5e cable. It can do 1gbps with a RJ45 connection, just replace the plug and connect tou your device to check, yo ucan get a cheap ethernet cable tester too. If it has just 3 pairs, it can probably do 100mbs automatically with most ethernet capable devices.
- If you just need to connect 2 devices, you may probably just use existing cables to do it. More than 2 devices would not work.
- If it doesn't work, all those cables probably go to a box, find it and check if they are connected, if not yo ucan just crimp the ends together.
Other alternatives:
- As others mentioned, MoCA devices are also able to deliver 1gbps, and there is a higher chance that you may find them in most rooms, and they are almost always connected, so it shoudl be plug&play.
- Powerline adapters novadays not too bad as well. I was able to use them in a 30 eyar old home, 3 floors up to provide 500mbs.
I connected self powered crank telephones to my home phone wiring for use as intercoms. Crank one and the others ring. Pick up to engage the battery powered talk circuit and you're chatting with Mabel like it's 1915. I did replace the old dry cell batteries with lithium camera cells so I don't need to think about them for a decade.
We have an Ethernet run that's not in use right now. I had a Cisco ATA from earlier experiments so I picked up 2 old phones with proper bell ringers and now the kids can call up from the living room to my office when it's time for dinner, they love it.
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.
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.
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!
I have been using the exact same G4201TM devices at home for approaching five years now to do much the same: reuse some unused telephone wiring for a meaningful purpose. They are rock solid and have needed exactly zero attention since being installed.
I'm so confused why there is no discussion about RJ45 connector being backwards compatible with RJ11 (the RJ11 connector fits appropriately into the RJ45 socket) and that the G4201TM should have a RJ45 socket (like G4202TCP) instead of RJ11 to be most widely functional/compatible (even though you still can use a RJ11 cable with a RJ45 wall socket to overcome this, but you could use RJ45 cables too)...
> 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 and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).
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).
I’ve lived in two apartments with the setup OP described, and they were both built 2003-2006. But I’ve not had it anywhere else, so it does seem constrained to a specific window of apartment developments
Yes, the author's assertion here is nonsense. A case of someone with a very small window of experience being certain that what he's seen couldn't possibly be an outlier - must instead be normal for everyone.
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.
> 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!
Just click "reconnect" and re-join to the EU (and Schengen area)
I am saying this because I have some friends living in UK, but I do not have the Visa for UK. Although I am on a work/residence-permit in EU, it is just extra hassle to get the visa. I am instead waiting for my years to finish to apply for citizenship...
A lot of British houses have coaxial cable TV in all bedrooms.
Ignoring the horrible taste of our forebears that were putting TVs where they don't belong, that does enable carrying gigabit ethernet using MoCA technology.
> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps – 75 Mbps – 150 Mbps – 300 Mbps – 500 Mbps – 900 Mbps, each one costing a few more pounds per month than the last. This makes the UK simultaneously one of the cheapest and one of the most expensive countries to get Internet.
Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.
This is due to advertising standards. They are required to advertise "average speed", although how this is actually calculated is nebulous.
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.
It's not true either. Openreach offer a 1.6gbit/sec product now, which ISPs can resell.
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
It's not just A&A either. I know I'm lucky as I live in an area that's had a relatively new CityFibre XGS-PON install, but I've got 2300Mbps symmetrical and 5000Mbps is coming Q1 this year.
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.
I used to live in the UK and thought double-digit broadband was pretty good, actually.
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.)
Not only do A&A offer good speeds, their customer service is exceptional. There are chat rooms on which engineers and enthusiasts reside and if you phone them you get an engineer.
Excellent article! I think another take away is that we should all take a class on electrical wiring safety. Wiring is fun and very interesting, but can be very dangerous. Classes and the literature that comes with it are invaluable. However, Youtube and the literature will only take you so far, safety wise. (I'm not affiliated with any tech school, I learned by being in the trades under the guidance of trained electricians, with test stands and real life testing.)
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.
I'm so afraid that my landlord (a big company) will use ANY excuse to rob me of my deposit when I move out... lol, even though I'm a member of Mieterverein.
The same landlord whose workers outright forgot to install the water heater in the kitchen the day I got the flat, and __painted shut__ the bathroom window. LMAO.
Though I can only second this -- use transparent fiber and be creative in where you route it -- and nobody will be able to tell you did something 'naughty' in your rental.
I lived in a building in Norway that had phone lines from like 1924. As it was declared as historic it was very difficult to dig newer cables. So ISP tried to use the old cables. At best one can get 10 MBit/s with a lot of packet loss. Eventually everyone switched to mobile internet. With 5g and stationary antenna it was possible to get 300 MBit/s with no packet loss and sub 10ms ping to local servers.
