12 ms·
10mbps over 1km on a single pair of wires
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ahwd 4y agoSPE looks really interesting for CAN/RS485 replacement. I just noticed Analog devices also has chips finally available even at resellers: ADIN1100 for pure phy like the TI part in this but more interesting once are ADIN1110 (spi bus to MAC+PHY so any mcu with spi bus can communicate with ethernet) and especially ADIN2111 which is 2xSPE PHY + MAC + spi bus so with single chip you can make daisy-chain devices talking at 10base-t1l and the ADIN2111 has simplified rx/tx interface so with small transformer nice galvanically seperated link can be made. Until now I have used isolated CAN transceivers for links between devices that need ~100m distance as quite many MCU have built-in CAN peripherals but ethernet MAC is usually restricted to the bigger series. The spi bus on the ADIN (and probably later some other chips similar to the ENCJ from microchip) opens this up to smaller lower end devices. I am really excited for the coming years as I have been waiting for these 10base-T1L devices to be available for roughly two years and the chip shortage in general has not made things easier.
- miguel_cordeiro 4y agoLove this stuff and was expecting to find more "wild" engineering stories in the comments. Not disappointed!
- neilalexander 4y agoUnless you absolutely need to go 1 kilometre specifically, what are the advantages to this over using G.hn? On shorter runs G.hn will go anything up to 1.8Gbps and will still manage well over 100Mbps on anything up to about 700-800 metres. Even better/further with coaxial instead of twisted pair. I’ve been using a pair of GIGA Copper G4201TMs to take advantage of twisted pair wiring at home rather than having to rip it out and it also appears more cost-effective: https://www.gigacopper.net/web/en/ghn_faq_en.html https://www.gigacopper.net/web/en/ghn_faq_en.html
- nullc 4y agoNot sure how I'd feel about have 1km ethernet links without monitoring-- in particular, being able to catch pre-fail stats getting worse when it's wet out and being able to TDR the interface remotely so when it fails I've got some idea if it was cut near one end or the other before I go out to fix it.
- bragr 4y agoConsidering MoCA ethernet to coax will do >1Gbps over 1km distances for the same price, I'm failing to see the use case unless you absolutely have to reuse an existing wire pair. Ultra lower power applications maybe? https://www.newegg.com/p/1B4-03D1-00051?item=9SIAU2EH777285 https://www.newegg.com/p/1B4-03D1-00051?item=9SIAU2EH777285 https://www.amazon.com/MOTOROLA-Adapter-Ethernet-Bonded-MM1000/dp/B077Y3SQXR?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/MOTOROLA-Adapter-Ethernet-Bonded-MM10... https://www.newegg.com/p/1FR-00BD-00001?item=9SIA1CZEDM0099 https://www.newegg.com/p/1FR-00BD-00001?item=9SIA1CZEDM0099
- rasz 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug http://www.helicopting.de http://www.helicopting.de https://bitlair.nl/Projects/Ethernet_over_phone_cable https://bitlair.nl/Projects/Ethernet_over_phone_cable https://forum.openrov.com/t/teardown-of-a-homeplug-adapter/305?page=4 https://forum.openrov.com/t/teardown-of-a-homeplug-adapter/3... https://rovmaker.org/product/tether-interface-board/ https://rovmaker.org/product/tether-interface-board/ etc, HomePlug has been widely adopted in the ROV building community
- bergenty 4y agoIs this impressive?
- mmac_ 4y agoSingle pair communications are invaluable in industrial applications - almost all of our scenarios involve the restriction of not being able to run new cable. The costs involved in running new cables can be eye watering to say the least. If you're on a greenfield project, then there are surely better solutions since you have the luxury of designing the cable runs. VDSL has been king in the areas I work in for quite a few years now and has been very reliable. We are experimenting with SPE and it's looking positive with the biggest benefit being cost. SPE for us is a significant cost down that will allow us to design it into more products where VDSL blew the BOM budget. We'll still use VDSL when we need higher bandwidth but only have that single copper pair. SPE fills a gap where you need a decent amount of bandwidth at a reasonable distance for a low price. For us it complements modbus, standard ethernet, vdsl etc. SPE is also very new with the chipsets really only starting to become available in the last 12 months or so. Chip shortages aren't helping but expect to start seeing these solutions pop up all over the place.
- yosheli123 4y agoSo I built a tiny single pair Ethernet bridge (10BASE-T1L) that can transmit 10mbps over a kilometer on a single pair of twisted copper wires. Would love to get some feedback for the next iteration
- Aloha 4y agoWhat are the limits on cable characteristics? Capacitance, foreign voltage, etc?
