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Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV.

Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency.

We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.

So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.

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> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous

How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.

I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.

The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.

I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.

Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.

Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.

Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?

Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.

In that's your usecase, it's better to save yourself the hassle and just set up good WiFi

If you get old equipment to go with your old cabling, ethernet is not necessarily switched. 10 and 100 can be run as a shared medium.

Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.

Worth trying on a shorter run of CAT3, yes. Worth trying on a standard untwisted two pair phone line? Nope. Good luck getting even 5meters.

20Mb/s is enough? Is this a joke? A single youtube full HD stream can reach 7Mb/s. Literallywatching a youtube movie and doing something else will saturate that link. In fact I think it's so low it will negatively impact basic website loading time. Just going to reddit.com loads 18.2 MB of resources. This will take about 8 seconds on your "useable for everything".

My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists?

Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No.

Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely.

Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.

> No patience.

Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?

20Mb/s isn't 20mbps.

That’s exactly what it is. 20MB/s isn’t 20mbps, it would be 160mbps.

I always thought Mb/s meant megabytes and mb/S was megabit

20Mb/s is twenty megabit per second. Twenty megabyte per second is 20MB/s notice that the b must be capitalized for byte instead of bit.

20 Mb/s is terrible. Sure, it'll work in some sense, but I'd go mad if that's the best I could get. A good wifi setup is way better than a cabled 20 Mb/s unless you absolutely need consist and better latency for some reason.

Doesn't a modern Wi-fi still has worse ping than CAT4 cable?

He said hard to reach places. If an old house has CAT4 in the basement, I'll take the lower pings, reliability, and at worst I'll WebDAV. Unless your home server is in the basement I can't see a normal realistic scenario where the data transfer isn't sufficient.

My 4k blu ray rips range between 60 and 100 GB. These would not even be close watchable over 20mb/s.

Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.

Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. I don't transfer 60gb blurays daily so it doesn't matter to me.

1. It's not enough when you're on an active connection doing other things at the same time as the video. Live streams at full quality will use a third to half of 20Mbps and demand very little interruption. Loading a single page with a few images can interfere. And even dedicated 20Mbps, with tightly encoded content, can be too little for 4k.

2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.

Maybe 720P, but I've got 4k Blu ray movies that have peaks of over 200Mb/s when streaming and my device always stutters over those sections.

20mb/s is not sufficient for 4k video unless it has been bitcrushed to death. And even then, you are assuming a given network only has a single user.

Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.

> Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video.

On a 120" display?

This feels exactly like "I don't have ethernet cards capable of 100Mbps so scp can't copy files faster than 10Mbps is not OpenSSH's problem".

Can't tell if serious or not so bravo.

On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.

Same. I spent a good amount of time in our house the first fall setting up PoE cameras, which involved much time crawling around the attic. Hell of a workout and can be unpleasant but extremely doable.

Mask, Gloves and a Long Sleeved shirt and it's all good.

Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.

I've always wondered if that's the old glass insulation itself, or the accumulated mouse-poop-dust embedding itself in the microscratches and freaking out your immune system.

From the one time I blew in insulation without wearing a full Tyvek suit, I am confident is answering that it's the glass. That was an itchy lesson.

(I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mouse poop factor along for the ride after long enough, though)

A lifetime of accumulated pollen/dirt/mousepoop does add some extra fun though in my experience.

The reason fiberglass is itchy is because it’s piercing the epidermis. It’s basically a pad of brittle micro hypodermic needles. Add those two together, and it gets extra fun.

Agreed. It's not rocket science.

Unless you're mobility limited, everything in an attic should be accessible.

The main considerations are:

   - Do work when it's cold outside. Do not be up there when it's warm and sunny
   - Wear a breathing mask. N95 / painter's mask works fine. Glass insulation particles aren't lethal, but also aren't stuff you want in lungs
   - Think twice. Then move. Slowly. And feel you're standing on something stable before fully transferring your weight
   - Mind your head. The roof plywood will likely have roofing nails sticking through
   - Bring 2 lights, preferably one lantern-type. That way you can leave one en route

If it's blown insulation, you can sweep it over and expose joists to stand on.