Tangentially, the fact that we're still using gigabit connections in our homes and especially offices in 2026 is weird. Gigabit Ethernet is over two decades old, but it's still the most common standard. Both 2.5 and 10 Gbps are effectively niche technologies.
I get it; it's "good enough" in most cases, like USB 2.0. But it still sucks we haven't moved past it.
You don’t need niche hardware to do this, if you’re handy with a soldering iron! You can quite easily modify devices intended for use on AC lines, for any conductor!
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
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?
It might have detected the wrong country/city for you. Check Settings -> Downloads -> Region
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.
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.
Reading the blog post and comments here from fellow UK inhabitants I am shocked to see how phone lines are considered common when I always ever lived in places with only one of them for the entire place (3+ bedroom houses on two floors).
Can confirm the bit about phone sockets. Our old house came with a phone socket by the bed in both bedrooms. Also a TV aerial socket in the master bedroom (not in the second bedroom though, no TV for you!)
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.
> 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.
> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets.
Really? I've never seen that many in a house. Most might have one extension in a bedroom upstairs. Which is usually the one room where you don't want a data connection. Crazy to think when I was little it was common to have a phone downstairs and another upstairs in the master bedroom. Who the hell wants to make a phone call from bed?!
I think it's easier just to run cables, tbh. If you can't put them in the walls/floors then hide them in plastic conduit. You can do a pretty good job with a bit of planning.
Am I the only one who gets amazing performance from Mesh wifi (only one AP is connected to Ethernet) and have absolutely no need to run Ethernet around the house ....or use old telephone wires?
> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets.
That's nonsense. Not in a new house. Maybe one from 20 years ago.
Anyway nice find. It's always annoying when there's a product that you know should exist but simply doesn't.
I'm currently trying to find a reasonably priced Bluetooth Auracast receiver so I can play audio to multiple rooms from my phone (no way am I investing in Sonos after all their bullshit).
There should be loads of these but the only ones I can find seem to be battery powered wearable devices aimed at tour groups, or hundreds of pounds.
The 10 phone sockets are pretty unlikely, true, but 0 Ethernet? Probably more common than not. If anything, modern builds are doing less ethernet than ever because they assume everyone is just using WiFi.
tialaramex|1 month ago
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 some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.
You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.
Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.
When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?
So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.
ninkendo|1 month ago
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.
VLM|1 month ago
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.
throw0101a|1 month ago
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
manbart|1 month ago
ddacunha|1 month ago
hinkley|1 month ago
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.
realaaa|1 month ago
Fiveplus|1 month ago
If the author is hitting 940 Mbps on a daisy-chain, either the echo cancellation or the frequency diversity on these chips must be lightyears ahead of standard DSLAMs. Does the web interface expose the SNR-per-tone graph? I suspect you would see massive dips where the wiring splits to the other rooms, but the OFDM is just aggressively modulating around them.
user5994461|1 month ago
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.
zbrozek|1 month ago
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.
amluto|1 month ago
spawnbsd|1 month ago
That being said, with 200MHz of spectrum to play with, the impact on rates should be negligible. With the 200MHz G.hn phone line profile (48KHz tone spacing), we get about ~1.5Gbps, so you can take some lumps and still get ~1Gbps throughput.
One big advantage though, G.hn is natively p2mp and each jack could have it's own G.hn endpoint.
jakub_g|1 month ago
> 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.
hdgvhicv|1 month ago
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.
Reason077|1 month ago
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.
stoobs|1 month ago
jasonkester|1 month ago
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!
cjbarber|1 month ago
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.
VLM|1 month ago
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.
djhworld|1 month ago
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 got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...
But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.
Philip-J-Fry|1 month ago
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.
Latty|1 month ago
globular-toast|1 month ago
omnicognate|1 month ago
I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to get, but powerline ethernet modems are sold everywhere despite barely working in most houses.
Latty|1 month ago
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.
retired|1 month ago
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 over the home.
The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.
gnfargbl|1 month ago
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.
simondotau|1 month ago
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.
jedilance|1 month ago
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
gambiting|1 month ago
As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer to and from it. And it wasn't like an inch from the router either - it did it while in my hand, on the other side of the room with me sitting on our sofa.
Nextgrid|1 month ago
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.
michaelt|1 month ago
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.
a022311|1 month ago
I had a phone socket in that room and I had already discussed the possibility of converting it into an Ethernet socket but decided it's not worth it because everything ended up in a cupboard far away from my router. These adapters would have solved the problem nicely!