- zakki 4y agoIs this full duplex?
- yosheli123 4y agoYep full duplex
- yetihehe 4y ago> Any application requiring a simple, low cost, robust connection between physically disparate devices At $195 it's definitely not low cost.
- silviot 4y agoWhat's the difference in price between 1km of fiber vs 1km or single pair wire? It might play a role in this solution being cheaper than immediately apparent.
- eru 4y agoI don't think the wire itself would be the expense, but the laying of it?
- voakbasda 4y agoThe cost of laying wire is virtually the same as laying fiber, so the difference really comes down to the material costs. The only good reason to use wire would be existing installations, as you sidestep that cost entirely.
- hericium 4y agoDSLs were capable of at least 8Mbit/s speeds close to 20 years ago. I worked for a small ISP and where were more than 100 meters (theoretical limit for cat5) between residential buildings, we were setting up 8 modems on a single UTP cable. With home internet speeds back then it wasn't a bottleneck.
- hinkley 4y agoAs long as you weren't stringing those cables off of rooftops. I heard too many stories of lightning strikes burning out a lot of expensive equipment.
- RicoElectrico 4y agoWait, can DSL modems talk to each other instead of a DSLAM line card?
- chmod775 4y agoThey may be using the term "modem" loosely here, or rather, more generally than "home modems". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem
- crazyjncsu 4y agoNot a traditional dsl modem, but these work well using dsl technology: https://www.amazon.com/Tupavco-Ethernet-Extender-Kit-Repeater-VDSL/dp/B01BOD8C9W https://www.amazon.com/Tupavco-Ethernet-Extender-Kit-Repeate...
- Dan_Sylveste 4y agoI was about to point something like this out.
- xhrpost 4y agoThat's pretty cool. The specs look like this is both faster and cheaper than the main link of this thread, unless I'm missing something?
- worldofmatthew 4y agoSome questions: 1. Would you need two of them at a $430 cost for this? 2. If so would the person be much better with alternative solutions like fixed wireless or Ethernet-VDSL2 conversion that would deliver much better performance at this price point?
- xattt 4y agoThe economics in buying this is whether re-running the 1-km of copper with whatever media you want will cost $430 or less. I think just rolling a telecom truck will cost you this.
- yosheli123 4y agoYeah fair. I'm aiming at new space constrained applications with this.
- yosheli123 4y agoYeah approx $400 for a pair. Mainly chip shortage messiness, I think I can get the cost down to less than $200 a pair in April 2023. Regarding VSDL, never used it myself; I guess it would come down to space/power considerations. I haven't seen VDSL used much in the industrial automation, single pair ethernet seems to be the preferred choice.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoLong range networking is a very overcrowded market. You need something that is either really good or really cheap.
- mrjin 4y agoFurther more, why would someone choose this over $59.69 a pair fiber ether net media converter, up to 20KM, 1000Mbps from TP-LINK? There are most likely cheaper options from other vendors. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001435649462.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001435649462.html
- hotpotamus 4y agoIt seems that single mode fiber is king for long distance cable runs now, nevermind that it can push gigabits. What kind of cable would this be and is it actually much cheaper? My impression is that most cost of cabling now is the labor to run it as opposed to the medium, but I'm a neophyte for sure.
- yosheli123 4y agoBasically just any CAT5e like twisted pair has worked for me up to 1km. 26AWG unshielded twisted pair basically, 100Ohm diff impedance. Cost of cabling is pennies IMO. Labor cost, who knows. Optical can be quite expensive though these boards aren't exactly cheap (yet).
- hotpotamus 4y agoI've actually had to deal with fiber for the first time in my career recently and it was actually easier and cheaper than I imagined. I think my take on costs was about a decade out of date and things have gotten pretty affordable these days (for 1Gbps at long range at least). Probably all the fiber to the home providers have pushed the economies of scale on these things. But here's sort of an example of what I'm talking about. https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Converter-1000Base-LX-1000Base-Tx/dp/B06XZ6CV6W/ https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Converter-1000Base-L... So the cost is pretty low if you wanted to terminate with these (these things aren't too loved in networking circles, but I can vouch that they do work), then the biggest difference is the cost of bulk cable - fiber vs copper. I assume the cost of labor to run it is essentially the same. The main tradeoffs I see are that you can run power over catX cable (though probably not 1km?) but single mode fiber seems to be indefinitely able to upgrade bandwidth; I'm told that old installations from the 90's are still used and are pushing 100's of gigabits with newer optics attached to them. Like I said, I'm fairly new to this having started a job where I have to talk to datacenter people about this sort of thing, so I'm learning a bit as I go.
