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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

Best thing I did was wire my house with cat6, so my TV, computer, server, security cam, nas and printer are all wired. Its so worth the effort. Wifi is now for a rarely used laptop and phones.

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I had everything wired until a lightning strike took out everything connected to the router (tv, avr, PC). Now everything that can be connected by Wi-Fi is. I also added a grounding rod to the coax service entrance, knock on wood...

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get a lightning rod and some isolation?

Yeah I tried that route after losing equipment over my broadband cable connection. Didn’t help. Next major lightning strike and I lost more Ethernet equipment.

I’ve since isolated my equipment from my ISP’s with a pair of fiber adapters. I’m also on AT&T fiber now instead of coax (but the ONT is outside and Ethernet runs from it to the AT&T RG inside).

Ethernet ports seem to be really sensitive (HDMI too) and it’s possible a current is being induced in them from some other path. I’ll find out this summer. (I live in NC which has the second highest number of lightning strikes in the US after FL.)

Edit: just realized you wrote lighting rod. You actually would need a lightning protection system which is multiple rods properly installed and grounded. It isn’t a DIY thing to install and I’ve been told is not cheap. Also probably doesn’t help with nearby strikes, only keeps your house from burning down from a direct strike.

I’ve also installed a couple type 2 surge protectors.

What kind of building do you live in where this occurred? An older house?

Nope, two story home w/basement built in 2004. It’s at the high point in the neighborhood. I’ve had the grounding rod checked. I think I’ve just been really unlucky. I’ve lost networking gear two or three times (which I believe was actually via the cable modem) and the most recent strike 2 years ago took out circuit boards in an A/C unit, a separate air handler/furnace, one of my garage door openers, and an arc-fault circuit breaker in one of my panel. That last strike was the first time I had more than a few hundred dollars of damage and enough to claim against my home owners policy.

This is since 2004. And we get a lot of lightning storms here in the summer. I grew up in S Florida and I don't recall getting lightning storms as frequently or as violently as here.

If you buy a house before wiring for network was common, you can check the phone outlets. A lot of homes use Cat 5 for the phone cable so those outlets can be repurposed for networking.

With the right modems, you can run ethernet over any spare length of twisted pair or coax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.hn

That's very interesting, thank you.

I have the cat5e throughout the house but in a ring topology as it was wired for phones only. RIght now I just have two points connected end to end. Next step is to think of a clever way to use the 2 unused pairs to support another 100BaseT and create a fake hub and spoke topology. This G.hn standard might be a good way to get even more performance out of this setup.

Makes sense considering you can get (A)DSL over the same kind of cables.

Never knew that was a thing, i definitely need to try it out now

Another (albeit, terrible) solution is HomePlug[0]. I once had broadband installed in an apartment and was provided with a couple cheap "ethernet over power" wallworts. I think the tech has improved, but they seemed to get a massive amount of interference (I think they capped out at like 65mbps?). I think I lost connections whenever the microwave was turned on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug

(edit: just noticed "ethernet over power" mentioned in another comment here. Same thing)

My houses wiring is pretty new and although my homeplug units are advertised to run at up to 500mbps, I get about 300mbps out of them which isn't terrible.

I have heard ham radio types complaining about the HF interference these devices generate.

Where can I buy hardware for this?

Search for "Powerline" or similar on Amazon.

I was hoping for something over phone lines not power lines. Power lines tend to have far too much appliance noise.

If that doesn't work, and you either don't look up often or you don't mind a little ugliness, I've found running cable along the tops of walls near the ceiling works pretty well, and is easy to do. Here's part of my home network cable run and also part of the speaker cable run for the right rear surround sound channel [1].

Where a cable needs to make a turn to follow a corner, I screw in a cup hook. For support along a straight section of wall I nail a wire nail partly in and hang the cable on the protruding part.

[1] https://imgur.com/GVEiubN

Yeah, I have something like that and my wife hates it. It DOES look pretty bad.

Yeah my wife would kill me. Something like this would be good, not sure where you get though. (LOL now I read the watermark, it tells you)

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/43/cc/e2/43cce2542a8cd5c3ca13f3604...