By the way, I have more fun stories. The cabling in my current house (which has Ethernet sockets) is still miserable. I spent a year working with my PC over USB tethering to my phone until I finally called an electrician to find which of the 11 dangling cables in the cupboard went to my office...
One day some wires in there were slightly moved and the internet got disconnected because they were badly crimped. Nothing was working so in the end I got an RJ45 connector and managed to get the wires in there.
pzmarzly|1 month ago
I heard the state of the wiring also wasn't great, sometimes apartments had twisted pair wires, while some straight wires, some only have 2 or 3 out of 4 wires connected, etc.
Good to know this technology still exists.
forinti|1 month ago
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?).
jimnotgym|1 month ago
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 coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
tialaramex|1 month ago
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.
mprovost|1 month ago
dangravell|1 month ago
I'm not convinced socket A can talk to socket B when, for example, socket B is in an extension, or... or...
bdavbdav|1 month ago
larusso|1 month ago
larusso|1 month ago
j4mie|1 month ago
bloomingeek|1 month ago
<I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sockets. 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.>
My wife and I rented a flat in Amsterdam a few years ago. I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room, which I thought was strange. Now I know. (I was looking for the broom, BTW.)
Nextgrid|1 month ago
I wonder if it was "future-proofing" for some kind of modem-based automation/monitoring system.
bdavbdav|1 month ago
the_mitsuhiko|1 month ago
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/
FloatArtifact|1 month ago
wtcactus|1 month ago
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.
digiown|1 month ago
kalleboo|1 month ago
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.
arwineap|1 month ago
JonChesterfield|1 month ago
I'm currently running MoCA over spliced coax as part of the local connection and not amused by the 5ms latency on it. Also running 100mbit over cat3 I found in a wall which does work, but cat3 in another wall can't hold 10mbit. That link actually can hold 70mbit of vdsl but after a nearby lightning strike slagged various hardware I've moved the vdsl modem back to the BT wires entry point and run the output through some fibre.
And there's a wifi bridge between two other points. And some ethernet running outside the building. Previously also ethernet-over-mains that I might bring back now that I've learned what spanning tree protocols are so the periodic reboots they inexplicably require can be tolerated transparently.
Also the connection to the internet itself is crap so bonding vdsl, starlink and 5g through the openmptcprouter project. Just lots of redundancy and self healing hacks all over the place to give an observably solid connection.
Which is a rambling way to say that if you're in Britain and your network connection brings you sorrow, it can be forced to be acceptable with application of more time and money than other countries require.
Nextgrid|1 month ago
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.
wtcactus|1 month ago
Ok, the writer could be renting a house and not wanting to do that. But sincerely, in Portugal, the landlords couldn't care less. Maybe in the UK, they really, really love their phone sockets and don't want to replace them, don't know.
michaelt|1 month ago
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.
nihonium|1 month ago
- Open your telephone socket, if the actual cable has 5 pairs, it's probably a cat5e cable. It can do 1gbps with a RJ45 connection, just replace the plug and connect tou your device to check, yo ucan get a cheap ethernet cable tester too. If it has just 3 pairs, it can probably do 100mbs automatically with most ethernet capable devices. - If you just need to connect 2 devices, you may probably just use existing cables to do it. More than 2 devices would not work. - If it doesn't work, all those cables probably go to a box, find it and check if they are connected, if not yo ucan just crimp the ends together.
Other alternatives: - As others mentioned, MoCA devices are also able to deliver 1gbps, and there is a higher chance that you may find them in most rooms, and they are almost always connected, so it shoudl be plug&play. - Powerline adapters novadays not too bad as well. I was able to use them in a 30 eyar old home, 3 floors up to provide 500mbs.
jakedata|1 month ago
kalleboo|1 month ago
mrandish|1 month ago
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.
anonymousiam|1 month ago
lukevp|1 month ago
aucisson_masque|1 month ago
I just got the fiber installed, took less than 10 minutes, excluding the replacement of phone port to Ethernet port.
mikeweiss|1 month ago
neilalexander|1 month ago
potato67|1 month ago
(models https://www.gigacopper.net/wp/en/home-networking/ )
alimbada|1 month ago
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 and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).
hnlmorg|1 month ago
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).
lambdas|1 month ago
abanana|1 month ago
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.
pvtmert|1 month ago
Just click "reconnect" and re-join to the EU (and Schengen area)
I am saying this because I have some friends living in UK, but I do not have the Visa for UK. Although I am on a work/residence-permit in EU, it is just extra hassle to get the visa. I am instead waiting for my years to finish to apply for citizenship...
mgaunard|1 month ago
Ignoring the horrible taste of our forebears that were putting TVs where they don't belong, that does enable carrying gigabit ethernet using MoCA technology.
cjs_ac|1 month ago
Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.