- DannyBee 4y agoOptical is not expensive anymore. It's 20 bucks for 10gbps transceivers. The cable is much cheaper than twisted pair. termination will take you no longer than a network cable. The world is not the same as it was 15 years ago :)
- jacknews 4y agoSPE (Single-Pair Ethernet) is going to be a big deal, IMHO, and I would view this as a 'development board' for learning, though perhaps it also makes economic sense as an actual solution in some situations. The other killer feature of SPE (apart from in-theory cheaper cabling) is PoDL (Power over data line). Does this board do that?
- ginko 4y agoWhat's the advantage of SPE compared to regular ethernet? That it's cheaper?
- quickthrower2 4y agoWell my house has electricity sockets but no ethernet sockets, so it would be less expensive than getting those installed. If I could stomach sub-wifi speeds.
- plasticchris 4y agoJust get a decent mesh WiFi, should get around 600mbps or better, it’s cheaper too.
- phonon 4y agoHave you tried G.hn powerline to Ethernet?
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoWhy not use the power lines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug
- NegativeLatency 4y agoYou can do your own Ethernet, it’s especially easy if you’re just running a wire or two for an extra AP or something with premade cables
- yosheli123 4y ago
- worldofmatthew 4y agoSomething like this is what this is competing with; https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314029740243 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314029740243 In the US, you will be able to get these cheaper than the product on Botblox and with better performance (both products require a pair). "20/12Mbps over a long distance of 1.4km" The author might be more competitive when he managers to go $100/pair (which he mentioned in another post he plans to by Apr 2023).
- varjag 4y agoDSL isn't it. Not anywhere as easy to embed into products as 2 wire Ethernet, and you miss PoE option.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoNot a hard problem to solve as both are twisted pair and POE injectors are a extremely cheap.
- yosheli123 4y agotbh I don't think I'm really ever going to compete with the mass volume stuff on DSL. I think this is more for applications where space is the key motivator, rather than cost.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yosheli123 4y agoYeah I'm really targeting directly embedded applications that will want single pair ethernet. Robot tethers and things like that. $200 a pair is definitely possible. $100 a pair is probably possible in a year or so, I just can't place orders for the chips in bulk because of the chip shortage so everything is inflated.
- jmpman 4y agoWhat’s the best way to do this underwater? I need to go across a lake about 1km.
- yosheli123 4y agoYou'd use some standard tether cable, Blue Robotics sell good stuff for that. https://bluerobotics.com/store/cables-connectors/cables/fathom-rov-tether-rov-ready/ https://bluerobotics.com/store/cables-connectors/cables/fath... Then just straight onto the screw terminals.
- jmpman 4y agoI need it to be on the bottom if the lake. Trying to keep fisherman from snagging it too
- dhon_ 4y agoYou might be better off with directional wifi antennas if appropriate for your application.
- jmpman 4y agoHouse in the way. Although I could blast high power through my neighbor’s bedroom, it feels rude.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrjin 4y agoFiber I recon.
- trollied 4y agoA few years ago, revk (owner of an ISP in the UK) did ADSL over wet string: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...
- yosheli123 4y agoThat's brilliant!
- xhrpost 4y agoThere's also Ethernet over barbed wire: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm
- gorkish 4y agoBack in the day I ran X.25 over an actual barbed wire fence for a customer. It connected a serial terminal in a field house at a local feedyard back to their SCO box in the main office. Probably about 1500 feet. It was reliable!
- rlonstein 4y agoParaphrasing the old joke about getting a dry pair, must be an SBC customer.
- justcodin 4y agowow
- aidos 4y agoThe HN post at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440681 RevK is the owner of AAISP (an xkcd/806 compliant organisation).
- ComputerGuru 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/ https://www.revk.uk/2010/10/xkcd806-compliance.html?m=1 https://www.revk.uk/2010/10/xkcd806-compliance.html?m=1
- vicek22 4y ago- 1km of fiber optic cable - https://www.amazon.com/Jeirdus-Launch-Singlemode-Measuring-Optical/dp/B07H5JVKQL https://www.amazon.com/Jeirdus-Launch-Singlemode-Measuring-O... - 1Gb modem - https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Ethernet-Converter-Multi-Mode-MC200CM/dp/B003AVRLZI https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Ethernet-Converter-Multi-Mode... The price for two modems and the cable is just under $120
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoI think this is more a usecase for places where you already have a copper cable available (eg. telephone cable between buildings). If you have to dig and pull a new cable, doing fiber is the only logical choice now, but the price for all that is way way above $120.