They're regularly spaced from the exterior wall to an interior beam, all running the same direction, and the support boards up to the roof will run down to one.

I actually brought up an old LED rope that I wasn't doing anything with and just left it there unplugged for future needs. Probably will be dead by the time I need to work up there again, haha.

That's a damn good idea.

I wired a string of LED lights for a friend (with outlets), but I figured the electronics in them would eventually fry.

I wouldn't be surprised if attics in the southeast get up to 140F in the summer.

Rope lighting would be cheap and semi-insulated.

it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.

My most interesting ethernet run:

My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.

SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.

It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.

You can hire someone to run the cable for you, it's not a terribly hard job. The most expensive part is getting out there.

So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable.

Drones is overthinking it.

> So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable

That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free.

I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge.

A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof.

The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them.

So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.

Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.

They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.

> Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.

> They have expenses, fuel, insurance.

I think you missed important details in their post:

>> tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes

>> tasks that are near them

The idea is, you're someone handy with equipment, and someone down the block wants lights installed. So you walk there with a couple tools on your hand, spend 5 minutes doing it, and earn (say) $20. Instead of just sitting at home and watching TV when you're bored. If you don't feel like it then you just don't take the offer up.

This is not meant to be an alternative to your day job. It's just intended to be something extra you can do when you're home anyway. If transportation and fuel and other costs would factor in then you just wouldn't do it.

It's in no way insulting, it's an opportunity for anyone that wants it. I'm not a handyman but I'd definitely do this from time to time if (say) my neighbors needed computer or coding help for a few minutes.

You shouldn’t do electrical work on someone else’s house. If it burns down and electrical is the cause as an unlicensed uninsured electrician you are going to regret that $20 you made.

Coding a web page for a neighbour is different since there are often no ramifications in the physical world if it doesn’t load or look exactly as desired

I'm not claiming it's a good idea for electrical work. I'm just replying to the points in the comment saying it's an insulting wage.

It’s not a realistic hourly rate given the overheads tradespeople have for things like insurance. Where I live a plumber is $135 for the first half hour and then $135 for every hour after that. Canadian dollars. When the phone rings off the hook at that rate who is going to bother with a $20 job.

For a 10-minute job, $20 is equivalent to $120/hr. If you feel that's too small then pretend they said $40 instead, making it $240/hr. But you're setting up strawmen here. Not every single handyman job needs >$100 insurance for a 10-minute job, and nobody is claiming this is good for plumbing or electrical jobs in particular.

Let's extend the idea to unlicensed dentistry too. For $20 I'll remove your tooth with a pair of pliers. It'll take less than 5 minutes.

Isn't that a felony?

Gosh, I cannot imagine what would be unappealing about the opportunity for a tradesman to devalue the price of their labor and experience the small-but-inherent risk of catastrophic injury any time a ladder is involved in exchange for the chance to pick up a spare tenner…

(Beyond that, even if they’re already in the area, by the time they pull up the truck, load and unload the ladder and actually do the job, the per-minute rate is probably already a fair bit worse than what they would earn from real customers - it may seem to you like you’re offering an easy job at $10/minute, but it’s probably a tenth of that all in from their perspective.)

Haha, I had the very same idea when I needed a similar job to be done. There are many concerns though, as quick $20 could become an evening job (i.e. 3 hours instead of 5 minutes), as some extra info may arise, and you being not qualified enough may think is ‘quick and easy.’

Although in an ideal scenario that’s a really great idea, as quite many people (I believe) may be in need of such services.

Isn’t this just taskrabbit?

Pretty similar, but seems like you want the pool of people restricted to those with the tools, skills, and experience to not want to bother for that rate.

The problem is that work involves job acquisition, analysis, communication, travel and of course risk to self and risk to property. It's also not repeatable so its basically impossible to earn a living 20 here and there.

It's probably not worth it for anyone you might actually want to hire and doubly so for anything to which substantial chance of liability attaches. It might make more sense as a list of things your friends/neighbors/family could use help with playing up altruism angle and minimizing emphasise on liability. You know more like neighbor helping neighbor. You could also hopefully integrate positive things like sharing things that may still have value eg you upgraded your washing and dryer but the old set are still workable or things to do that others might want to share in so its not all a distributed version of your grandma's chore list.

