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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

I had the same thing in the house I bought, it was a nice surprise… there were 6 different phone jacks around the house in great locations for Ethernet (WiFi access points or just for a computer), and they all led down to the furnace room where they attached to a punch-down panel (basically they were all spliced into each other.)

To my surprise they were all cat5 cables. With the house being built in 2003 this was surprisingly forward-looking.

I capped all the cables that were on the punchdown panel and put a switch in there instead, and replaced all the wall jacks with RJ45, and bam, working gigabit around the house, including PoE for my WiFi access points. Still haven’t had to punch any holes in the walls.

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Same; this was the nicest unexpected surprise about buying this place.

Condo built in 2006 with cat5 . Two bedrooms + living room all wired with rj11 phone jacks. Just snipped those off, wired up rj45, and attached the other ends in my utility closet to a patch panel with rj45 as well.

I don't know if it's just cat5 or 5e, but it saturates a 2.5Gbe link and in-wall cable length is about 15-25 meters.

And you're lucky with that build time, if it was more recent it'd probably be CCA or even CCS. When we redid our place a few years ago I went and bought a drum of plenum cable and told the electricians to use that, so I know what went in there. Overprovisioned slightly but who cares, I had a whole drum of cable and a 48-port switch so may as well use it all.

My mother moved into a retirement village a while back and I was pleasantly surprised to find Ethernet jacks in every room, in some cases more than one. There was no patch panel or anything which was a bit odd, maybe hidden in a service cupboard, but initially I just needed to get a connection from the router to the bedroom and established that these two jacks there were connected. Hooked it up, nothing worked no matter what I did.

On the next visit, with diagnostic gear to look at the wiring map, I found out that the Ethernet jacks were wired up for phone lines. Some genius had decided to run Ethernet to every room, with RJ45 wall sockets, but wired it up for phone lines, so it was simultaneously unusable for either phones or networking.

The only problem with this is that for some god-afwful reason, anything built before the 2010s (?) placed electrical and phone sockets at hip level instead of ankle level. So you're staring at ugly sockets all day.

So sadly you still have to punch holes.

Then again, it isn't that much of a bother if all you have to do is punch a lower hole, relocate the socket and then plaster both holes up and repaint. Especially if you make it a weekend job to do the whole house at once. Or rather, the way I look at it is that it's a weekend job that will improve how the house feels for decades. Doing blind wiring (gutters) for all the ceiling lights falls in the same category.

I think electrical/phone sockets were placed at that level because many telephones were designed to hang on the wall (docking onto and covering up the faceplate) for easy access. My childhood home had one that we used this way before we got a landline.

You can always put a blank plate over the old one and save yourself a mess of plastering.

Make it several weekend jobs are you get multiple lots of kudos from the wife :-).

Alas my 2009 condo conversion was wired with coax to every room instead. I've been using the coax drops to pull Ethernet cables.

Ahh! Don’t replace your coax with Cat5e/6! Coaxial cable has excellent noise rejection—better than Cat5e.

Instead, get a MoCA adapter like this one [1]. You can get 2.5Gbps over coax!

[1] https://a.co/d/e2FYGWj

I was resigned to running cat6e up three floors because there was only coax and I needed a wifi AP up there. Came across the moca solution and it's great. I get flawless 2.5gbe from the basement switch to the third floor over coax. It's basically a little device that connects at each end of the coax and cat6 goes in and out.

Cat 6 would be better though so I could run POE from the basement switch to power the wifi AP, and instead I need to go do a much more complicated switch (cat6) -> moca adapter + power brick to power moca adapter -> coax -> moca adapter + power brick (cat6) -> POE injector (with power brick) -> wifi AP. SO I'm adding at least three power bricks to the setup, which is annoying. Otherwise it would be one cat6 drawing POE from the switch and powering the AP.

You can run power over coax! You can buy power-injecting splitters that were used to power old analog cameras. They basically just connect the cable to the 12V, sometimes directly but usually through some current-limiting safety switch.

MoCA devices have a 100 Ohm internal resistor at the end to limit the cable echoes, so they are not affected by the DC on the cable.

+1 on MOCA 2 being excellent to solve gaps in wiring. We bought a 6000 sqft 2001 house built with in-wall RJ11, lots of coax runs and some Cat5e runs (but not enough). Due to the size the house, the electrical, HVAC and cabling is roughly divided into two halves with separate electrical panels, HVAC pads, etc.

Unfortunately, all the RJ11 and alarm wiring runs to a closet in one half while all the coax and Cat5e run to a closet in the other half - with no RJ11 endpoints near the Cat5e/Coax closet and not Cat5e/Coax endpoints near the RJ11 closet (sigh). I tried Powerline data and it only works well in adjacent rooms and not at all between the halves due to separate electrical panels. Fortunately, there were a lot of coax runs set up for two separate nets (18-inch satellite and a huge attic antenna for OTA broadcast). So, by repurposing the now-unneeded antenna coax, MOCA 2.5 gbps mostly saved the day by filling in where the Cat5e should have gone but didn't.

Yeah nah

It's worth remembering that UK coax is typically lower quality than that used in the US where these are designed to be used, due to UK coax only needing to transmit terrestrial TV compared to cable in the US.

Also, it has far more potential to improve over time. A coaxial cable can carry terabits worth of RF bandwidth.

I'm not replacing it; I am asking cat 5 to the same jack by replacing the one port faceplate with a two port one.

MoCA us interesting but that's a lot of equipment at each end compared to just a cable.

My place had previous owners who had the foresight to thread the wire through PVC tube behind the wall. This means that when I wanted to add extra access points, it was easy to thread another cat5 through and pull it to where I wanted.

And some cat5 cables will take gigabit speeds even though they’re not rated for it if they’re high quality enough too.

Cat5 is rated for Gigabit over spans of up to 100 meters.

The 1000Base-T spec predates Cat5e.

Oh cool

> some cat5 cables will take gigabit speeds

Especially if the run is relatively short (<=100ft) and it doesn't run parallel to noisy power cables.

There were a lot of tech enthusiasts who put them in.

I know more than a few who did this, ethernet cable pricing had just fallen at some point to make this more accessible.

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