Suggestions For a Coax-To-Ethernet Solution? 608
watanabe writes "I just moved from a house with Cat5e wiring to a house with ... a whole bunch of coax cables. Like, my living room has five coax cables coming out of a hole in the wall. All of them go back up to my attic.
The house is big, (and I like it, thank you), but I have realized that our digital usage pattern (media server + squeezeboxes + remote time machine backups to a linux box) will not work without wiring. I am currently bridging some old Linksys WRT54Gs to the right places, but of course, that slows everything down.
This got me thinking: 100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables. What about a two coax-head -> ethernet jack setup? Has anyone done this before? Searching online only gives me $100+ coaxethernet transceiver type boxes. At that price, a HomePNY system would make more sense.
I'm willing to solder if I have to, but I first wanted to get advice and holes shot in my plan, if there are any."
Use the Coax as a wirepull for the cat5 (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have lots of coax running through pipes and if it is free, then use the coax as a wirepull to rewire the house.
Cat5 provides many more options than cat5.
That's not how coax works (Score:4, Insightful)
Coax gives you one braided shield and one center conductor to carry RF. It's not even remotely like UTP.
Re:ATT Uverse runs over coax (Score:5, Insightful)
Twisted pair, man (Score:5, Insightful)
100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables.
The four wires in your coax are not twisted. It's not gonna work.
Pay $100 for those coax-ethernet transceiver things, or string some Cat5e. Seriously, if you can afford to buy a big ass house then what's another couple hundred??
Use the Coax to pull CAT 5e cable (Score:5, Insightful)
If the coax is sitting loose in the walls, you can use it as a pull cable to thread in replacement UTP cable.
Old Ethernet worked over Coax. I just doubt you have the correct kind of Coax. Also, my experience with residential cable installs is that they tend to have damaged Coax cable, so it is pointless even trying to use it for high-bandwidth applications.
Finally, while it is theoretically possible to substitute 4 "pairs" of twisted pair with 4 Coax cables, my suspicion would be that you would have severe impedance mismatch problems. It might be good at 10 Mb, where the old Coaxial ethernet worked. I doubt it would handle modern 1 Gb Ethernet signals. Also, modern Ethernet expects all 4 pairs to be of approximately the same length, and it is unlikely someone would have 4 matched-length pairs of coaxial cable sitting in their wall.
Just bite the bullet pull Cat6 (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have access to the attic, it may be a full day's work to wire the whole house, but you'll be far better off pulling the correct wiring into place. Buy a 500ft box of cable and the appropriate wall jacks and plates and make a day of it. It's not hard with a fish tape or fish sticks (those bendy fiberglass poles for running wires).
I have been using an 802.11N bridge to connect my upstairs printer/scanner/thing and I have another computer up there with a wireless bridge and it's a pain compared to the situation downstairs where I ran Cat6 to a patch panel in the basement.
Buying all the cable, jacks and plates has cost less than the single 802.11N bridge, and I have gigabit Ethernet for my devices. The wiring is simple and once it's in place it's done.
Re:Use the Coax as a wirepull for the cat5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like paying a pro to run Cat5 would be cheaper than these things all over the house.
Re:Related Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Character encoding (5:erocS) (Score:3, Insightful)
It'd be nice if they maintained a reasonably comprehensive whitelist then. It isn't hard to allow known-good pages without control characters.
Re:Related Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree on the conduit containing Cat6 and the fish line. I'd keep the Cat6 separate and put in the conduit with the fish line though. Conduit is definitely the great idea, but having to run more than 1 cable through a conduit is a lot more work than an empty conduit. And forget running the gray PVC or the flexible gray conduit (outdoor rated stuff). Both are way too expensive and totally unnecessary for low voltage wires (except maybe in a few weird states with goofy regulations). Use cheap polyethylene tube used for sprinklers (1/2") which you can get in 500 and 1000 foot rolls.
Re:Twisted pair, man (Score:4, Insightful)
The extra hundred is probably something he'll have to explain to his S.O.
Sometimes it's easier to freakin' sell the house. :-)
Re:Use the Coax as a wirepull for the cat5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wireless (Score:2, Insightful)
He said the house is pretty big, though. When you start getting multiple floors and a lot of walls and things in the way, wireless performance (with affordable gear) starts to suck pretty hard.
On top of that, you have to worry about encryption and data security.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its uses. But there are also VERY GOOD reasons to want a wired network.
I totally agree with you about the conduit. If you're building a new house, absolutely you want conduit, with accessible faceplate-covered junction boxes wherever it turns corners. Conduit seems expensive at the time, but it's *WAY* cheaper than ripping the walls apart later and then paying drywall guys and painters to come in and fix it up, and it's WAY worth it for the convenience of being able to run new cabling later for whatever purpose you happen to need it for.
Thirty years ago, would you have predicted the need for CAT6 cable? How awesome would it be to be able to put it in now just by taking the faceplates off a couple of junctions and threading it through the conduit? That kind of flexibility is *worth* the cost of the conduit, several times over, if you use it even once in the entire lifetime of the building.
I didn't get the impression that the article submitter was building a new place, though. Why would there be only coax and no cat5/6 in a place that was just built? The way I read it, he bought an existing house. In which case, retrofitting conduit would be a hassle.