20 ms·

Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

• Roritharr 8mo ago
  Wild to me that this developer has no access to a device with gigabit ethernet. Time really does fly.
  • Quarrel 8mo ago
    He claims: > 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.
    • user5994461 8mo ago
      Full quote. The problem is the price. > 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. Gigabit is so much more expensive (obviously it's gone down a lot). In London 2016, I had ADSL broadband at 16 Mbps for £12/month. That building didn't have fiber at the time. When fiber finally happened... it started as 30 Mbps fiber for so much more money.
      • sudhirb 8mo ago
        I have 150Mb/s FTTP for £37/month - upgrading to gigabit would be £75/month, for example!
      • Latty 8mo ago
        This is actually something where you are often better off outside of cities. The areas serviced by newer providers who are using the government grants to offer fibre to places without it and are actually running new fibre tend to offer much better prices and speeds. E.g: One of them offers 900Mbps symmetric for £40/month (with a deal for £30/month for the first year). Meanwhile the legacy providers via OpenReach will only give you 700 down/100 up for more money, and require a two year contract. The only real downside is most of them will CGNAT you, but most do offer IPv6 too, and mine offers a static IPv4 for £5/month more.
    • timthorn 8mo ago
      It's possibly because of a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority back in the ADSL days: https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/broadband-speed-claims-guidance.html?hl=en-GB https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/broadband-speed-claims-guida...
    • regularfry 8mo ago
      Fibre rollout in London was (is?) really, really patchy. If your building had it you were lucky. If you hadn't had it already you may well have found it impossible to get at retail.
      • martinald 8mo ago
        It's actually very well covered now. The problem is apartment buildings. The buildings owner has to give approval to allow openreach/virgin/hyperopic to run new fibre thru the building, and it's extremely time consuming for network providers to negotiate these individually per building. If you're not in an apartment building you'll almost certainly have FTTH coverage from someone in London. The govt is consulting on new laws which would give apartment building residents the power to demand the freeholder of the apartment building allow fibre installs, which would make this far easier.
    • iamcalledrob 8mo ago
      Symnetric gigabit connections can be hard to come by in London. If you're served by a niche fibre provider (e.g. Hyperoptic, Community Fibre) then you're golden. There's Virgin (think Comcast) with paltry upload speeds due to the cable tech. Understandable though not ideal. Then there's the OpenReach full fibre network with paltry upload speeds due to... ??? there appears to no good reason, other than not wanting to cannibalise their leased line business. Does anyone actually know why they don't offer a symmetric product like the niche fibre ISPs?
      • lonesword 8mo ago
        Hyperoptic is niche? I thought they were available all over London.
        • iamcalledrob 8mo ago
          Not where I am. It's street by street. A lot of areas have no fibre at all, not even OpenReach. It's cable from Virgin or DSL
        • mprovost 8mo ago
          Even if they are available on your street, each building and individual flat has to be connected. For blocks of flats that's not always straightforward.
      • martinald 8mo ago
        Virgin actually have upgraded a huge swath of their footprint from cable to XGS-PON (probably coming up to 10million homes now, with the full program due to finish in a couple of years). However, due to their comically bad billing systems (i believe they licensed a billing system off the cable modem headend provider) they do not allow their existing users to switch from DOCSIS cable to FTTH. This has been a problem for a couple of years now. They've spent billions on civil engineering work to blow fibre everywhere but existing customers can't order it because their billing system is tightly coupled to their cable modem system. They offer up to 2gig symmetrical over XGSPON FTTH. Re openreach I think it's a bit of protecting leased line revenue, a bit of faster upload speeds actually being quite niche - the market is driven by headline download speeds - but most importantly they rolled out GPON not XGSPON. GPON "only" has 2.5gbit/1.2gbit available to the entire network slice it's on, which can be up to 32 homes (theoretically many more but openreach have that as the maximum I've seen). This means one gigabit uplink can nearly saturate the entire link for the network slice of 32 homes. They do have plans to upgrade to XGSPON (though I suspect they may skip that and move to 50GPON instead). XGSPON has 10git/10gbit and 50GPON 50/50 available to the same 32 homes. They are just about to start a pilot of XGSPON in Guildford which has up to 8gig symmetrical available. It's not a huge amount of work to upgrade PON versions, it just requires new line cards, and new ONT boxes for each house and can run side by side with existing GPON.
