I wanted wired Ethernet in my office but didn't want to punch holes in the wall. Luckily I have an old "central vacuum system" that as far as I can tell has never been even powered on, many years before I bought the house.
I tied a ping pong ball to a piece of string and used a vacuum cleaner to suck it through the pipes, then used the string to pull a stronger rope and then the Ethernet cable. So now my Ethernet goes from my office to the wireless router via the vacuum ducting.
My wired ethernet triumph was in my current rental. There's an old under-floor evaporative air-conditioning ducted system which is no longer used. I bought a $40 remote control car with large rubber wheels and a low CoG, strapped a GoPro and a head torch to it so I could stream video to a phone, and tied on a piece of string. The mission was to get from my study to the kitchen which is about 10m all up.
It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around. All of this wasn't helped by the terrible latency and needing to move the phone to different places to reduce distance and attenuation through the floor. I got stuck quite a few times but could always use the string to pull back a bit when I got wedged on a rock. Sometimes I just needed to gun it to get over an obstacle.
In the end, the car and ethernet cable were cheaper than a good wireless card or POE kit, and I got to give away the car to a kid.
> It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around.
My uncle worked for a company that designed and installed commercial ductwork. The joke he liked to tell while they were going in: "Make sure Bruce Willis can get around in there."
I visited an old Victorian National Trust house in the UK where the owner had used his rabbit-hunting ferrets to help install electric wiring under the floors rather than rip up the expensive wooden floors and panelling
Ferrets were often used to drag cables to the right place. It is apparently an urban myth that Boeing did this in jet manufacture, but they were used in other similar contexts.
I mean, he was running a string under the floor connected to the RC car. He could probably have piped the video (and maybe power) over a thin enough wire to go completely wired.
for those who do not have old pipes to use, most of us have coax, there is something called MOCA, simply go onto amazon or whatever and search. it allows you to run your ethernet over the cable tv coax in your house "over the top" of any cable tv you have runnning on it. cable uses the first 800Mhz of spectrum on the coax, moca rides above 1ghz so they can coexist. You can extend ethernet from any coax outlet to any other coax outlet. not hole punching, not central vacuum or whatever.
If you do already have telephone and/or coax cabling in your home, it might be easier in the long run to just replace it to be honest. Ethernet sockets and cables are cheap, and don't consume power.
I was looking into MOCA, but eventually I decided against it due to pricing and latency concerns. In the end, I opened up the coax socket at my router, tied an ethernet cable to the coax cable, went to my office (room above the room where the router is), opened up the coax socket, pulled out the coax cable, and voila, I now had an ethernet cable in the duct.
It's not that simple everywhere, We have brick walls, replacing cables means lot of dust and repairing those opened walls... provided you don't damage anything already there.
So here I'm feeling adventurous for pushing 10 GbE over a run of Cat5E for the next decade or more.
True, although if you are lucky your cables run through cable ducts. My house was built in 1935 and has brick walls as well, but all cables run through plastic cable ducts embedded in the walls. Where I'm from this is very common, as virtually all housing has brick (or concrete) walls.
Unfortunately, I bet a lot of this kind of cable is stapled down along the run. And with enough twist and turns I'm not confident the existing wire wouldn't break while being pulled, even without the staples.
And you don't even have to lose the coax cabling. If you tie two ethernet cables to the coax cable, pull them both through the duct, you can then pull the coax cable back in place.
Ya, well, Moca 3 is pretty new BTW, and it's not your mommy's ethernet over coax, you are thinking of old timey ieee802.3 this is full on OFDM modulation over coax, RF'ey stuff like Docis. Fios uses this to get your signal in over your house cabling.
I use it to get my mm-wave 5G 2Gbps signal from my antenna on my garage over the same coax my cable TV runs on to my lab in my basement and have a wifi AP for the rest of the place.
Ya, sorry, I stream but I still like my cable, shrug :)
Make sure you put a filter on the outside of your house if it is hooked to the cable system so you don't create feedback and screw everyone else around you who are using the cable system.
Interesting. I'll look into it and see whether it's possible.
While my highly-tuned Wifi 6 setup at home is honestly quite excellent (even for my competitive FPS gaming needs, and even wireless VR has been brilliant), it would be nice to ditch it for higher reliability.
Problem is, I'm pretty sure my rental has a single coax socket for cable TV (which is used for my NBN internet connection now). I'll have a look though!
