Hacker News Reader

Comment by beeandapenguin | Hacker News Reader

Depending on how far apart your rooms are, it's not too difficult to wire up a long, flat ribbon ethernet cable[1] between rooms. They usually come with clips to help install it cleanly as a fixture. Then you can just connect it to a separate switch/WiFI access point in the other room and have the same connection speeds. However, if you have two WiFI access points, you'll likely run into radio interference if they don't have mesh capabilities.

I use an 100ft cable to go from living room to basement, and have an mesh AP for each. The Eero devices are relatively affordable compared to Ubiquiti for how powerful they are, if you want a seamless experience using multiple WiFi APs.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Ethernet-Cable-White-Connectors/d...

View on HN

I finally put all my network gear/rack in the garage, where the cable and fiber are, then proceeded to run an outdoor ethernet cable to my office with a small ubiquity PoE switch.

Before that I was running a flat ethernet cable (like you suggested) and tucking it between the carpet and the wall making it invisible for the most part.

Wifi is good in the house, but the speeds I get on wired just blow it out of the water.

This is sensible advice. They are very convenient.

However I will clarify that although you can get great speeds with a flat Ethernet cable (thanks to modern manufacturing?), you must not use these to carry power.

I want to make this clear because first cables tend to describe themselves as Cat6 or whatever. This may be close enough in terms of signal/speed, but these don't use a thick enough wire guage to do PoE (Power over Ethernet), let alone PoE+.

(I am reasonably sure real Cat6 cables must support at least PoE, but it is hard to be certain when standards are behind paywalls.)

For smaller draw devices it may work fine. I powered 2 Unifi ac lites via Poe with a 25ft and 50ft flat Ethernet cable for a couple years, no problems.

I am glad that worked for you. The reason I flag it is: it may silently appear to work, but be heating up the cables without you realising it.

Oh no, yeah I made sure that wasn’t the case with my setup. Monoprice 30awg flat Ethernet cables in 25-50ft with a 6.5w power draw from the devices, no heat at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com