  • dvdkon 8mo ago
    The way I read it, they probably have Ethernet on their gaming desktop PC, just not on a second device to run a local speed test.
• Fiveplus 8mo ago
  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.
  • user5994461 8mo ago
    A view from the the debugging tools since you asked https://thehftguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/screenshot_frequency_1.png https://thehftguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/screenshot_... I don't think there is anything too fancy compared to a DSLAM. It's just that DSLAM are low-frequency long-range by design. Numbers for nerds, on top of my head: * ADSL1 is 1Mhz 8Mbps (2 kilometer) * ADSL2 is 2Mhz 20Mbps (1 kilometer) * VSDL1 is 15Mhz 150Mbps (less than 1 kilometer) * Gigabit Ethernet 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.
    • direwolf20 8mo ago
      Gigabit Ethernet uses four pairs per direction. It uses the same four pairs in both directions at the same time.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      • estimator7292 8mo ago
        1000Base-T uses two pairs per direction, actually. It's full duplex. Each port sees two TX and two RX pair. There are four pair of wires in the cable. If you use all of them for TX, you can't receive.
• userbinator 8mo ago
  It sounds like his phone lines were already cat5, which is not surprisingly capable of 1Gbps. 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 8mo ago
    Then they would need to deal with drivers.
    • Nextgrid 8mo ago
      Yeah the era of non-Ethernet/Wi-Fi NICs died off decades ago with the last ADSL cards. Nowadays I'm not sure if OSes even support creating drivers for anything non-Ethernet (especially where to provide the config UI for your non-standard protocol). What I've seen done recently to work around this is to combine your custom chip with a standard Ethernet NIC on the same board. The computer just sees an (off-the-shelf) NIC that's always connected, and all configuration happens via IP by browsing to a specific private IP (this kinda insists on NAT though).
      • VorpalWay 8mo ago
        Linux would support it for sure. It even still has support for several old NICs (it was only the other day I saw a news item about some old protocol from the early 90s finally being removed). But I can imagine no one wants to develop a new such driver. And if you want to sell to consumers you need Windows and Mac support, and then it easier to just adapt to existing interfaces.
    • userbinator 8mo ago
      You could have a regular single-chip Ethernet NIC on the same card.
• jakub_g 8mo ago
  > 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! Wow.
  • hdgvhicv 8mo ago
    Another Brexit bonus 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.
    • bflesch 8mo ago
      It's never to late to rejoin, we've all learned a lot about foreign propaganda in the last decade.
      • tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
        We need a whole generation to die off before that becomes likely. In the mean time we should move closer when the opportunity rises.
        • bflesch 8mo ago
          Don't be so sure that the next generation automatically gets less indoctrinated. Facebook at least documented content interactions out in the open. With tiktok you don't notice what kind of content someone consumes. There are tens of thousands of people working a full time job just to influence people in democratic countries to act/vote against their interests. Then we have hundreds of thousands more in advertisement industry with their own interests, mainly in line with goals of US companies. There is reason for optimism because if everyone is on tiktok it becomes "uncool" again but still it is a very dangerous tool.
• retired 8mo ago
  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.
  • gnfargbl 8mo ago
    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.
    • user5994461 8mo ago
      > most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables. It's really not that simple when you realize that the average UK flat has 3+ sockets and the average house has 5+ sockets (speaking from my own experience). Some daisy chained and some direct. Besides, a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.
      • Nextgrid 8mo ago
        > a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire. Nobody's going to complain about a backwards-compatible upgrade (you can put phone sockets back when you leave - nobody has to know there's cat 5/6 behind it).