Incidentally a have a great domain used for a fairly half-assed implementation of a not entirely different idea.

(ignoring all the other comments in this thread who are legitimately calling out these are professional services you want and your suggested price is insulting)

What ever happened to taskrabbit anyway?

Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.

And on the plywood, go buy a 4x8 foot sheet and cut it into 4 4x2 foot sheets. These are easy to carry into your attic one or two at a time and you can lay them down as “tiles” that span 4 16in joists. Easy to just lay them down (screwed to the joists) to where you need to get and also continue extending your tiles later if you want to either get further or complete your “floor” for storage purposes. And you can still take up one tile at a time if you need to get access to something like the top side of a ceiling light fixture.

If you ask nicely and go at a not-busy time, larger home improvement stores will generally cut them for you there.

Many also just offer this as a service for like $.50 or $1 per cut. Very worth it if you don’t have a vehicle that can transport a full sheet.

Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.

Fish tape and a cheap endoscope are the tools you want.

Your details are crazy, especially the drone, but the overall concept is feasible. I did this professionally for years.

Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)

Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.

Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.

In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.

(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)

RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life.

To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.

> flopped along the ceiling grid wasn’t professional

In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.

This splice is the only issue, really.

Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic".

Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

Finding a competent electrician these days, for a residential job, can be the difficult part.

I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find.

And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.

Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work).

Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs.

Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)

Post COVID burnout (or maybe it’s cognitive dissonance issues?) seems to be a thing too.

Just finding a contractor or business owner able to think clearly is reaching near impossibility.

Like on even the most basic things. It’s quite concerning.

I'd question the correlation to COVID on that one.

The breakdown of the apprentice model ~20 years ago and now-due generational consequences of that change seems more to blame.

Community expertise evaporated with retirement of folks who have been doing it 30+ years.

And without anyone receiving it... many of the folks out there are "let me look up plans at Home Depot before doing the job" types.

It correlated exactly with Covid. And the folks I’m talking about are the same folks pre-covid. They didn’t retire, they’ve lost their minds, very noticeably increasing in particular over the last 3 years.

This fall is part of a steady escalation.

It appears to be heavily correlated with the insane propaganda floating around too.

You should not be surprised. A lot of us are DIYers, and see no need to pay someone to do something we can do ourselves. Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs. There is zero reason to pay someone to do it.

I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have different values than I so live and let live...

> Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs.

Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.

So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.

I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.

Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!

Worth it, though, and would do it again.

> I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house

I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.

> something fun or more interesting

I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.

I generally feel the same way having spent a lot of my childhood on a farm, but when I started adding up the cost of all the random tools I would buy (now that I can’t skip out to a barn with 50 years of accumulated tools) to complete a task, and the time for the multiple Home Depot runs/missed steps I’ve started to realize it’s easier and cheaper (in some cases) to have someone else do it. Though there are still some tasks I can’t help doing myself just because I enjoy the challenge, catharsis, or I just want done properly.

You are not a professional at everything and you don't know what you don't know so things that seem easy might not be and in fact could have significant dangers. A person that does the thing every week is going to be efficient and knowledgeable. It also creates jobs and supports the economy. A lot of strong independent types are frugal and arrogant and self centered to the point of being a miser.

Careful with electricians and data cabling. Here's why: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tzh00l/dais...

A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.

Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.

Believe it or not, many of us don't make huge sums of money.

>Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.

Yup, which lately is often much harder/riskier than DIY if you already know how to DIY.

> That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.

I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential.

Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e

With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).

If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.

That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:

https://superuser.com/a/1281656

I thought gigabit required all four pairs, or am I missing part of what you said?

They said exactly that.

For typical Ethernet sure. Although there are newer standards that can use a single pair (1000Base-T1). They are very range-limited though and not what you would normally install in your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1

IMO sounds crazy. Can't you just step on the wooden frame instead of the space between them?

Lots of people just lay some planks down over the joists.