- ape4 4y agoYou can also buy 50km on that page! But the fiber is raw (unprotected) so I would think that its not usable to run outdoors?
- Zenst 4y ago1KM of fiber cable for $60 seems crazy cheap when you contrast it with 3D printer filement. More so as I'd of thought the former be more expensive to manufacture.
- inetknght 4y agoFiber is generally laid just once. But the filament is a recurring cost to consumers so it provides more value to businesses ... and therefore more opportunity for a higher demand and higher price.
- Zenst 4y agoDoes seem very much that the whole 3D filement market just needs one disruptive supplier. Which often happens when you have high-margin consumables markets. Which with the ink printer market saw makes of the printers introduce DRM into the consumables - something I don't see happing with 3D filement though, so could be interesting. That all said, I see that there are products that can convert your plastic bottles into 3D printer filement - https://3devo.wpmudev.host/filament-makers/ https://3devo.wpmudev.host/filament-makers/
- gtirloni 4y agoWhy are you mostly ignoring fiber comments in this thread? It seems like a no-brainer.
- kjs3 4y agoNo one is obligated to respond to every "you didn't do it the way I would have done it" comment.
- withinboredom 4y agoThere are lots of reasons to choose something other than fiber, this isn't/shouldn't be a discussion of why you, or anyone else, would choose fiber instead of this product. It's pretty obvious that there is fiber in the world and saying "but there's fiber!" isn't very constructive. Some off the top of my head reasons why I wouldn't choose fiber: - runs that require turning very sharply, beyond what fiber can handle. - applications where the cable can undergo sheering forces causing sharp bends or damage. - applications where the cabling already exists. - in cases where the cabling is already owned thus this becomes quite cheap.
- jimmyswimmy 4y agoActually need something like this, but I need to be able to program the microcontroller for my own uses (to use it to convert and transfer sensor data). Is the firmware source code available?
- zajio1am 4y ago10 mbps or 10 Mbps? That is 9 orders of magnitude difference.
- gandalfian 4y agoI'm 1km of copper to green box, then fibre rest of way to telephone exchange. VDSL 40mb down and 6mbs up. That's on a 1980's buried copper cable.
- unwind 4y agoNeat, but is that copper a single pair?
- jcrawfordor 4y agoOne catch is that ISPs rolling out VDSL, such as CenturyLink, are often using pair bonding. So despite a typical performance limit of 40/10, CL offers 80/20 in VDSL markets by taking advantage of the fact that homes are typically wired for two lines.
- anderiv 4y agoDSL uses a single pair, yes.
- midasuni 4y agoYes that’s how the traditional phone system works, single pair from your house back to the exchange (via a jumper block in a cabinet nearby). Modern DSL equipment can get upto 50mbit aggregate speed over 1km of traditional phone wire (so 40/10, or 30/20 or however you would want to set it up) Condition of the wire will effect it of course, aluminium wire, ground conditions, cross talk etc could lower your speed.
- jandrese 4y agoI think the difference with this product is the transceivers are $150 each and you don't need anything else to use them except for a couple of power supplies. I do find it interesting that their box diagram claims a 2km range.
- transistor-man 4y agoAwesome project! This would be fairly great fit for underwater UAV's, or like security camera way out on the edge of property. May be a good idea to post on ardu-sub related discussion forums. I'm not aware of an off the shelf module that's point to point ADSL, almost every modem is intended to yell at a ADSL / ADSL2+ host. Did you run into any issues with consumer-grade gigabit switches negotiating 10Mbit?
- rasz 4y agoROV community zeroed in on hacked homeplug devices long time ago. $30 a pop 100Mbit 1km links.
- 0xfaded 4y agoBlue Robotics sells the fathomX exactly for this purpose. I wouldn't be surprised if it uses the same chip set. https://bluerobotics.com/store/comm-control-power/tether-interface/fathom-x-r1/ https://bluerobotics.com/store/comm-control-power/tether-int...
- yosheli123 4y agoThat tops out at around 300meters. Ours goes beyond 1km. Still there's is awesome for camera feeds; I love the Blue Robotics hardware, SPEBlox Long is just a different application (more industrial automation focussed)
- transistor-man 4y agoAny chance you're going to release schematics / open source the design?
