Running 100Base-TX network (RJ45) through RJ11 phone lines?

rpg

Hi guys,

We have phone lines running into every room in the house and would like to utilise these to run broadband in each of the rooms through cable, instead of using WiFi.

I understand that 100Base-TX only uses two twisted pairs (1,2 & 3,6) so therefore I can't see any reason why these pairs can't be run to a RJ11 socket and through the phone lines.

Has anyone done this? Obviously I'd have to make up a good few RJ45 -> RJ11 cables but I'd be prepared to do this.

Any information appreciated.

Cheers,
Richard

watty

Distance is much less assuming it's CAT3 twisted pair.


Use the phone cable to pull in a CAT5e?

rpg

watty wrote: »

Distance is much less assuming it's CAT3 twisted pair.


Use the phone cable to pull in a CAT5e?

Thanks for the response Watty.

I'll remove the wall sockets this evening and see what I'm dealing with. Is there a chance CAT5 cabling was used for phone lines? The house is a new-ish build (~15 years) so I might be lucky?

vibe666

rpg wrote: »

Thanks for the response Watty.

I'll remove the wall sockets this evening and see what I'm dealing with. Is there a chance CAT5 cabling was used for phone lines? The house is a new-ish build (~15 years) so I might be lucky?

almost no chance, even if it was done recently. the difference in cost between cat5 and twisted pair is significant enough that nobody would do unless they had to (i.e. a builder or sparkie isn't going to give a crap and use whatever cheap cabling they can lay their hands on).

is it safe to assume that this is all to do with your wireless not working properly on the cisco router?

have you considered homeplugs as an alternative?

they connect to your plug sockets with an ethernet socket on the bottom to effectively use your power cables around the house as your wired network and are pretty good as long as your home wiring is decent enough, your sockets are all on the same ring main (i.e. connected to the same fuse in your main fusebox) and your house isn't using loads of cheap CFL bulbs from IKEA like mine is.

they usually come in pairs, but you can use a bunch of them as long as the extra ones are all compatible and the whole thing is pretty much plug and play.

don't waste your time with the 85mbps ones though, they calculate the speeds of them even more liberally than they do with wifi, so go for the 200mbps ones at least if you can find them.

Jonathan

vibe666 wrote: »

have you considered homeplugs as an alternative?

they connect to your plug sockets with an ethernet socket on the bottom to effectively use your power cables around the house as your wired network and are pretty good as long as your home wiring is decent enough, your sockets are all on the same ring main (i.e. connected to the same fuse in your main fusebox) and your house isn't using loads of cheap CFL bulbs from IKEA like mine is.

they usually come in pairs, but you can use a bunch of them as long as the extra ones are all compatible and the whole thing is pretty much plug and play.

don't waste your time with the 85mbps ones though, they calculate the speeds of them even more liberally than they do with wifi, so go for the 200mbps ones at least if you can find them.

They aren't really an alternative to wired ethernet. They are are however, an alternative to running your own FM radio transmitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3yVu5IfaEY

watty

Homeplugs can work or not depending on your wiring.
If Regulators where proactive they would be illegal.

They can easily interfere with DSL and reduce the speed as well as interfering with Radio reception for your neighbours.

See http://www.techtir.ie/forum/homeplug-plt-comtrend

vibe666 wrote: »

they connect to your plug sockets with an ethernet socket on the bottom to effectively use your power cables around the house as your wired network and are pretty good as long as your home wiring is decent enough, your sockets are all on the same ring main (i.e. connected to the same fuse in your main fusebox) and your house isn't using loads of cheap CFL bulbs from IKEA like mine is.

they usually come in pairs, but you can use a bunch of them as long as the extra ones are all compatible and the whole thing is pretty much plug and play.

don't waste your time with the 85mbps ones though, they calculate the speeds of them even more liberally than they do with wifi, so go for the 200mbps ones at least if you can find them.

The fuses don't provide any filtering and the Meter almost none. The performance depends entirely on the length of wire. The Lighting circuits act as transmitter aerials.

The "faster" models create worse interference. These are ALL wide band transmitters and will even connect using wiring as aerials (run one of an unplugged UPS). They will degrade badly if there are "noisy" PSUs or CFLs too

carbsy

Am I missing something? Isn't 100 Base-TX, 4 twisted pairs? God I've wired enough of them lol.Where did the 2 come from?

*edit* just checked... didn't realise only 2 were used!

vibe666

watty wrote: »

Homeplugs can work or not depending on your wiring.
If Regulators where proactive they would be illegal.

They can easily interfere with DSL and reduce the speed as well as interfering with Radio reception for your neighbours.

See http://www.techtir.ie/forum/homeplug-plt-comtrend

The fuses don't provide any filtering and the Meter almost none. The performance depends entirely on the length of wire. The Lighting circuits act as transmitter aerials.

The "faster" models create worse interference. These are ALL wide band transmitters and will even connect using wiring as aerials (run one of an unplugged UPS). They will degrade badly if there are "noisy" PSUs or CFLs too

you forgot about ruining it for ham radio enthusiasts.

i wasn't trying to save the world, just trying to help out with the poor guys networking problems.

just watched that video and it's pretty severe stuff.

not sure if all the movie studio's are going to feel the same about him showing his downloaded movie collection on youtube tho.

and those speeds were brutal for *allegedly* gb ethernet.

Sponge Bob

I got 10mbits out of 50m of 2 pair phone wire when I was bored one day and crimped RJ45s onto it. FD and stable with no packet loss.