        • 8mo ago
• gambiting 8mo ago
  >>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.
  • michaelt 8mo ago
    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.
    • Nextgrid 8mo ago
      > For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building. It often isn't - it's just magic like TCP/etc that is doing its job and making it feel that way for bulk non-interactive transfers. But get those people on a Zoom call or anything real-time and it'll be painful (double pain if they've subsequently got terrible bluetooth headsets and/or accidentally use their laptop's internal mic). Doesn't help stupid ISPs split their 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on separate SSIDs so now devices can't switch automatically and you've either got people constantly hogging the 2.4 band or barely trying to hang onto the 5GHz one in conditions where falling back to 2.4 would be appropriate.
      • OvervCW 8mo ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if they did this to lower the support workload, since I have several 2.4Ghz devices that fail to connect to WiFi at all if I put both bands on the same SSID. I intentionally separated them for that reason and portable devices like phones know how to switch between multiple SSIDs based on signal strength anyway.
• pzmarzly 8mo ago
  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. Good to know this technology still exists.
  • forinti 8mo ago
    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?).
    • consp 8mo ago
      My parents shared coaxiale television for years with the neighbors. Technically illegal but there is no way to know with analogue television.
    • mattmanser 8mo ago
      I think our phone lines must work differently, the entire infrastructure is owned by one company (BT) who must lease it to other companies. So they can do things like this, as everyone needs a router at the end to access it and that's how they charge per customer. There is a separate cable network, again one operator (Virgin), who don't lease it out.
• mgraupner 8mo ago
  I have an 8-wire phone line (twisted pair) between floors. I connected it with an RJ45 socket and it connects at Gigabit speed. If you only have four wires available, it will usually still work at 100 MBit.
• JonChesterfield 8mo ago
  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.
  • Nextgrid 8mo ago
    > the periodic reboots they inexplicably 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.
    • db48x 8mo ago
      Certain brands of g.fast and g.hn devices are apparently so buggy as to be essentially defective, yes.
• Havoc 8mo ago
  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
  • Nextgrid 8mo ago
    Here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elfcam®-Fibre-Optic-Multimode-Duplex/dp/B097ZQW786 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elfcam®-Fibre-Optic-Multimode-Duple... It is flat and thin enough you can stick it on top of skirting boards/etc with tiny dabs of hot glue.
    • Havoc 8mo ago
      Neat. Thanks I had found that brand when I was looking a month ago and it was out of stock everywhere
  • davkan 8mo ago
    No need for fiber for 1.6 gigabit, Cat5e can do 10GbE over short distances, 2.5GbE over longer distances.
    • pinum 8mo ago
      The other advantage of fibre is subtlety if you can't (or don't want to) run it through walls. 0.9mm diameter and light enough to attach it with occasional dots of glue instead of needing cable clips.
  • vdm 8mo ago
    https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-lc-apc-invisible-cable.html https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-lc-apc-invisible-cabl...
    • pinum 8mo ago
      I can second this 0.9mm transparent stuff, I've run it successfully and it's very subtle. Depending on the media converter pair you're using, you probably want UPC instead of APC. I also found that the cheapest generic bidi media converters tend to be SC, so I want with a 30m pre-terminated SC/UPC cable. Total cost (cable plus media converters) was about £30. Alternatively, you can order a custom 30+m white 0.9mm cable from FS: https://www.fs.com/uk/products/12285.html https://www.fs.com/uk/products/12285.html Lead time is fairly long.
• maccard 8mo ago
  And here I am struggling to get gigabit Ethernet over brand new cat6 cabling with devices bought in 2025…
  • stephen_g 8mo ago
    Over what distance? Sounds like something is broken… Sure all the pairs are punched down in the right order, cables aren’t crushed, etc.? I’ve had 2.5GbE running over old in-wall Cat5 in old buildings on short to medium (15-30m) runs with no issues…
    • maccard 8mo ago
      Roughly 15 metres. Almost certainly a cabling issue, although frustratingly the electrician who installed it says that they think it's fine. I've got a ubiquiti U7 AP connected to a USW lite 8 via POE, and it negotiates GbE, but then falls back to E.