- geozimm 4y agoAll these things are related. Back in the 1990s I worked with others to develop DSL technologies (ADSL, HDSL, VDSL) for telcos. Why not fiber, some ask? oh, fiber materials may be sand, but installed fiber is sand, energy, and labor. Installation costs trump everything - use what you have for the physical medium. While we (PairGain) also made point-to-point private links, it was clear then, and even moreso now that most DSL involves a service provider managing the network - with specialized skills, practices and setup. In the 2010's I was spending time with the Ethernet folks, and in particular industrial folks with large plants. I ended up chairing IEEE Std 802.3cg which developed the 10 Mb/s 1km technology. Not really a speed increase - more an application refocus. As the networking world developed, many realized that converging networks above the physical layer added network complexity and therefore setup and ongoing operating costs... So we now also have SPE - pure Ethernet at DSL-like distances... Similar tech with different use models, enabling connectivity for whatever... I'm not Al Gore - I won't claim to have invented the internet. I just an engineer who happened to have a hand in both of these technologies, and am still pleased to see that people use them.
- yosheli123 4y agoAwesome to have your input on this. I'd love to talk to you in person to learn more. Reach out at josh@botblox.io
- Aloha 4y agoI remember seeing your guys HDSL hardware in the field what seems like a million years ago. (for those without a telecom background) It was pretty common as a way to extend T1's without conditioned lines or repeaters then. Interestingly enough, I'd done direct t-spans's inside of a building over house cable in a situation that was too long (and too poor of cable) to do Ethernet.
- throwaway____10 4y agoWhat a blast from the past, DSL was an exciting technology. I did the config and networking of DSLAMs for the first private test installs of Paradyne (Hotwire) DSL hardware in a western state around ~1998-1999, a couple years before DSL really hit the mainstream. The telecos were slow to move on the technology and didn't do their own centralized rollouts until several years later. We took full advantage of that lead time time to win away a lot of ISDN customers with much lower prices and much faster service. We also saw end of that advantage coming and got out of the business before we had to compete directly with the telecos who could operate at scale and do bundled pricing of the line + service that was harder to compete with. At the time high speed internet over cable was also a while off for the general public. We also had a tip from a teleco employee that we could use DC Signalling channels / dry copper pairs instead of regular phone circuits (no dial tone, they were meant for alarm service). They cost about 1/2 to 1/3 of the price. At one point we petitioned to get the local telco to dig up the sidewalk and install several hundred more copper pairs into the building. It was really interesting to watch the internet access landscape change so quickly.
- PeterPumpkin45 4y ago
- superkuh 4y agoIf you use a surface wave transmission line with RF launcher cones on the ends you can send gigabits over a single 28 awg copper wire at very low loss from 100 MHz to ~10 GHz. The only problem is that the line has to be suspended and away from conductors.
- madengr 4y agoYeah, I did some EM simulations of that years ago when I read about it. Shame it never took off. The balloon tether is really cool. http://www.corridor.biz/ http://www.corridor.biz/
- superkuh 4y agomadengr responded with a completely on topic link to a surface wave transmission line start-up. But it looks like that comment, and 2/3 of their other on-topic posts are getting grayed out [dead]. I don't think they know. madngr: your account my be shadowbanned and only viewable by those like me that show dead posts.
- jokoon 4y agoI guess it's also a latency tradeoff?
- ladyattis 4y agoI wonder if keeping the wires on a spool is what allows the speed to be the range of 10mbps? I only ask because I know at least for radio signals there's capacitive coupling between wires which some signal leakage will happen. But I assume as long as the signals are differential as in current flow between the two wires are in opposition which should in theory be fine, so common mode signals ought not to leak over.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoThe schematic/drawing says 2000 meter range, the title and description say 1km. Not sure which to believe!
- tiffanyh 4y agoMost don't realize, you can run 400mbps of data over your old in-home electrical wiring. https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/everything-you-need-to-know-about-powerline-networking/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/everything-you-need-...
- worldofmatthew 4y agoDepending on the country, you can be made responsible for radio interference.
- icedchai 4y agoI experimented with powerline network adapters for a while. You might see 400 megabits on the same circuit. Between floors in your house on different circuits? Very unlikely. The latency was also pretty bad compared to wifi.
- tumetab1 4y agoMy experience is also that between floors (circuits) you loose bandwidth. With latency I see no issue and I find that weird. Latency, with Wi-Fi or not, it’s probably correlated with transmission failures so there probably some bad circuitry or devices than create noise (like electrical motors).
- RedShift1 4y agoMy experience with powerline adapters is that they all fail sooner or later... I think 230 V is just too much to handle in a small package combined with sensitive low voltage communication chips.