Also Ethernet to bridging MoCA does add on about 3-5ms of latency round trip. Whether this is of any concern is another thing, it probably isn’t for most - but it is something to know.
As I mentioned in the top post that it runs over the top of docis which is what the cablecos use which is 800Mhz and below and Moca is above 1Ghz so they coexist.
Yeah fair enough, though I think the bigger challenge for me is that most places I've lived in, in Australia, have a single cable connection point in the lounge room and that's it (for Foxtel). Though I'm going to check!
For what its worth, I saw this comment and bought Moca hardware (ScreenBeam Bonded). Ten minutes of setup later after an Amazon delivery and I'm happier with Netflix / Prime / Hulu / etc. There is literally no comparison on the performance I'm now getting.
I have Fiber to the house and then an Eero first generation to provide Wifi. I also have an AmpliFi HD. And we still had regular (3x per week) problems with streaming video.
I learned about MoCA from this thread too. Placed an order the next day and set it up today morning, and now my desk downstairs has a direct wired connection running at full speed, all the way across the house. This was an incredible solution for my needs!
There is also Ethernet over powerline via powerline adapters. I run these in my apartment. From the router you plug a “host” adapter into an outlet, plug in the ethernet cable. Now you have a source. Throughout the rest of the apartment or house you plug-in a receiving adapter (there’s a little sync button to sync it to the host) and plug in an ethernet cable as an output. Plug that into a small switch if you need more connections. Repeat throughout your home. It’s just as cool as MOCA.
Powerline sucks. It's slow (in most houses you're lucky to get 100mbps throughput even with high end "2000mbps" adapters), and it tends to suffer from bad jitter and latency spikes to the point where it's more like bad wifi, while MOCA is generally pretty close to ethernet in terms of having basically no additional jitter or ping spikes (only real downside is the cost of the MOCA adapters, and that it's a shared link between all the adapters so you're limited to eg. 2.5Gbps combined on all MOCA links, which isn't a problem for most people).
Also, for the cost of either powerline or MOCA adapters you can buy a big roll of CAT6 CMR and a fish bit and run ethernet through the walls (just do a good job on the patches if you're renting).
I have to begrudgingly agree with you. A couple years ago I plopped a couple powerline adapters on either end of my house. They're on different circuits, but the same phase of the panel.
It worked great. I got a consistent 80Mbps through them. I was happy and probably commented here or elsewhere about how they can work, or, "don't dismiss it, it might just be the trick."
Well, now they're pretty flaky. They still work just enough for me to keep using them, but other WiFi issues I'm having are convincing me that I gotta stop being lazy and run some cable to all my rooms. (I even have a crawlspace! It will be relatively easy if I can just get cracking on it.)
I don't know what changed between then and now. Phone chargers on the circuit? That random smart plug I bought last year? My A/C cycling in the summer? Doesn't matter. Powerlines are a hostile environment for high-speed data.
If you have accessible spaces and don't have high ceilings, this is true. If you have neither basement nor attic (or they are not accessible easily), or you have ceilings high enough to require crossbraces, and especially if you only need to make one or two runs, MoCA is very cost-effective.
I've gotten a pretty reliable 400-500mbps over a "2gbps" powerline adapter. Granted this was in small 1-2br apartments, but you're probably dealing with only one coax jack in the whole place and it's not feasible/worth it to run your own cabling.
Imo, in a small 1-2br apartment it's easy enough to run ethernet and hide it along the walls, either by tucking it under the moulding if you have carpet, or using cable hiders.
I'm also just laser focused on good consistent latency though after years of suffering awful cable internet and trying to minimize all latency that I could control (https://i.imgur.com/i84mIsD.png was what it was like during the day in 2020 in the first wfh period. Luckily I've only been getting consistent spikes up to ~200ms throughout 2021 /s).
edit: That ping was on hardwired ethernet with no load as well, and Rogers (realistically the only ISP where I live in Canada because my available Bell DSL connection is too slow) was throttling uploads to 4mbps.
My go-to solution for routing ethernet while renting are 3M Command Hooks. They are remarkably strong, while being easy to remove – albeit a tad bit on the expensive side.
They basically turn all the electrical wires in your house into a giant antenna and radiate broadband noise.