Sure, but don’t slip/screw up, or you’re going to have a very bad time (and a lot of expensive fixes to make).

If you’re up there a lot or doing a lot of things, it’s also exhausting paying that much attention. And inevitably, you’ll screw up.

Reading you both...

I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.

Definitely a great move and idea. One thing people frequently overlook when buying higher end CAT x copper cable is the thicker the cable the more difficult (some cases impossible) to attach an RJ45 head/plug or Keystone type connector. Additionally, it can become much more difficult to flex/bend, especially if considering it in an electrical gang box for a face plate. This is why frequently you’ll see “cat 8” bulk cable for not much more than cat 6E bulk cable.

Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.

You can get about 500Mbps at best, which is honestly fine for most uses.

That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down.

Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!

Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world.

The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.

I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.

>Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole

I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to.

I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms.

Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.

If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.)

Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.

Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.

Seems easier to just go into the attic and not step on the drywall.

Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.

We use tennis balls and string all the time; works great.

(We just tape the string to the balls with a few loops of duct tape, though.)

One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls...

But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)

the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.

MoCA really doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everybody always thinks if WiFi repeaters, or Ethernet over power line but MoCA is much faster and more reliable than either of them!

It’s perfect for apartments that have cabletv jacks in every room. Just make sure you are using the appropriate wideband splitters and have a filter at the cable demarcation in your dwelling.

The problem I’ve found with moca is that every time I’ve tried it (3x now), there’s always something going on behind the walls that ends up completely ruining it. Someone put filters or splitters in, or something to that extent, and it turns out there’s insane packet loss or sub MB speed or it just doesn’t work for some reason.

MoCA is really expensive. You're better off just hiring someone to wire the house up. Id

How cheap are electricians where you live? MoCA adapters are around $50/each where electricians are around $200 just to visit + hourly and materials (US, west coast). That's a lot of MoCA devices.

Yes, but you need 2 to start ($100), that's the cheaper version of the MOCA adapters (the high use cost $80/each) that's just one room. It's an extra $50/$80 per room. If you're only looking for one connection, MOCA seems alright, but if it's going to be multiple rooms, it's better (and cleaner) to just do the in-wall wiring.

These prices are also recently reduced. Without them you're looking at $150/170 a pair depending on the version you buy.

https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethern...

I've been happily using the laughably cheap Direct-TV Deca adapters for years now to get 100Mbps ethernet to my detached garage (where of course the previous owners needed coax TV :P), for my smart garage door, wyze cam, and streaming music while mowing. Works like a charm for $20!

Another way to get something supposedly more stable than wifi when ethernet cabling is not feasible is to use your house's electric wiring and run data through that. There are kits which offer data rates in gigabits (although based on a few reviews I read the actual speed vary greatly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...

The few times I have run into these, the actual performance is terrible. Wifi is almost always better.

it's been 10 years but I had great success running internet into the basement this way. Wifi was terrible down there (router was in the upper floor) and there wasn't an existing ethernet cable going down. Of course it wasn't perfect but it was trivial to set up and worked.

Same for me, my parents house had no WiFi signal downstairs or Ethernet in the walls. A powerline wifi extender kit worked out of the box and is fast enough for their needs.

I had a similar issue until I limited the amount of wire between the connections. For example I put one right by an outlet under my breaker box, then another in my garage right where the subpanel is and it improved dramatically.

Mine is, in theory, 2Gb/s. In practise, nearer 50Mb/s.

It also causes interference on my amplifier, although it's a cheap amplifier.

About once a year one of the adaptors loses its connection to the other adaptor, and instead connects to someone else's setup in this apartment building.

That shouldn't be happening, and is a massive security/privacy issue. Your power line devices should be configured to use an encryption key unique to them.

Yep, GP should do a factory reset on both, and pair them. If it stil happens after that, replace them with models that don't have this problem!

I was pretty horrified when I worked out what had happened.

It's from TP-Link, and supposedly does pair and create a secure connection: https://www.tp-link.com/sg/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa8...

How does interference caused by the radio waves have anything to do with using encryption?

Same. It was great 10 years ago, but wifi speeds at this point make the wired through electric lines painfully slow. Even with the occasional wifi hiccup, wifi is almost always better.