100base ( pins 1 2 3 and 6) can only fall back to 10base. No intermediate steps. The risk is that it falls back to 100mbit HD instead of 10 Base FD so be prepared to overrule the autonegotiation.

watty

You can probabily even use 2 x CAT3 2 pairs (2 cables each 4 wires) exactly same length and run 1Gigabit down it for 20m. 1G needs all 4 pairs, running each pair at 250Mbps, transmission and reception is on the same pair at same time, like voice on a telephone pair.

100Mbps does work fine up to a certain distance on CAT3 (skinny phone twisted pair). I'm just not sure if it's 20m or 30m or what.

Sponge Bob

But a Gb ethernet can only fall back to 100base and 10base, there being no 25 base ethernet standard. 100mb at 20m sounds _about_ right watty, I would not chance wiring the extra pins for gbit at any length as there are insufficient twists in cat 3 wiring for Gbit ethernet AFAIK thereby rendering the exercise pointless.

The powerline ( homeplug) stuff, especially the faster 100mbit plus headline speed gear, is evil. It pollutes valuable radio spectrum. The swedes banned it.

MunsterCycling

Jonathan wrote: »

They aren't really an alternative to wired ethernet. They are are however, an alternative to running your own FM radio transmitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3yVu5IfaEY

What a badly wired dwelling that youtube guy lives in, that is jut plain rubbish

watty

Sponge Bob wrote: »

But a Gb ethernet can only fall back to 100base and 10base, there being no 25 base ethernet standard. 100mb at 20m sounds _about_ right watty, I would not chance wiring the extra pins for gbit at any length as there are insufficient twists in cat 3 wiring for Gbit ethernet AFAIK thereby rendering the exercise pointless.

The powerline ( homeplug) stuff, especially the faster 100mbit plus headline speed gear, is evil. It pollutes valuable radio spectrum. The swedes banned it.

The 1G needs 4 pairs, so you would need two identical matched (type and length) 2 pair phone wires. Since it's "really" 250Mbps and using echo cancellation & Hybrid techniques, I'd doubt more than 10m to 15m is possible.

1Gbps even down CAT5E is impossible at 100m, so natively 1G Ethernet is actually FOUR parallel "bonded" 250Mbps transmissions. It uses high frequency version of Hybrid + echo canceller used on voice to actually transmit and receive at 250Mbps at the same time on the same pair. 4 x 250Mbps = 1Gbps. You need all 4 pairs. So Power Over Ethernet doesn't work.

vibe666

MunsterCycling wrote: »

What a badly wired dwelling that youtube guy lives in, that is jut plain rubbish

there was actually a lot of publicity about it a while ago and i know ham radio guys have been complaining for a long time about the 85mbps and 200mbps versions interfering with their radio transmissions, so it's not all bull.

rpg

Reviving my thread here for an update! I never got a chance to have a go at this until recently (or should I be honest and say I never bothered ) but I did some testing today.

This is the phone cable running through the house. It's cheap 6 core (wire) 3 twisted pair phone cable:



So I put RJ45 connectors on the ends (leaving pin 7 & 8 empty) and tested. Initially I got onto speedtest.net and got about 9Mbps (from a 30Mbs connection) but then it dropped all of a sudden (mid test) and wouldn't come back. I noticed for a split second every few seconds, "network cable disconnected" would flash as if a cable was just plugged in, but I don't know if this has any relevance. But anyway it got me thinking, and specifically in relation to this post below:

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I got 10mbits out of 50m of 2 pair phone wire when I was bored one day and crimped RJ45s onto it. FD and stable with no packet loss.

100base ( pins 1 2 3 and 6) can only fall back to 10base. No intermediate steps. The risk is that it falls back to 100mbit HD instead of 10 Base FD so be prepared to overrule the autonegotiation.

Do you think that the crap telephone cable isn't capable of 100Mbps and therefore drops back to half-duplex 100Mbps instead of 10Mbps full-duplex? Is that what this post is referring to? Do I manually need to set the router and my network card to 10Base to stop this auto-negotiation to half-duplex 100Base?

I'll spend a bit of time with it tomorrow, but I'd be very grateful if someone could help me out with some info. Thanks for all the help so far.

Sponge Bob

set the network card ( in properties) to 10 Full Duplex and see what happens.

rpg

Sponge Bob wrote: »

set the network card ( in properties) to 10 Full Duplex and see what happens.

Thanks Sponge Bob.

Did that here:



Network disconnected, came back on, network speed at 10.0Mbps, and speedtest.net runs a stable ~9.5Mbps all the time now.



It's a 30Mb connection in the house here, but I'm more than happy with 10Mbps upstairs, if I want the 30Mbps I'll come down and plug directly into the Cisco (EPC2425).

Now the next thing. 3 floors up is a room with 2 PC's, but only 1 incoming connection. I have a Netgear FWAG114 with a built in 4-port switch. So I connected the internet port on it to the incoming connection, and it recognises it, but it doesn't give internet through either WiFi or direct connection to one of the four ports (where it would usually running a Cat5 cable).

I know the Netgear has auto-negotiation as a feature, but I can't see anywhere in the firmware to disable it and set speed/duplex manually. Do you think this is why I'm not getting internet from the Netgear?

Thanks again.

Sponge Bob

Nice one. Stable 10mbits and low pings better than unstable and iffy 100mbits.

Older switches used to let you click on a single PORT icon and lock down to 10mbits FD or HD there.

rpg

Couldn't find any old 10Mbps switches around the office or anything - only found 10/100Mbps and none of them would work, or give me the option to change speed/duplex.

So I bought a few of these and connected the lines up directly:



Still getting the same speed (~9.5Mbps) three floors up and decent line quality too:



All in all, a success.