And they do it very poorly, I've never been able to get powerline networking to work well. I had trouble reaching the Wifi node in my office from the bedroom on the far side of the house, I thought powerline networking was the answer, but the link was not that fast (around 10mbit), with very variable latency, anywhere from 5msec to 100msec, and around 2% packet drops. Both outlets were on the same leg of my home power panel, I verified it at the breaker box.
I finally ended up putting up a couple Unifi Nanostation M2's (the bigger ones with the 10dBi antennas) aimed at each other through the walls to act as a point to point network, and it was faster and more reliable. Still not super fast, I get like 30mbit, but latency is a nice constant 7msec, with little packet loss.
But in a previous house, the walls were real plaster with metal lath behind acting as a faraday cage, and I had no choice but to use powerline networking (it was a rental house, so I couldn't easily run ethernet)
It very much depends what band/frequency you are listening on. An Icom TRX could be HF, VHF, or UHF. And of course it will depend where your antenna is.
I would choose MOCA over Powerline. Powerline trips AFCI breakers, is really sensitive to other devices and wiring quality, add even in best conditions seems to perform worse (in my experience).
I use those and have a generally positive view on them, but from personal experience, the adapters tend to de-synchronize, and re-synchronizing them is a pain (first of all because you need to actually access them, but since they are ugly they are generally kept hidden in hard to reach places).
They are also the other issues people reported.
IMO, they are fine in a rental where you don't have a lot of options and don't expect too much, but if you have a choice, use a better alternative.
Powerline networking is a terrible idea. Trying to feed RF over unshielded and electrically noisy wires is doomed to failure, as the signals can leak both in and out. P/L will cause interference to other services and also suffer from interference.
The big problem is that it might work just fine one day, then fail catastrophically if anything in the environment changes.
Oh for sure there’s no way I’m getting those speeds. I don’t have that need though. A simple 1Gbps is enough for me. While advertised as 1Gbps adapters, I get at max 800Mbps which is fine. I don’t suffer from stuttering or packet loss as reported by others. I also don’t have a bunch of RF interference as reported by others. So I’m happy with them and will continue to use them.
oh man this is why i read HN; i had no idea that this existed-- somehow-- and am the kind of person that runs ethernet cables all over the house rather than compromise in any way (powerline SUCKS ASS); and also i happen to currently live in a house with 1.2 trillion coax jacks, but no cat5/6 wiring to speak of, so this seems like it completely solves my problem in the best possible way. i don't know if i could possibly be more excited than this (i wish i were kidding more than i am).
yeah, sure, if i got a bunch of really fancy wireless equipment, that could probably swing it too, but would also require getting new WiFi cards to actually be able to take advantage.
I learn about in the last house I had which was in FiOS (fiber) available area and I of course ordered it and when they were installing it I asked the guy a bunch of questions and one was "who are you getting the signal across my Cable TV Coax" and he told me they were using MoCa so I googled it later and thought wow, that's interesting.
Then Later I moved to this place and there is no FiOS but I have mm-wave 5G (2Gbps) but there was no Ethernet cable in the house so I thought, hey, I know, I will use that MoCa thing, and it worked like a charm, got my signal from the CPE antenna unit mounted on my Garage (best signal) down to my lab in my basement.
I think it is a pretty decent review of the pro's and con's of using Ethernet cable vs. Ethernet cable. Perhaps others not reading this thread could also benefit from the knowledge.
The various people who have replied to you with their own cable solutions is interesting. Mine seems downright uncouth by comparison.
I just ran mine up near where the wall meets the ceiling. When inside I look down a lot more than I look up so the ugliness of the cable doesn't bother me.
Here's part of my Ethernet cable run [1] through the living room. The other cable in that picture is a speaker cable for one of the home theater rear speakers.
You can also just own it, cables are not inherently ugly. I’m not saying go full on Centre Pompidou, but a couple of dirt-cheap adhesive clips in an appropriate colour can go a long way (though not if your walls are plastered). The setup in 8-Bit Guy[1]’s old studio is a good inspiration.
(Sometimes the clips can be a bit too cheap, in which case tearing off the original crappy adhesive and using some of that insanely-strong double-sided 3M tape helps.)
They are sharing their stories because they are more clever than the rest of us.
I had a cable going diagonally across the wall for ages before the SO put their foot down and demanded something slightly more aesthetically pleasing. Now it follows the trim at least.