Have you considered CableOrganizer.com? :P

You could hide it with some crown molding.

If you want to do the work, adding in crown molding after running some cat6 can make the room look much nicer if the style fits. You can then drill a hole in the drywall at the top of the wall, drop the cable down between the studs and install an actual outlet. Crown molding usually has a decent amount of space to run a few cables.

As others have said, crown molding can help that. Also, there are flat cables that can make running cable between baseboard and carpet (and even under carpet) virtually invisible.

A staple-gun works well for this.

Staples leave small holes when removed which are easy to patch. You can also use many of them to get nice straight and tight runs. You can put a bit of white (or whatever color your walls are) paint on them to help blend in.

It's not ideal aesthetically, but nice straight lines and right angles go a long way to making it look better. The next step up would be to run some channel to hide the wires, but I don't find that necessary.

Careful with the staple gun. Some of them are more powerful than you might think, and are potentially capable of pushing the staple through the insulation and providing a nice conductor to connect the wires. It has happened to me.

Wouldn't it be great if the default for buildings was to use trim and quarter round that doubled as conduit? Why doesn't anyone do this?

I use copper pipe as my surface-mounted networking conduit; it gives the room a nice, elegant maybe-steampunk feel.

This was one of my highest priorities after buying my current house and it was well worth the effort.

The cable line in my livingroom connects to a modem. The modem feeds into a wifi router so that I get a good signal throughout most of the house. One of the ports in the router's on-board switch feeds into a wall outlet, which connects to a master switch in the basement. I could never go back to pure wifi.

What I find strange is that, like the OP said, the original network was setup for phone outlets... but the house was only a couple years old. Are RJ11 phone networks really still a bigger selling point than RJ45 switched networks? With the high adoption of cellphones and the increasing demand for internet-connected devices, it seems like RJ45 should be standard.

I recently bought a house built in the 1960s. It's surprisingly easy to add Cat6 to an older home as the interior walls aren't insulated. I've been adding drops as needed and it takes me about 30 minutes start to finish to run a new drop.

I'm out the cost of materials (maybe $200?) and the price of having an electrician add an outlet to my "MDF"/hall closet ($175).

Dont forget about powerline-to-ethernet adapters, esp if you only have a small number of devices or dont need full gigabit bandwidth. experience varies, but if the two endpoints are on the same breaker, you can get > 100mbps, and if it has to cross breakers, you can (potentially) still get over 1mbs, which is enough for streaming and basic surfing. Much easier than running wire or messing with drywall if you're not handiman-inclined.

That’ll depend on how or if they daisy chained the phone jacks. You should be able to get at least one Ethernet connection (two ends) but beyond that you might have to get creative.

If you put your modem at the same jack where the first tee in the line is, you should be able to get at least two connections, but for more than that you may need a switch at each tee.

I bought a new house, and for me, this was part of the spec too.

Modern WiFi is getting better, but for some things you just can’t beat good, old-fashioned wires.

Don't forget Ethernet over Power... works great on some houses and you don't need to lay out cables. But if you can nothing beats wiring the hole house.

In my experience this works worse in newer houses with modern (more complex, less transparent) electrical systems, and at best you get sub-WiFi speeds.

You have little to lose by trying, but there’s no guarantee it will work at all, even less work well.

It has improved a lot in the last few years, in case your experience was from a few years ago.

I have a very old house and it works well for me.

I think you do best to have just two stations in a powerline network situation because the contention and overhead of contention control is much less. (Compare that to gigabit ethernet which is full duplex and switched so there is little or no contention)

You can connect a "distant" powerline NIC to an ethernet switch and plug multiple devices into that if they are close together, that works better than plugging in multiple powerline NICs.

Unfortunately new houses have circuit breakers that detect broadband noise caused by arcing. These are good for catching fires early, but will blow if you use powerline NICs.

I have an older house that has been expanded several times, with some rather amateurish wiring. One outlet works, the one next to it doesn't. Slow speed, interruptions that require resets...