Aside from the terrible and inconsistent performance, the bigger problem is the sheer amount of electrical noise introduced into the line which can adversely affect electrical appliances and devices.

Personally, I just don't find all the drawbacks worth it.

I tried this. It kinda worked. It also apparently leaks a lot of ... data? Interference? Something. Wifi seems to work just as well for us.

If your neighbors use it too, you could end up on each other's network

ServeTheHome just published an article about powerline networking

TLDR: It's still bad.

https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...

When I was a uni student in an old house with thick walls these were worth it. My bedroom had terrible WiFi - power line networking got me a few hundred mbps but the latency suffered.

I never had good luck with that. Even on the same circuit, as instructed. The performance and reliability is really quite bad.

I thought ethernet was more of the wire protocol than the cable. I could have sworn that the "ethernet" cables when I first started working were coax, and the article talks about the first ethernet being on coax. Seems like ethernet in modern usage is synonymous with CAT5.

Ah yes, "Thick Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and "Thin Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.

And if a single vampire tap comes loose, the entire network segment goes down. Don't miss that.

And 10BaseT! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair)

Anybody else remember "vampire connections"?

[Ah, a minute late. FFP999 remembers them.]

The first Ethernet was on coax yes. It was also a shared physical bus so the 10 megabit was often shared among a room full of computers. Despite this it felt speedy!!

But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.

Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.

> Despite this it felt speedy!!

When the most common data transfer technology is a POTS modem that can do 56kb/second...

Think more like 2400 or 9600 bps actually :)

True--I was talking more towards the end of the use of coax for Ethernet, which was also the peak of the dialup days.

Oh yeah but then it wasn't really speedy anymore.

At college we used to have rooms with 24 X-terminals with 1280x1024 screens - huge for the day. All on one single shared 10mbit!

And wow it was speedy. Because all we did was locally rendered motif window managers, locally rendered fonts and widgets etc. Windows weren't moved animated but just the border was shown while moving.

Fast forward to the 56k days and everyone was running mosaic and netscape scrolling to pages loaded with bitmap images, scrolling marquee text (server rendered usually) and animated under construction images. It was anything but speedy at that point - lol.

From that point onwards things moved on really fast.

You remember correctly. This was the most common form of Ethernet cable when I was first starting out roughly 3,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

I do this too and it is terrific, literally indistinguishable from ethernet. What’s amazing is you can run cable and MoCa on the same wire at the same time!

How does this work with both? Is there a defined band plan standard that cable operators know to avoid? Do you need to install a notch filter on the line coming into the house?

MOCA modems looks for unused bandwidth

I think it just sits in the mutli-ghz bands. It shouldn’t conflict with cable, which uses lower frequency bands. You just gotta make sure to install a low pass filter at your demarcation point so you aren’t broadcasting your MoCA stuff beyond your home.

You also have to use appropriate splitters that are rated for the top ends of the spectrum.

It's more the other way around. There's a defined band plan, because historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio, so it inherited the broadcast TV band plan. Then digital TV inherited the analogue cable band plan and added higher-frequency channels.

To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.

> historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio

Well, to be pedantic, that is still how it works. And it's how cable Internet works. And it's also how a lot of techniques over twisted pair work, too.

The conductor is used as a waveguide and a very-much-analogue signal encoding a digital signal is what is sent over the line. DOCSIS 3 uses up to QAM-4096, which can encode 12 bits in a single symbol on the line, by using multiple steps of amplitude shift and phase shift, to encode bits. Quite similar to how FM radio works, just digital steps, rather than an analogue continuum between 0 and 100 amplitude and 0 and 100 phase, at the decoder.

This has even started showing up for links within a single computer, now. The latest revision of PCIe uses modulated RF (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) rather than simple binary voltage levels.

MoCa was designed specifically to work over existing coax used for TV and behave with existing signals. The board of the consortium that designed it includes Comcast, Cox, and Verizon. It was basically a solution for "we're gonna need internet in our customer's homes but we already ran coax in them"

When I built my house I ran both coax and ethernet to all my TVs.

