Ethernet Through 4 Twisted Pairs of Phone Wire?

hillbilly1 said:
Hardly anybody runs cat 5e now, it’s mostly cat 6 or fiber. If you use cat 6, be sure you get cat 6 jacks and patch panels (if needed). The hooks are also known as “ bridal rings”.
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CAT 5e is all they will ever need. Don't fall for the CAT cult propaganda and save yourself some money in both the cable and hardware.

Bridal rings are a little different.

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-Hal
 
Joethemechanic said:
Could I just extend their fiber drop with this stuff and move everything to the office? Including their demarc/modem?
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Doubtful the connectors are compatible. However, I was going to suggest that you have them relocate the outside drop to the opposite side of the building where the office is. But I thought you were only interested in APs.

-Hal
 
hbiss said:
Doubtful the connectors are compatible. However, I was going to suggest that you have them relocate the outside drop to the opposite side of the building where the office is. But I thought you were only interested in APs.

-Hal
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Where that red line is on the right side of the building is the existing telco drop. My building is like 5 feet off the property line on that side and it's a bit of an embankment where the grass is, so there is no traffic under the drop.

Right where the service is is an interior cinder block wall running front to back. The windows are the office.
 
hbiss said:
Where the black pickup is parked? Ok, what does the inside look like? That front wall in particular.

-Hal
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To the right of the service mast is bare cinder block. To the left of the mast is cinder block covered in 80's paneling. 2 stories, 4 rooms and an entryway
 
hbiss said:
CAT 5e is all they will ever need. Don't fall for the CAT cult propaganda and save yourself some money in both the cable and hardware.
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I am not an expert but I'd tend to agree, I worked on a project where it called out shielded cat 6 or something exotic and we pulled in plenum cat5e , as it was a plenum and for some reason all we could get with plenum rating was 5e, the I.T. project management person just shrugged and say that was fine.
 
hillbilly1 said:
I know, but I’m saying that’s what most IT guys want as a general rule.
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Sure, they want the latest and bestest. Why stop there. CAT 7 is available and they'll want that as soon as they can figure it out. Then there is CAT 8... then there is fiber. I've been calling for homes to be "wired" with fiber for years and I've only seen one- that was never used.

I defy any typical user to see the difference in their network between CAT5e and even fiber.

-Hal
 
ptonsparky said:
I’d be tickled with fiber to the house.
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Verizon FiOS is the only one that I am familiar with. Just because they run fiber doesn't mean you automatically get gigs and gigs of bandwidth. You get the same plans as with coax, and actually Optimum coax will top out at 8 gigs where Verizon fiber will only give you 2 gigs download speed. And believe me, higher speed isn't even noticeable. I know because Cablevision used to change me back and forth between .5 gig and 1 gig depending on their promotions and I didn't even know it until they told me and I did a speed test.

-Hal
 
hillbilly1 said:
Didn’t Frontier get bought by Verizon? The industrial customer I have has Kinetic fiber ( one step above Frontier, not saying much) and Starlink as a backup.
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I wouldn't announce that if I were Verizon, based on how they operate the old telephone systems they operate in my area of the country. Worst communications company in the region. Not only are people dropping them they are switching long time held phone numbers to cell phones or voip services if they want to keep a number they have had, particularly businesses. I moved my business land line number to a cell phone several years ago.

drive around the countryside and they have pedestals with open or even damaged doors. Most this being left that way by third party locating service companies that do their 811 locations.
 
One thing to be wary of when trying to use pre-Ethernet twisted pair is that techs back then liberally used Scotchlock UG IDC connectors (those little round snap together things). These are fine for old phones, but won't work at all or won't work well for Ethernet.
 
A friend called me in to get some phone over ethernet wiring working after he couldn't.

He didn't understand the idea of maintaining the twists. This is his work, and then mine:

Bef.JPG Aft.JPG
 
hbiss said:
Verizon FiOS is the only one that I am familiar with. Just because they run fiber doesn't mean you automatically get gigs and gigs of bandwidth. You get the same plans as with coax, and actually Optimum coax will top out at 8 gigs where Verizon fiber will only give you 2 gigs download speed. And believe me, higher speed isn't even noticeable. I know because Cablevision used to change me back and forth between .5 gig and 1 gig depending on their promotions and I didn't even know it until they told me and I did a speed test.

-Hal
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Cable? What's cable. I live 6 miles from town.
 
If your in a pinch and need wired internet or LAN to one device, one camera, one printer, (in my case its a Roku I use to stream TV) a cat-3 cable will work and especially a old 25 pair cable like Joe (the op) mentioned he had.
I would not reuse it for the main internent trunk into a building or anything, I would run cat6 for that.

The history and theory behind this all goes back to the telegraph / telegraphic encoding teleprinters days when they were first trying to figure out how may pulses per second you can push thru a copper pair over distance.
Ralph Hartley had a early theory on calculating bits per second (google Hartley's law), I am no expert on the math but some of you might find it interesting:
A 100BASE-TX device transmits on 1 pair (2 wires) and receives on another pair (2 more wires). Without getting too far into encoding theory (way above my pay grade) the 100BASE-TX uses a 4B5B encoding (if I am not mistaken) for each 4 data bits, it transmits a series of 5 symbols -- 100BASE-TX has a 125 MHz symbol rate (or a baud rate of 125 Mbaud) on each pair. Each symbol carries slightly less than 1 bit of information (approximately).
According to Hartley's law the bandwidth required to transmit 125 Mbaud is 31.25 MHz
Cat3 cable is a 16MHz cable, cat5 grades around 100 MHz - 250 MHz (I think)
Another factor is distance, and due to the twists a cat 3 is about 60% of the true wire length of cat 5.

At home my old 40 feet of cat3 to the TV, that I can't replace (or am too lazy to replace), is the approx equivalent of 24 feet of cat5.
Another factor is modern chips are better at sorting out the errors just like wifi has gotten better as this error correction has improved.
Hence I can stream HD video to my Roku over cat3.
So while cat3 is technically below the specs for 100mb lan, and cat5 is way better, in a pinch cat3 works fine for me.
As @synchro , @LarryFine and @tthh correctly point out the key besides distance is the terminations (much like regular electrical work)
So with clean terminations on cat5 keystone jacks, (not even as nice as Larry's) , point to point runs of cat3 can work for the lazy.
 
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I think I'm going to have to just have then install the fiber drop in the same location as the old telco drop, and put the modem in the telco closet, and go from there. I just want to wait until the snow melts. Even if it has to send the wifi through the cinderblock wall, it's got to be faster then the 10Mbps I'm getting now..

What I need to do is start shopping for an old bucket truck. Not just for this. Even changing lights here is a nightmare. I'm too old to be climbing 20 feet up a ladder. Especially with only one fully functioning foot
 
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