Google wifi pucks work much better, in spite of the cinder block walls.

Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel.

Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test.

In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.

Seconded - if you're going to try Powerline networking, buy your equipment from a retailer with a generous returns policy.

The theoretical throughput is lower, but I found the real-world performance for network filesystem access specifically was wildly superior. Never determined exactly why- latency? dropped packets? but 10-20mbps powerline links mopped the floor with 200mbps wifi links, even with only a two foot airgap.

(These weren't label-advertised speeds, these were the negotiated links)

Used this for a couple years since the wireless sginal was weak where my room was, and using a 500 MB/s device was decent. Though a couple times a week it would randomly drop out for several minutes which required unplugging/plugging back in the device. Not sure if it was due to the wiring of the house or what; it seems like it'd be a hard problem to troubleshoot. The Powerline standard has only gotten better though with time. As little as ~7 years ago there were only 50 MB/s devices. They now have gigabit-level ones.

Gah, don't do that if you value your RF spectrum. Those types of devices should be banned as they turn the untwisted electrical lines in your house into a giant set it antennas.

If you have any ham radio neighbors ethernet over power is basically a jammer.

Do they increase the actual power emitted or just create interference? i.e. should one be concerned health-wise if many of those are used? (assuming one believes in RF in these frequencies being harmful).

It's kind of a pointless question. If you believe RF can hurt you, it has no bearing on the fact that it can't and doesn't.

well, high enough levels of RF (ie, well above routine public exposure) can burn.

Sure, and if you stare into a focused microwave emitter you'll cook your brains.

That's like saying light is harmful because looking directly at the sun or a high-powered laser will blind you.

Focused beams are outside the scope of this question because we're dealing with cell transmitters.

I do that because the house is rented and I can't make holes, but the ethernet ports lose connection far more often than I'd like.

I thought about doing either powerline networking or CATV cable. We have CATV to every room and aren't using it. After some research, the speed and reliability seemed quite questionable.

I'd prefer to run Ethernet, but one portion of my house, the part that has most of the devices, is really hard to wire to my standards. I should probably just find a pro to do that run, or bite the bullet and either do some drywall work or put up some crown molding to get that run.

I'm afraid I won't know where to stop though. :-) If I'm gonna do drywall work in the spare bedroom, I might as well pull it ALL down. If I do that, I might as well run some more power circuits, seal the HVAC ducting. I might as well remodel that closet. Which might mean taking space from the closet for the basement bathroom and laundry. etc...

I have an illness. :-)

Nah, you're totally normal. Renovating is like opening a can of worms. No matter what happens, the scope of the project will always balloon once you find out what inside the walls.

Our house has single-wall construction, so I'm immune to that illness. There is, by definition, nothing hidden in the walls. ;-)

Stuff like this, water damage and insulation make me think we are putting walls together wrong. I have no idea what the solution is but this is the pits.

I remember finding out Americans build walls differently than Europe. The stories about finding insect nests in walls sound insane for me to this day.

Well, old buildings follow old building code or none at all. There are still a lot of 100 year old houses here that were built without insulation, and a void is gonna look damned attractive to wasps, bees, and smaller birds.

Interior finish work is expensive, doing it over to put in insulation is even moreso. And to add insult to injury, the low R value of walls is a data point used by siding installers, to try to talk you out of ripping the old stuff off before installing new. Each layer has an R value, dontchaknow...

I use MoCA (over CATV) and it's really solid for me. Price has come down, you can get motorola devices that support MoCA 2.0 bonded which can provide around 800MBps for $60. Latency is in single digits with minimal jitter, compared to powerline, which doesn't play nice with the AFCI circuit breakers required by code in most US cities now, and also has pretty bad latency and jitter.

I also made sure to use a proper MoCA cable splitter, as well as installed terminators on the unconnected end points.

Which single digits? Single digit seconds? :-) Milliseconds? Microseconds? Just wondering... Looks like my local gigE at work is 0.3ms machine-to-machine, for comparison. And at my data center, pinging google.com is 0.6ms. :-) At home I have nothing close to that though.