And if you don't want it to look especially great surface mounted trunking is decent enough and affordable. Actually it is very common here. Small rectangle mounted either to ceiling or floor of the wall.
There's cable gutter kits you can probably get at your local DIY store to make that look a bit neater if you're looking to improve. They're usually stick-on so no drilling or anything required.
There's also decorative ones that run along your floor, I forgot the English name, but they're a bit bigger than the usual ones and can hold a number of cables out of sight.
You mean baseboards? Checking them is a good idea; some do have a space for running a cable. So if there's no need to go over a corner, it might be an option.
If you are thinking about doing this make sure you use plenum-rated cable, otherwise in addition to packets your Ethernet cables will also be an excellent transport for fire.
I’m under the impression the concern is more about smoke being emitted during a fire which would then filter into a room and obscure escape paths.
This is more of an issue in a commercial building where you have lots of people who need to move through potentially narrow escape routes than it is in a home where every major room will have multiple means of egress.
Off-topic but since you brought it up, does anybody ever use builtin central vacuum systems? I have several friends who have houses built during the era when these things were popular but none of them ever use the systems.
Yeah I definitely do, the hose is stupidly clunky but as someone with allergies the big advantage is there's no pass through of fine particles into the room you're vacuuming.
There are systems these days where the hose retracts up into the vacuum tubing in the wall, so you just pull out however much you need and then let it feed back into the wall when you're done.
This is what I have and it's great. I also have a toe kick adapter, so I can use a regular broom and sweep the dust to a little port under a kitchen cabinet and it automatically sucks it up.
I don't have allergies, I just never liked the way it smells so dusty after using a vacuum cleaner inside.
> Off-topic but since you brought it up, does anybody ever use builtin central vacuum systems? I have several friends who have houses built during the era when these things were popular but none of them ever use the systems.
I grew up in a house with one. I haven't lived there since 1998, but, yes, we used it all the time. As my sibling commenter lreeves says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361950), it's good if you have allergies.
I also once heard a vacuum cleaner salesman say (and yes, that used to be a thing) -- we know we can make vacuum cleaners less noisy (drop the universal motor IIRC), but people buy vacuum cleaners assuming the noise == power.
My house has this. I've only used it when something was wrong with the alternative. I love the idea, but the hose is huge and ours has a minor defect where it turns itself off if you plug the hose in completely. Roomba and then a handheld Dyson for details is much more convenient
Yes! Use mine all the time. Strong sustained suction and much quieter. Less frequent bag emptying. Air quality seems better. Hose is a pain to deal with, but not a big deal as long as you have somewhere to store it.
Our house, built in 2004, has one. We’ve never used it. The closet that has the vacuum in it also has some other equipment and is a bit of an IDF for my home network. Strongly considering removing the vacuum unit entirely and using the ducting as conduit per the above comment!
> I wanted wired Ethernet in my office but didn't want to punch holes in the wall. Luckily I have an old "central vacuum system" that as far as I can tell has never been even powered on, many years before I bought the house.
Lucky you, you had a preinstalled system of cabling conduit :)
Before I had my basement finished, I installed a bunch of PVC conduit for the network wiring, so it would be possible to upgrade or add to it in the future.
I once wired up an apartment for ethernet using the old rj11 (telephone) wires. The phones were all run with cat5e so it was very easy. If you're only doing 100bt you only need two pairs for full duplex, leaving two other pairs to run two phone lines. There are a lot of homes built using cat5 for the phone systems with 2-3 unused pairs in each cable. All I did was swap out the faceplates for rj11/rj45 combo plates and rewire.
Of course these days you might just give up the land line entirely to get gigE over all 4 pair and just remove the old rj11 jacks.
Around 20 years ago the Internet suddenly became a thing but you had big hotels that were not pre-wired with RJ45 and the owners did not to spend lots of money running new cables.
One solution was to use the existing phone line in each room and put an ADSL modem on it. They got Internet (and kept analog phones) in every room by just upgrading the endpoints.
Yeah, 1 pair for signal, one for shielding. Cat3 and Cat5/5e/6 aren't the same - but I think you can practically get up to 1gbps over Cat3 - 10gbps is unlikely.
The "shielding" is done by measuring the difference in signal between two wires in a pair -- that's why twisted pairs are used. There isn't a dedicated pair for this purpose.