It was worth it. Even though I have an HD Homerun, the fact that my TV's menu's and remote work as-designed for live TV helps make things run much more smoothly.

MoCa is just a standard to run the Ethernet network over Coax cables

Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.

You can get ethernet to coax baluns and get 100Mbps and PoE. They're extremely reliable, passive (so little to break) and cheap. There might be gig versions now. They're used to retrofit older surveillance camera wiring plants to ethernet without ripping out all the cables, but don't really care what type of ethernet device is on each end.

If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.

> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room

Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables?

If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.

OP could almost be describing my house. New construction, coax to every room, no ethernet. And the builder specifically warned me not to try to use the existing coax to pull a new drop because it's all filled with fireproof foam/insulation stuff.

It’s always possible to run new Ethernet cable. Just think like a cable TV installation technician. Run it on the surface, drill through walls and fish as needed. Run it along the exterior if needed.

It’s always possible. Not always pretty, but possible.

I develop software for a living, my capabilities at layer 1 are quite limited.

Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right.

I have managed to get Ethernet everywhere I want for the most part though, thanks to a luckily positioned unfinished half of the basement and garage, where visible cables are fine and I can just pop through walls here and there.

> Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right.

Obviously this is always a cost issue (ie it’s subjective exactly how nice it has to look and what is acceptable to pay), but it’s far from impossible to run ethernet or fiber without breaking down walls.

The cheap version of this is having new covered cable channels running on top of existing baseboards and door trims. The more expensive version would be to either replace or carve out space in the boards to fit the cable, in that case you would never see it except when it exits the board to an outlet.

In American homes, cables are typically stapled to the wood frame construction, not run in conduit. You have to cut open the finished wall surface to change them.

Right, that makes sense. I’m realizing now I just assumed conduits were the norm.

If you're willing to put the work in you can use the coax drops and runs as pulling line for cat, new coax (if you want to keep it) and real pulling line (to leave tied at the top and bottom of each drop if you ever need to run something else). Same idea if you have POTS copper run throughout. Most of the time even the ancient drops and runs have enough space cut out for a number of cables since doing runs is generally easier when the holes are larger.

Maybe for plasterboard and timber construction. My house is mostly brick with the coax chased into the wall.

Ah, yeah my advice is definitely for sheet rock/dry wall based dwellings. I think you could manage to replace the coax run through brick with a single cat run though. I would buy and generously use wire pulling lubricant though.

The cables don't go through the brick; they're under plaster. No way are you removing that without destroying the plaster.

This has the nasty side effect of rendering WiFi pretty much unusable too.

Also, check the phone lines. If it's recent enough build, it will use Cat5 (or higher, but probably not) for the phone lines.

Even if not... I've managed to link at Gigabit over category 3 cable of a short distance.

One issue with that is that electricians can sometimes be brutal on Cat5 used as a phone line. I’ve had drops that were basically unusable as ethernet because some of the pairs were damaged, even though the phone pair in use was fine.

Even MUCH older phone lines can push gigabit with G.fast, I have gigabit fiber internet in early 1980s construction that way.

MoCA is great but the downside is that requires two active components. And leveraging PoE becomes impossible.

Also, why not replace the coax cable with UTP? Tape some fish tape to your coax cable, and gently pull the coax cable on the other end. Then ape some UTP to the other end of the fish tape and pull again slowly. Pretty easy actually.

Cable that was installed when the house was built is usually stapled to the studs, making it close to impossible to simply pull out unfortunately.

I'm not familiar with this type of construction. Where I live any wiring is run through pipes.

True but if you don’t care about another power brick on both ends… it’s a quick, dirty, fast and effective way to bring wired Ethernet to every room with a cable jack.

I have the exact situation. Like 8 coax lines in the home but no Ethernet. Can someone point me in a consumer-ready direction? I imagine I can do this:

- put cable modem in basement where line comes in.

- do something that goes from router to into 2-3 coax lines heading into the home.

- have some little box in those rooms that expose an Ethernet port.

I’ve used this model for a few networks and had a good time. Minimal setup and supports a WPS-like security.

https://a.co/d/4aC81NS

See the diagram in this guide: https://www.motorolacable.com/documents/MM1025-QuickStart-re...