Anyway: This is a fascinating idea. I had looked a year or two ago and the options didn't seem as good. What adapter are you using? I'm seeing mostly an Actiontec for around $90 each. I need to check my head end, but this might just be plug-and-play to reach 2 of my hardest to cable locations. I started thinking about just running some fiber along the CATV runs (along the outside of the house), but that'd be more of a pain. Especially getting the terminated ends through the wall. I'd want to run fiber since it'd be exposed to possible lightning, but I guess the CATV cable is similarly exposed. Hell, maybe I should just run some shielded cat6...

Anyway, I might just try this MoCA 2.0, thanks for that pointer.

Single digit milliseconds. Unfortunately anything ethernet over X will have latency due to the underlying medium.

I don't recommend Actiontec, I had a fairly expensive adapter go bad on me after about a year. I replaced the other ones with Motorola MM1000, which are much more reliable in my experience, and I found for $60.

Thanks, I saw some references to the Motorola, and I've had pretty good luck with their gear in the past (15 years of Surfboards after a cable tech recommended it as having fewer issues than the others). But when I searched pretty much all that came up for my string was the ActionTec.

No one here has heard about Ethernet over Coax?

MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) http://www.mocalliance.org/

MoCA 2.0 allows theoretical speeds of up to 500 Mbps (1 Gbps if bonded). This allows real world speeds of 1/2 to 2/3 of that.

Many houses have cable outlets.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2950015/powerline-vs-moca-wh...

Everything old is new again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5

But no, I hadn't heard of it. (I realize the impedance and signaling is obviously different.)

MoCA adapters are much more expensive compared to typical Ethernet adapters in general but work in a pinch. I've moved frequently and have lived in older houses so I'm now armed with two different powerline Ethernet adapters, a pair of bonded MoCA 2.0 adapters (one is already included if you have a STB from a cable provider technically but the Ethernet port on it may not be a passthrough or bridge connection), and a Ubiquiti based setup. While the best option outside of direct CAT5+ cabling is the MoCA adapter setup, I'm disappointed that in most older homes with pretty awful wiring I can still only get 600 Mbps maximum. I know it's the house's cabling because in my previous house I used the same adapters and got a clear 850 Mbps for a slightly longer cable distance. Sometimes a signal booster [1] helps but tends to boost the wrong frequencies if you buy the cheaper ones that were meant for older, analog broadcast in a home.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Signal-Booster-Amplifier-Int...

Watch out for latency issues if you use Sonos and perhaps other wireless speaker systems.

I used ethernet over power myself for several years when I rented a house, and it worked well for me. Recently, a friend was having wifi trouble (old house, thick plaster faraday cage walls). I suggested ethernet over power, and it worked great with one exception:

They have Sonos speakers, and Sonos just would not work with it. They apparently are very sensitive to latency. The ping times were roughly 50ms (from memory) between the 2 ethernet over power adapters.. I guess Sonos takes synchronization quite seriously.

What sort of PoE adapters was your friend using? PoE adapters should add minimal latency as they just use a center tapped ethernet transformer to separate the DC power from the AC ethernet signal.

He's talking about Powerline networking, not PoE.

Powerline networks (Powerline AV and g.hn) send ethernet through the electrical wiring.

Of course! I'm so used to PoE that power line networking didn't cross my mind. Thanks for the correction.

One time I tried using these. The internet worked fine but connections to other things on my network was very intermittent. I found out that I was switching between my own router and my neighbor's. The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines.

I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.

I don’t understand, what you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense. Were they also using Ethernet over power devices? Even so they typically have a setup process that negotiate the encryption keys between devices in your own home.

> The signal was traveling out of my house and into my neighbor's over the power lines. I do not recommend Ethernet over Power any more.

For what it's worth, you could turn on the built-in encryption within most Powerline adapters. (Usually a button labeled "Security" or similar). Then you can leak anything you want, and still be reasonably safe.

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/PL1200/202-11566-...

Wi-fi has this exact same problem, with basically the same solution.

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