      • maccard 8mo ago
        I solved this yesterday. It was in fact a cable problem. I think the initial GbE negotiation was a red herring from ubiquiti as two of the pairs were flipped.
• IshKebab 8mo ago
  > 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.
  • zabzonk 8mo ago
    Why would they have ethernet sockets? Only one of the four computers I own has one, and I've never used it. I don't think this is unusual.
  • Latty 8mo ago
    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.
    • IshKebab 8mo ago
      Ah yeah I quoted too much. I meant the phone sockets thing. Zero ethernet seems to be the norm still unfortunately because most people do just use WiFi.
• bjackman 8mo ago
  Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam? 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 8mo ago
    Peering between your ISP and Valve is likely saturated. Considering Valve has an incentive to make downloads fast (= more revenue), it's likely your ISP is being stingy in this case.
    • stefan_ 8mo ago
      And ISPs in most of the western world have no incentives to fix it, instead trying to scam Valve and others to get paid twice.
      • Nextgrid 8mo ago
        The business model of consumer ISPs is "take the money and don't deliver" so this tracks.
    • bjackman 8mo ago
      I would have assumed valve use some third party CDN but yeah this would make sense I guess
  • user5994461 8mo ago
    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.
  • simoncion 8mo ago
    > Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam? 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.
• mgaunard 8mo ago
  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.
• neilalexander 8mo ago
  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.
• wtcactus 8mo ago
  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.
  • michaelt 8mo ago
    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.
• a022311 8mo ago
  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.
• jakedata 8mo ago
  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.
  • kalleboo 8mo ago
    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.
• larusso 8mo ago
  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!
  • larusso 8mo ago
    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 ;)
• djhworld 8mo ago
  > 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.
  • Latty 8mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Dayshine 8mo ago
      It's for the TVs, to provide network for live TV boxes.
  • Philip-J-Fry 8mo ago
    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.
• cjs_ac 8mo ago
  > 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. [0] https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/
  • pumplekin 8mo ago
    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.
    • VorpalWay 8mo ago
      Couldn't they just list link speed and average speed (however that is measured, before or after protocol overhead for example) as two separate lines on the product page?
    • db48x 8mo ago
      It’s still nonsense. Everyone doing FTTH is using passive optical networking (PON, or NGPON or XGPON or XGSPON or …) which actually has a line rate of 10Gbps. It then uses TDMA to give each subscriber enough time slots to send and receive at a particular speed. My ISP, Ziply Fiber, just gives every subscriber enough time slots to send at the advertised speed _after_ protocol overhead, even at gigabit and higher speeds. If you buy the 500 Mbps service it really will speed test at 500 Mbps. If you buy gigabit it really will test at 1000Mbps provided you have faster than gigabit Ethernet between you and the router. The router that they rent connects to the ONT at 10Gbps, so speed tests done on the router itself always test at the speed you’re subscribed to. At 10Gbps and above they start using direct–attached fiber (DIA) instead, so the speed you subscribe to is the line rate and it will test lower due to protocol overhead. But if you can max out a 50Gbps link then I think the overhead will not bother you much. They also allow residential customers to run BGP and use their own addresses. They’re a great ISP.
• alimbada 8mo ago
  > 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).
  • lambdas 8mo ago
    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
    • alimbada 8mo ago
      Interesting. Every place I've lived in has been older than that so that makes sense.
      • user5994461 8mo ago
        It's a setup seen in a lot of new builds flat from the 2000s and 2010s, which is a very large amount of the housing stock in London for flats (There has been so many constructions!).
  • hnlmorg 8mo ago
    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).
    • 8mo ago
• dobroezlo 8mo ago
  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...
  • somehnguy 8mo ago
    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.
