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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I own my condo but have this exact issue. There are 1Gb Cat5 cables inside the cement walls and I cannot replace them if they ever break, nor upgrade them.

Already this is a problem as I have 1.Gbit internet.

Edit: I am silly and wrote Mbit instead of Gbit.

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> There are 1Gb Cat5 cables inside the cement walls

I believe you when you say you can't replace them, but I'm curious why? Every wire I've ever seen run through concrete was in a conduit that could have replacements pulled through it. Did they just run the wires and pour over them?

If you need speed and money is of limited concern, consider fiber. There are some nearly invisible configurations that stick onto the walls, and baseboards or crown molding can be a channel as well. It’s possible you could sneak it under a door, or through a small gap in the frame behind the trim. You might even be able to smuggle it through electrical conduit for short distances, since it’s non conductive (but don’t trust me on the safety or compliance issues of that, I wouldn’t trust myself, though I’ve seen zanier from the previous homeowners here...)

The obvious downside being the extra expense of media conversion.

if you have coax cables in the walls then MoCA is a pretty good solution. (Powerline is not)

also dear god I hope it's a typo and you meant 1Gb

Is MoCA reliable? Just bought a new house and wiring Ethernet into some of the rooms will be tricky, but a previous owner already did coaxial in the whole house.

Extremely reliable, but it can get expensive to have to buy a moca to Ethernet adapter at each point.

You want to stick with moca 2, and there might be some gotchas with older coax wiring, but I previously ran it for years without issue.

I think I'm running into some of those gotchas with older wiring. I've got moca adapters set up between a few rooms and have periodic dropouts on one of them, which unfortunately is the room with my wifi AP.

Traced the cables and the only splitter I can find is a moca 2 aware one, and the coax cable that would have been used for cable internet is unplugged so that's not interfering.

Nice when it works, real pain to troubleshoot when it doesn't.

2 things that solved my problems with moca was buying a moca adapter to filter the signal out from leaving/entering the house (adapter on the primary incoming coax) and then another adapter on the coax plugging into your cable modem.

This fixed some (probably modem specific) problems where internet would randomly drop in the presence of moca.

Right, I'm on FiOS so there's no cable modem, and as best I can tell the primary incoming coax line is disconnected.

There is no such beast as 1Mb cat5. Do you mean 1gb? Assuming the cables are in conduit you may be able to use the existing cables to pull new cables. This usually works.

Thank you, I had a brain fart and meant Gbit.

At condo distances you should be able to do 10Gbps over cat5.

2.5Gbps isn't even going out of spec for cat5 and should go the full 100 meters.

Not always, one link in my condo can only seem to do 5Gbps, 10 will drop the link. Despite several re-crimpings of the connector

Could be that it's snagged somewhere, flattening the twisted pairs?

Oh no, maybe, but I would have no way to fix it. The run is literally from one side of the condo to the other, probably through the ceiling or floor. Or it's wired wrong, (and I lost my LED blinker somewhere :( ) because it's like 5Gb/s down and 1Gb/s up. Which is odd...

With no interference, wifi 2.5ghz can go several km at 100mbits.

What is one meg cat5? Isn’t cat5 rated to one gig?

CAT5 is in theory only rated for Fast Ethernet (100M) while CAT5e is rated for Gigabit Ethernet. In practice is very hard to actually find a cable that meets only CAT5 and not CAT5e.

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