You need only one pair to run half duplex 10/100bt (contrary to what's stated above), and two pair to run full duplex 10/100bt. In FD, there's one pair each for tx/rx. 10/100bt are very similar in this regard.
The different cable categories mostly relate to the wire quality and the number of twists in each pair.
> You need only one pair to run half duplex 10/100bt (contrary to what's stated above)
How do you wire your one pair for half duplex so it works with commercially available Ethernet equipment? I'll grant you that only one pair will be active at a time, and that 10base2 works with two wires, but you need two pair for 10baseT-HD. I'm very happy to be wrong, please point me in the right direction.
There's also 10Base-T1S, but it's a new specification (2020), and seems limited to automotive and industrial applications, not generally available.
10base2 is totally different. 10base2 is thinwire coax - as opposed to 10base5, thick ethernet.
With 10baseT, the T stands for "twisted pair," as opposed to coaxial cables. Everything we're talking about here is going to be baseT, for twisted pair.
In 10baseT full duplex there are only 4 of the 8 rj45 pins used. In 10baseT half duplex there are only 2 of the 8 rj45 pins used. I don't remember which pins off the top of my head, but you could easily experiment to figure it out. I'm sure it's using one of the two pair used in full duplex.
You don't need to wire anything differently. When you select half duplex mode in your driver it will start communicating over only 2 pins. This sometimes happens naturally with faulty or broken cables, when it looks like the other pins aren't connected properly.
100baseT is more or less the same as 10baseT in terms of pinouts, but at a higher frequency.
The pinout for full and half duplex is the same, the behavior is just different.
If you get traffic on the RX pins when you're sending on the TX pins, in full duplex, that's great. In half duplex, it's a collission and you stop sending your current packet and send a jam signal instead through the minimum packet time.
In 10base2, the RX check is more nuanced, because it's reading from the same bus that TX happens on, collision is only signalled if the RX differs from TX. In 10baseT, I think (but again, would love to be corrected), the expectation is that an ethernet hub will isolate a sending port from receiving its own transmission to the shared bus inside the hub, and of course switches are switches.
For the simple case of two Ethernet devices connected with a crossover cable, there is no possibility of actual collision, but if they run in half-duplex mode, recieving a packet while sending will be processed as a collision anyway.
If you connect only one pair, you can connect RX to RX and TX doesn't go anywhere, TX to TX and TX goes (subject to collissions), but nobody listens, or Peer A TX to Peer B RX and get a one way connection; peer B may detect link up because it gets link pulses, but peer A won't. I'm not sure what Auto MDI-X does in that situation, but it still won't work.
Autonegotiaton usually doesn't do anything smart about failing pins or poor connections either. If you've got two pair connected, you can autonegotiate (at 1Mbps, with the 10baseT link pulses) to the best connection offered by both ends, which will then fail to work if you negotiated to GigE and only have two pairs, or you negotiated to 100M and the cable is really terrible. It's getting somewhat common for OS drivers to detect this negotiation succeeds/connection doesn't behavior and restart the negotiation with fewer options though.
If I have some time today, I'll make a single pair cable and confirm, but if it were as easy as you said, there would probably be a web page telling people how to do it.
I could swear I remember running over a single pair, but it's been a few decades so I might be wrong about this!
If 10bT really does always use 4 pins then I wonder what would happen if tx+/rx+ and tx-/rx- were shorted? I wouldn't be surprised if there's no page illustrating it because why would you ever want to?
If you've got a burried run of two pair wire that you're running ethernet on, but something happens and one pair goes bad, it might be nice to use the working pair, because trenching is a pain. Or maybe you have two pair, but you really want a phone line and ethernet (and ethernet+voip won't work). Etc lots of cases where rewiring is hard, but you don't have enough wires.
Right you are! Twists for shielding, two pairs for duplex - which means that since the 90s on, you practically always want two pairs pr connector to enable duplex (be it 100mbit or faster). Ed: but probably 4 for gigE.
I'm so glad that in my country we build houses with ducts for cables, with two separate duct networks (one for AC power, and one for "telephony"), when it comes time to change technology we just push those spring-tipped cable guides through the ducts and then pull the new wire (or even just use the old outdated wire as a guide to pull the new one). I've installed Ethernet cables and even replaced AC wire (to a wider gouge or more phases) on rentals with no need for any McGyver shenanigans.
