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I had a similar issue but instead I opted to replace all the wiring with CAT5E. I used the old phone wiring as a pull-wire to get the CAT5E through the walls very, very slowly. CAT5E was used as I needed all the flexibility I could get and 1Gbit was enough at the time.

The RJ11 panels on the wall were replaced with RJ45, crimped everything. Took a full day of carefully pulling wires but in the end I got gigabit all over the home.

The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.

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You're the reason why the author's assertion that there is a huge untapped market for this in the UK is probably wrong; most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.

There might be some market for a simple point-to-point device sold by the likes of Argos, zero config and including all the right cables already, aimed at people who can't or won't upgrade their cabling but want to enable their kid to play Fortnite.

But... there is no clear patent protection available, so as soon as someone successfully creates and markets that device, the Tiktok Shop clones will appear.

Pulling cables through walls is really easy for some construction styles and really difficult for others.

Can involve taking up floorboards and drilling horizontally through beams, plumber style. Or cutting slots in masonry with angle grinders. Sometimes there are existing wires you can tie to and pull through, sometimes the existing wires were stapled to the walls.

On the bright side everything about the ethernet wires and connections is trivial. Like demo to a friend in 20 minutes and let them walk off with the toolbox and they'll be fine wiring their house, if the construction style is amenable.

Agreed. I tugged on each phone wire a to see if they were free. And I got lucky on all of them.

One of the problems I had was a kinked conduit where concrete was poured on top, or at least that is what I assumed. Was a bit difficult to get the “knot” (where the phone wire was connected to the CAT5E) through that spot.

The twisted pair (should be two but one pair is broken...) installed in the 60s in my home are so stuck you will never, ever, get those out without ripping the wall apart. Originally the coaxials should have gone through the same pipes, as there should be enough space, but there is so much gunk in there it was impossible and they layed out a new tube though the floors and ceilings in the corner. For fun and because institutional knowledge is for suckers, they tried the same with fiber and simply gave up so now we are in limbo because computer says we have fiber but we don't.

In the 70's house I bought, some of the coax and power was literally cast into the concrete.

most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.

"Technical" isn't the issue. 200 year old stone houses are the issue. If you can't punch through it with wifi (and thus have this issue), I expect you're not going to be able to poke a cable through either.

For an example, to get from my house router to my office, you'd need to punch through a 3 foot cobble & mortar wall, trench across 30 feet of poured concrete (and tidy it up somehow), punch through another 3 foot thick stone wall, then "pull cable" up to the office. There's an old phone line from A to B that went in 30 years ago when the place was first renovated, but you can tug on it all you like and it's not going anywhere.

If I'd seen this article a few years ago, my life would have been a lot easier.

Maybe cut a slit across your concrete driveway with a diamond concrete saw and drop fiber in, seal with some polymer afterwards?

Yeah, it'd have to be something like that, and nomatter how well you did it, it'd be noticeable.

Fortunately, (as I mentioned in another thread,) I got a powerful enough point-to-point wifi connection to blast through the stone walls and get decent results.

The holes are already made if there are phone cables going in every room. The idea is to reroute ethernet cables through the same holes and guides and replace the sockets.

It is the same when fiber is installed in an old house, you usually reuse tv antenna/phones entries/guides and exit holes.

With old houses you may also have restrictions on what you can do. BT send some to my friends' house every so often to upgrade to FTTP. They say they are going to drill through walls etc. until its pointed out the building is grade II* listed and there are rules and permissions needed at which point they go away.

> most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.

It's really not that simple when you realize that the average UK flat has 3+ sockets and the average house has 5+ sockets (speaking from my own experience). Some daisy chained and some direct.

Besides, a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.

> a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.

Nobody's going to complain about a backwards-compatible upgrade (you can put phone sockets back when you leave - nobody has to know there's cat 5/6 behind it).

Yeah but if you fuck it up it's a much bigger deal

You can ask a pro to do it if you aren't confident enough. It is not an expensive task.

One of the big problems with pulling cable in the UK is the abundance of solid internal walls. Running cabling in my house involves lifting floorboards or drilling through multiple 2ft thick stone walls. It’s worth doing while you’re there but so destructive if you’re not

> The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.

Unlikely, they’ll probably be delighted that you went to the effort at all. While not ideal, Cat5e is usually good enough for 10 gigabit over shorter lengths. It’s not unusual for it to work perfectly on wires as long as 20 or 30 metres.

I am curious if you have some tricks for attaching pull-wire and CAT cable. Also, did you use any lubricant for the CAT?

I tried the same approach to replace COAX cable with CAT but the tie just broke off like 10cm before the socket exit [1], and CAT is stuck there now.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/myW6IIq.jpeg

Relatively successful was slotting the cat5 jacket, cutting off two or three of the pairs, twisting/tying the remaining pair to the old wire, then sliding the jacket back over the join before wrapping in a conservative amount of electrical tape. You want the join to be similar width to the cable and preferably flexible.

I have a suspicion that pulling fishing line first is the right play if you can manage to connect it to the old wire. Flexible, very high tensile strength, small.

In addition, in one room I ran two CAT5E cables as there was conduit along the entire way. So I took a CAT5E cable double the length of the conduit, stripped the outer sheath in the middle, folded the cable to get a loop and then attached the phone cable to that using the individual inner wires. Plus tape.

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