Note both the usage of the PoE (point of entry, not power) filter, as well as the MoCA network encapsulating both DOCSIS and Ethernet traffic.

Some set-top boxes and modems are MoCA compatible, but I prefer using a discrete unit.

Oh wow I don’t even need to isolate my incoming cable Internet from it.

Thank you for these links. This is exactly what I needed to move forward.

Can confirm.

Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.

So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.

I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.

I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.

Oh, so you can connect several devices to the same "shared" coax cable around the house?

How is it? Is it really 2.5gbps or is it like Powerline adaptors that are an order of magnitude slower than their advertised speed? :P

I was able to hit >2gbps in speed tests using goCoax MoCA adapters when I used them, but it isn't "full duplex", so you won't see 2.5 down and up at the same time, for example.

I'm using MoCA to connect two parts of my house that I have not been able to pull CAT5 too.

There is a latency hit when using MoCA compared to Ethernet:

MoCA: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 3.24/4.02/4.64

Ethernet: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 0.365/0.461/0.515

Yes. My setup is like this:

Fiber ONT/Modem -> Access Point -> MoCA adapter 1 -> Coax Splitter

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 2 -> Switch -> bunch of devices

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point

the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck.

There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.

I can pull down a gig/sec no problem. Dunno how well it handles congestion or anything but it is way more than adequate for home use.

If there's already a coax cable run what's stopping you from running an ethernet cable alongside it or replacing it?

Because he uses MoCa instead.

Coax runs in residential houses tend not to go through conduits, and often squeeze through holes in joists just barely big enough for the cable. Not to mention that, in my experience, they also tend to involve splitters in the absolute most random of locations.

Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.

I haven't run Ethernet, but if I do the drops will be very near the coaxial cables because they're an easy reference.

If the endpoints have a hidden fork in between, then what you are shovelling in on one end might not be what comes out the other.

Laziness. I’d much rather spend $100 on gizmos than spend hours on a home improvement project. And these projects are never as simple as they at first promise to be.

I just replaced the coax cables. It's actually really easy to rewire: attach old and new cable together, and pull.

That only works when the coax was a retrofit itself, and the house is small. If it was installed when the house was built, it'll be stapled in various places.

I just had a house built. I am 99% sure looking at all the pics I took it is not stapled in. The tricky ones are the ones where they decided to drill a hole thru the 2x4s in the wall about every 4 ft... Now I am not saying they do not do that (different areas have different ideas of what is 'right').

My cables are all stapled to the studs, so pulling doesn't work that well :(

I should've done that instead of try and replace the coax with network cables; they all run through cable guides (yellow tubes), but they're probably bent, nicked and collapsed after installation so you can't just replace the cables through it.

Cool! I have the same issue with unused coax cables between every room, and was planning on replacing them with ethernet cables. In my case it's feasible without breaking down any walls. Does this work even with splitters?

Yes, it works with splitters. Just be careful because you'll lose signal strength on each split, your splitter should have a number on it for how much is lost.

Make sure your splitter is rated for like 1.8ghz so you don’t dramatically attenuate your signal. Cheap splitters will probably cause trouble.

I agree with this. I finally bit the bullet and bought a bunch of MoCA adapters for my house. In practice I don't get the full 2.5 gigabit speed, but I do get about 1.7. Good 'nuf for my needs, for sure.

Am I missing something? Given most residential equipment tops out at 1G isn't coax better than if ethernet had been ran?

I have 10Gbps between my home server and desktop. Is it overkill? Sure, but I do use my home server for networked storage in Lightroom etc so having it be even slightly faster is nice.

MoCA can be useful but doesn't it still encapsulate Ethernet at its lowest layer?

I'm still using the coax for my OTA antenna

MoCA 3.0 actually supports 10gpbs.

What hardware adapters are you using?

I use goCoax adapters and recommend them. I haven't tried any other manufacturers.

https://www.gocoax.com

I actually couldn’t get ethernet at fast enough speeds compared to wifi over the last couple years

with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable

what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?

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