I think in most (West-) European countries there are strict regulations/requirements that require ducts/pipes for any kind of power line. When my house was built (35 years ago) there were already regulations in place that required separate ducts for each group, separate groups for wet rooms (kitchen, bathroom) with grounding, etc.
Overall I found the standards of electrical work in Europe is significantly higher than US counterparts. In modern buildings every outlet and line has mandatory grounding, and GFCI is built into the fuse box on every power line for any building that's less than 30 years old. That really came in handy once when I accidentally hit a power line when drilling through the ceiling. I can't imagine doing any kind of renovation work without GFCI on everything.
I've seen none of the problems all these (presumably N American) commenters are reporting, but our power systems are famously much better in Europe. I'm from England but live in Czechia and apart from different plugs everything works the same.
I bought a rice cooker from a Taiwanese woman a couple of years ago and was shocked (fortunately, not literally) to discover that apparently Taiwan runs on American sockets and American (crappy) voltages. Luckily I had an adaptor plug and it seems to cope with 220V mains without releasing the magic smoke.
Other alternatives I've found to work are Ethernet over power (varies depending on how well your house is wired though) and ethernet over coax using MoCA adapters (if your house was previously wired with coax for cable TV these work great)
I've used Ethernet over Power, and it sucks except under ideal conditions. The pre-G.hn versions are quite slow.
G.hn is fast, but all of the G.hn devices I've found seem to use the same chipset (and presumably similar firmware, since the configuration pages have identical options, but different branding), and the chipset seems to buffer a massive amount, which means a single hiccup while using a high-bandwidth application makes the network unusable for a while.
Example: while streaming video over a G.hn adapter, I was running ping. There was a brief hiccup, and then ping times exceeded 20 seconds (!!), finally recovering after a few minutes. I eventually ran a program that ran on devices connected to each side and would reboot the adapter if ping times exceeded 500ms. This made the network far more reliable.
This hasn’t been my experience at all. I use TP-Link adapters and don’t see any ping interference or latency. I think it also has a lot to do with how in phase your power is.
I've used the TP-Link AV2000's for a few years, they're OK for me, sure I'd rather have proper hard wired ethernet, but I also prefer not punching holes in walls/ceilings all over my house. It's ridiculous they get marketed as 2000Mbit though, best I've ever got is close to 200Mbit and I'm in a fairly ideal set up for it. Also, never mix lower adapters like 500's, as this seems to cap the whole network at the lowest common denominator, even when they're not in use.
I use the TP-links too, but sometimes, every few weeks, they fall over and one of them needs a power cycle. I put them on the same circuit so they don't have to traverse the consumer unit to talk to each other.
I could have put Ethernet in, but adding a wire under the floor was vetoed in the interests of not making a mess.
I had the same issue, except it was usually every couple of days they'd need replugging to resync. Only regret from running ethernet recently (yes, it was messy) is that I didn't do it 10 years ago.
It’s the AV1000s. I don’t seem to have the issues you all are reporting with them. No packet loss. No latency beyond a reasonable 1ms. My apartment’s power lines are clean, properly grounded, and perfectly in phase I guess.
I ran a set of TP-Link powerline at my last 2 places: in both, I rented a room in shared flats (apartments).
In the first I got a very poor intermittent wifi over 3 floors from my landlord's wifi: 2-5 Mb/s if that. With powerline I got a consistent 60-70 Mb/s.
Yes, they needed rebooting regularly, but it was totally worth it.
2nd place, here in Prague, I bought new units, because the tech had updated. My old landlord still uses my old setup as a wifi repeater, over 4Y later.
New place, my flatmates had put Ethernet across the floor, so it was in very poor shape: walked on, trapped in doors, insulation frayed, etc. Connection was very intermittent.
In that place, powerline allowed me to remove the messy dangerous ugly cable and gave me a steady reliable 200-250 Mb/s connection.
I think the complaints here may be from Americans who are famous for having mains power like wet string, running at half the voltage of the rest of the world. Across Europe it's all 220V, with mandatory earth (ground) pins, and every dwelling is on a separate ring main, so nothing your neighbours do affects your home and there is zero leakage.