    • dobroezlo 8mo ago
      what do you mean by filters? how can I check this?
• omnicognate 8mo ago
  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.
  • Latty 8mo ago
    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.
    • guenthert 8mo ago
      I didn't notice overheating, but there are a quite a few different products on the market. The modest speed (~50MBps at my place) was then ok-ish, but the (variable!) latency of a couple of ms was annoying (it tended to break pacemaker/corosync cluster communication). And every once in a blue moon they stopped working altogether and needed to be un-plugged. Worst, for someone interested in analogue electronics, they emit (of course) a huge amount of electrical noise into the power lines.
• encom 8mo ago
  This seems like a lot of effort and expense to avoid either figuring out the current ethernet cable layout, or pulling new cable. It's not that hard.
• j4mie 8mo ago
  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.
• wolvoleo 8mo ago
  I mean on fairly short runs you can run Ethernet over water pipes if you want to. I'd try the cable on its own first without any fancy chipsets. I've been surprisingly successful with that in the past.
• tialaramex 8mo ago
  Worth knowing in this context: Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone. Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have 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 8mo ago
    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.
• jimnotgym 8mo ago
  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!
  • bdavbdav 8mo ago
    I’ve tried that over fairly short lengths at home, and ended up with flapping even locked to 10HDX
  • tialaramex 8mo ago
    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.
    • user5994461 8mo ago
      > the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it. You're actually wrong on all of that ^^ The cables actually have a rating to say what they are suitable to. See the markings on the cable: category Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6 + frequency range 100/250 Mhz + insulation UTP/FTP/STP/mix. Ethernet cards don't negotiate, they typically only check whether the pairs can transmit any signal. You could end up in a situation where they go for gigabit and it doesn't work well. Fortunately, the main issue for signal transmission is loss over distance. Ethernet is designed to work over 100m every time in a noisy industrial environment. You've got a pretty good chance for it to work on a short run, even with poor cables. The alternatives being discussed ADSL/VDSL/G.hn actually detect the capability of the medium and adjust the transmission rates and frequency to give the maximum possible speed. IMO they are much more advanced technologically and much more interesting. (Ethernet is doing exactly 250 Mbps on one pair, G.hn can do up to 1700 Mbps on the same pair, automatically adjusted, the article is getting 1300 Mbps which is insane!)
• bookofsleepyjoe 8mo ago
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• bdavbdav 8mo ago
  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.
• the_mitsuhiko 8mo ago
  I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets. We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more. That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet. In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail. Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways. [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/
  • arwineap 8mo ago
    Surely your access points are hard wired?
    • the_mitsuhiko 8mo ago
      I have three, only one is hard wired (the source). That's because I only have gigabit ethernet at the moment and the wireless backhaul is faster than the cable.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
  • FloatArtifact 8mo ago
    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.
• mschuster91 8mo ago
  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.
  • wildylion 8mo ago
    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.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• bloomingeek 8mo ago
  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.)
  • Nextgrid 8mo ago
    > I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room I wonder if it was "future-proofing" for some kind of modem-based automation/monitoring system.
• bloomingeek 8mo ago
  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.)
• ValveFan6969 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• martinald 8mo ago
  Another option is invsilight (https://lightera.com/invisilight-home-fiber-kit/ https://lightera.com/invisilight-home-fiber-kit/). It's very thin fibre cable that can be glued across skirting boards etc and is very hard to see.
• maximgeorge 8mo ago
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• jasonkester 8mo ago
  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. Thanks for the writeup!
  • cjbarber 8mo ago
    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.
    • malshe 8mo ago
      How about using fiber optic cables for this? I saw a few videos on YouTube showing the installation for home internet
      • loeg 8mo ago
        To what end? The runs aren't going to be long enough for fiber to provide a benefit, and the transceivers are more expensive for consumer use like this.
• pvtmert 8mo ago
  > After some days, the DHL website said they tried to deliver but nobody home, this is bullshit This is typical DHL. I started to believe, they put "tried to deliver, but nobody home" for any & all "UnhandledException" cases.