[0] https://www.aa.net.uk/
pumplekin|1 month ago
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.
alexfoo|1 month ago
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.
martinald|1 month ago
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
Bassetts|1 month ago
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.
TheOtherHobbes|1 month ago
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.)
dangravell|1 month ago
userbinator|1 month ago
However, I wonder why it seems G.hn is only available in the form of adapters, and not as e.g. a PCIe NIC.
mortenlarsen|1 month ago
bloomingeek|1 month ago
mschuster91|1 month ago
wildylion|1 month ago
The same landlord whose workers outright forgot to install the water heater in the kitchen the day I got the flat, and __painted shut__ the bathroom window. LMAO.
Though I can only second this -- use transparent fiber and be creative in where you route it -- and nobody will be able to tell you did something 'naughty' in your rental.
fpoling|1 month ago
maltalex|1 month ago
I get it; it's "good enough" in most cases, like USB 2.0. But it still sucks we haven't moved past it.
quailfarmer|1 month ago
http://www.helicopting.de/
I used this to get an Ethernet link to the roof of a building using an old antenna feed line someone had left.
Havoc|1 month ago
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
Nextgrid|1 month ago
It is flat and thin enough you can stick it on top of skirting boards/etc with tiny dabs of hot glue.
vdm|1 month ago
davkan|1 month ago
bjackman|1 month ago
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?
Nextgrid|1 month ago
Considering Valve has an incentive to make downloads fast (= more revenue), it's likely your ISP is being stingy in this case.
user5994461|1 month ago
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.
simoncion|1 month ago
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.
theragra|1 month ago
lomase|1 month ago
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j45|1 month ago
Came in handy in an older house that used to have an intercom system, we just borrowed the deactivated intercom wires (they were 4 or 6 copper wires).
josephernest|1 month ago
Does this mean we could have kept the good old copper lines from 60 years ago and still enjoy 1 Gbit internet in residential areas?
spawnbsd|1 month ago
dobroezlo|1 month ago
somehnguy|1 month ago
Halan|1 month ago
rwmj|1 month ago
mgraupner|1 month ago
If you only have four wires available, it will usually still work at 100 MBit.
dmitrygr|1 month ago
encom|1 month ago
jgavris|1 month ago
pvtmert|1 month ago
This is typical DHL. I started to believe, they put "tried to deliver, but nobody home" for any & all "UnhandledException" cases.
maccard|1 month ago
stephen_g|1 month ago
I’ve had 2.5GbE running over old in-wall Cat5 in old buildings on short to medium (15-30m) runs with no issues…
Roritharr|1 month ago
Time really does fly.
dvdkon|1 month ago
Quarrel|1 month ago
> 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.
martinald|1 month ago
It's very thin fibre cable that can be glued across skirting boards etc and is very hard to see.
jaberjaber23|1 month ago
globular-toast|1 month ago
Really? I've never seen that many in a house. Most might have one extension in a bedroom upstairs. Which is usually the one room where you don't want a data connection. Crazy to think when I was little it was common to have a phone downstairs and another upstairs in the master bedroom. Who the hell wants to make a phone call from bed?!
I think it's easier just to run cables, tbh. If you can't put them in the walls/floors then hide them in plastic conduit. You can do a pretty good job with a bit of planning.
wolvoleo|1 month ago
I've been surprisingly successful with that in the past.
unknown|1 month ago
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mikeweiss|1 month ago
yxhuvud|1 month ago
Eh, wifi7 go up to 1.7gbit or something like that. Should be plenty assuming the hardware supports it. Which is a pretty big assumption.
IshKebab|1 month ago
That's nonsense. Not in a new house. Maybe one from 20 years ago.
Anyway nice find. It's always annoying when there's a product that you know should exist but simply doesn't.
I'm currently trying to find a reasonably priced Bluetooth Auracast receiver so I can play audio to multiple rooms from my phone (no way am I investing in Sonos after all their bullshit).
There should be loads of these but the only ones I can find seem to be battery powered wearable devices aimed at tour groups, or hundreds of pounds.
Latty|1 month ago
zabzonk|1 month ago
Fizzadar|1 month ago
maximgeorge|1 month ago
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veegee|1 month ago
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bookofsleepyjoe|1 month ago
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ValveFan6969|1 month ago
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bookofsleepyjoe|1 month ago
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