Also, electric kettles work, and as I run on tea, that's important. :-D
Really the G.hn PL modulation seems more than adequate, but the behavior when conditions change is incredibly poor; if I had time, I'd find a "sufficiently noisy" appliance, some romex and run them all together. TCP and many video streaming sites are quite good at handling variable bandwidth, but the G.hn seems to turn that into variable latency, which is terrible. The people who design these are presumably not idiots, so I'd like to know why treating noise like congestion isn't sufficient...
Note that Ethernet over power should also work on coax, or really any other cable. (connect adapters to the wire and feed it with eg. 48V power supply)
Not really the newer ones use the 3 wires (phase, neuter and earth). I have one and reach 400-600Mbps in a really old building with really long and shitty cabling. Ping is 5ms more than pure Ethernet though.
Hard to compare what "crazy" expensive is but I bought a pair of these for $90 https://amazon.com/dp/B01MRV4WA1. For the 3 places in my house I wanted to wire with Ethernet, I was done under $300. Patching drywall, paint touch-ups, new cables, and the overall time and headache would have cost a lot more. I was done in a matter of minutes using old coax and these adapters.
In my case, I didn't build a MoCA network, just used these devices point-to-point. If you go full MoCA, think of it like a distributed hub - no switching, no routing, no security. In fact you should put filters to prevent neighbors from listening in using their own MoCA adapters. For me, point-to-point worked. YMMV but Ethernet over Coax is definitely worth looking into for upto 1gbps speed, which is plenty for wifi, netflix etc.
> Who knew that inbound cable internet has outbound data capability?
The physical medium isn't directional, so there's no reason to assume it would not transmit and receive. A coax cable is equivalent to three wires with better isolation from the environment (and with one "wire" usually used for ground).
There's an asymmetry in commercial broadband over coax, but Im not sire why that is precisely. Perhaps someone familiar with DOCSIS etc. could say.
It's true but you might not need that many. Our house was built in 2000 and every room is wired with coax but no ethernet. With some strategic placement I was able to get a hardwired switch in my office + two hardwired wifi APs with just two MoCA adapters - $300 well spent.
It would be pretty expensive to turn every coax run in my house into a hardwired ethernet switch but well placed hardwired APs obviates the need to do that.
In my case I used just a single pair of them to get wired Gigabit up to my second floor from the basement. Based on my layout and needs that got me everything I couldn't easily handle with Ethernet runs.
Ethernet runs are cheaper in parts, but MoCA adapters are crazy effective at avoiding large drywalling jobs.
Reminds me of my dad who connected to ISP through antenna made out of Pringles can. Surely he found a recipe somewhere but everybody was in awe regardless.
Around here, the cable installers nail the cables around the outside of the cheap houses and just punch holes through the walls to access the interior.
I have a fairly modern house (built mid 2000's) but for some reason wasn't built with ethernet; what was there was phone and coax cable lines, going through these yellow PVC tubes embedded in the wall.
In theory it would be a matter of tying an ethernet cable to an existing coax cable and pull through, but in practice, eek. I don't believe those lines are continuous, or there may be debris or kinks in it somewhere in the wall. In the end it took an electrician half an hour and an improvised cable pump to get it through.
I recently did some renovation work and the house had unused telephone (and COAX cable) wiring running to most rooms. Decided they would probably remain unused forever, so I replaced everything with cat6. You can usually use the old cables to pull through the new one. It's a bit of a chore and may require some specialised tooling for certain outlet brands/types, but it's so nice to just have ethernet outlets everywhere.
The great thing is you can upgrade the cable in future for newer technologies (eg. over a decade ago I bought used Mellanox equipment cheaper than 10G and ran fiber drops).
Depending on your wiring, the performance can be terrible.
I have one of these, advertised as 2000Mb/s but actually doing about 80, and in a small apartment. Every 6 months or so it connects to my neighbour's system without me doing anything.
Yes, in principle. In practice I found all the TP-Link ethernet-over-power equipment I used to use to me even less reliable than the WiFi I was trying to supplement. It would work fine for a while, then just lose sync, and I'd have to go round unplugging and replugging everything to get it to sync again. In the end I ran cat-6, but it took me a long time to conclude it was worth the effort. Now my only regret is I didn't decide to do it 10 years earlier.
I tied a ping pong ball to a piece of string and used a vacuum cleaner to suck it through the pipes, then used the string to pull a stronger rope and then the Ethernet cable. So now my Ethernet goes from my office to the wireless router via the vacuum ducting.