• pvtmert 8mo 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! 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...
• nihonium 8mo ago
  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.
• globular-toast 8mo ago
  > 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.
• jaberjaber23 8mo ago
  had the same thing, electrician just used whatever was on the truck. swapped the faceplates and got instant gigabit
• bookofsleepyjoe 8mo ago
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• j45 8mo ago
  I thought it was reasonably common knowledge if you had a phone jack with 4 wires, you could route data over those 4 pins in an ethernet plug too. 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).
• lukevp 8mo ago
  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!
• Fizzadar 8mo ago
  Damn I ripped all our telephone lines out and ran cat6 up through the house to my office and I could have just done this?! Well shit.
• dmitrygr 8mo ago
  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.
• mrandish 8mo ago
  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.
  • anonymousiam 8mo ago
    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.
    • mrandish 8mo ago
      I envy you. Must be nice to open up a wall jack and be pleasantly surprised instead of bitterly disappointed :-). I recently built a vacation property and could choose what to install. Initially, I was thinking CAT6A but after getting some good quality plenum-rated 6A to play with, I discovered it's surprisingly thick and doesn't bend very easily (minimum corner radii to avoid shield damage are actually specced) and it's not exactly easy to DIY new connectors on them correctly if you don't do it all the time. So, after really considering the max throughput I'm ever likely to actually use, I decided to go with some good CAT6. It wasn't even a cost thing, as the difference was negligible. It was just practical reality. None of the runs are very long and I should be able to get up to 10gbps on 6A, although I doubt I'll ever use more than 2.5gbps (only using 1gbps today). One factor is the property is off-grid except for AC, so data is via StarLink anyway and fiber won't ever happen out there. While LEO satellite and terrestrial cellular speeds will increase in coming years, when more than 2.5gpbs is available - it'll almost certainly be priced to maximize B2B profit and we probably wouldn't pay that for a vacation house (because this is the US, not someplace that prices broadband rationally like Korea).
• yxhuvud 8mo ago
  > phones are wireless, which is too slow to test things 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.
• fpoling 8mo ago
  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.
• aucisson_masque 8mo ago
  You disconnect the phone cable from the socket, attach a 50m Ethernet cable to it and pull the phone cable from the other side of your house. I just got the fiber installed, took less than 10 minutes, excluding the replacement of phone port to Ethernet port.
  • mikeweiss 8mo ago
    Doesn't work if the cable is stapled in somewhere or under layers of paint
    • aucisson_masque 8mo ago
      I’ve never seen Ethernet cable being stapled, ever. Or any other cable for that matter. Your always put it in a sheath and fix the sheath with whatever you want but the cable is free. Putting the cable naked inside the wall is barbarian.
      • mikeweiss 8mo ago
        Ummm you've never seen NM / Romex staples or low voltage wire staples? Really? Seriously? This? You've never seen this? https://www.homedepot.com/p/Briscon-1-in-x-1-2-in-Zinc-Plated-Steel-Staples-500-Pack-SN-40-B-500/203011358 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Briscon-1-in-x-1-2-in-Zinc-Plate...
• jgavris 8mo ago
  This is essentially how some fixed wireless providers (like Starry) deliver the last mile (twisted pair).
• mikeweiss 8mo ago
  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?
• Halan 8mo ago
  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).
• maltalex 8mo ago
  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.
• veegee 8mo ago
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• josephernest 8mo ago
  In France (and probably everywhere) there is currently massive deployment of FTTH (fiber to the home) and removal of copper lines, since a decade. 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 8mo ago
    Yes, yes it does.
• potato67 8mo ago
  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)... (models https://www.gigacopper.net/wp/en/home-networking/ https://www.gigacopper.net/wp/en/home-networking/ )
• quailfarmer 8mo ago
  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! http://www.helicopting.de/ 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.
• rwmj 8mo ago
  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!)