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Suggestions For a Coax-To-Ethernet Solution?
watanabe writes "I just moved from a house with Cat5e wiring to a house with ... a whole bunch of coax cables. Like, my living room has five coax cables coming out of a hole in the wall. All of them go back up to my attic.
The house is big, (and I like it, thank you), but I have realized that our digital usage pattern (media server + squeezeboxes + remote time machine backups to a linux box) will not work without wiring. I am currently bridging some old Linksys WRT54Gs to the right places, but of course, that slows everything down.
This got me thinking: 100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables. What about a two coax-head -> ethernet jack setup? Has anyone done this before? Searching online only gives me $100+ coaxethernet transceiver type boxes. At that price, a HomePNY system would make more sense.
I'm willing to solder if I have to, but I first wanted to get advice and holes shot in my plan, if there are any."
If you have lots of coax running through pipes and if it is free, then use the coax as a wirepull to rewire the house.
Cat5 provides many more options than cat5.
and run new wiring? Does the old coax run in channels or conduits?
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Don't even bother re-using the coax.
Use it to attach the end of a cat6 cable and pull the coax and cat6 through.
Just rewire.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Coax gives you one braided shield and one center conductor to carry RF. It's not even remotely like UTP.
this is my sig
Well, 10Base-2 uses coax. I think I have an old hub that still has a coax connector. :)
Tie one end of the coax to an ethernet cable and use the coax to pull the ethernet cable through the walls to the attic.
I have AT&T's Uverse for phone/TV/internet and its set-top boxes communicate over coax. They are using IP over coax, since the router shows the boxes' IP addresses as though they were on a an Ethernet network. The boxes run Windows Media Edition, for what it's worth.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
Why can't you tie a box of cat5e on a coax cable in your living room, then go to your attic and pull the coax (and cat5) up together? Or just go to the attic and fish down cat5 wherever you actually want it?
why not just use the existing coax cable as pull lines and replace them with cat5e?
should end up being cheaper than building out some weird hybrid solution.
Get a strand of cat5. Tie it to one end of the coax. Go to the other room. Pull the coax until you see the cat5. Crimp ends. Repeat.
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hahaha, the second I posted, I hit refresh and there's 20 other people saying the same thing :)
100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables.
The four wires in your coax are not twisted. It's not gonna work.
Pay $100 for those coax-ethernet transceiver things, or string some Cat5e. Seriously, if you can afford to buy a big ass house then what's another couple hundred??
both D-link and netgear make MoCA boxes that can be placed at each end of coax to convert ethernet.
www.netgear.com%2FProducts%2FPowerlineNetworking%2FCoax%2FMCAB1001.aspx&ei=wYN9S4-cOovUnAf_g-jXBw&usg=AFQjCNGap3DaokxxUbp8WxstG9dTTJTKUg&sig2=3YsnMh9tv1myz4zsV6qHlw
If the coax is sitting loose in the walls, you can use it as a pull cable to thread in replacement UTP cable.
Old Ethernet worked over Coax. I just doubt you have the correct kind of Coax. Also, my experience with residential cable installs is that they tend to have damaged Coax cable, so it is pointless even trying to use it for high-bandwidth applications.
Finally, while it is theoretically possible to substitute 4 "pairs" of twisted pair with 4 Coax cables, my suspicion would be that you would have severe impedance mismatch problems. It might be good at 10 Mb, where the old Coaxial ethernet worked. I doubt it would handle modern 1 Gb Ethernet signals. Also, modern Ethernet expects all 4 pairs to be of approximately the same length, and it is unlikely someone would have 4 matched-length pairs of coaxial cable sitting in their wall.
If you have access to the attic, it may be a full day's work to wire the whole house, but you'll be far better off pulling the correct wiring into place. Buy a 500ft box of cable and the appropriate wall jacks and plates and make a day of it. It's not hard with a fish tape or fish sticks (those bendy fiberglass poles for running wires).
I have been using an 802.11N bridge to connect my upstairs printer/scanner/thing and I have another computer up there with a wireless bridge and it's a pain compared to the situation downstairs where I ran Cat6 to a patch panel in the basement.
Buying all the cable, jacks and plates has cost less than the single 802.11N bridge, and I have gigabit Ethernet for my devices. The wiring is simple and once it's in place it's done.
Putting moderation advice in your
You need to transform 100 Ohm impedance of the CAT5 to the 50 Ohm (or 75 Ohm) impedance of the Coax cables.
50 Ohm case:
100 Ohm CAT 5 -> 2x 25 Ohm resistors in series -> 50 Ohm Coax -> 100 Ohm resistor in parallel -> 100 Ohm CAT 5
... and the other way round for for the other pair.
You can use the existing wiring to pull the new stuff (If you don't have another use for it, of course), but really running some new Ethernet isn't so bad, get a long drill bit, some fishing tape and a helper. Also keep in mind that it's pretty easy to go through the wall and run the wire on the outside of the building in a lot of cases -- it's pretty easy to hide CAT5/6. Also you can get patch panels that give you a nice, clean, finished look and not a hack job.
Cat5 cable is what they call "UTP" - Unshielded Twisted Pair. Essentially, the losses and electrical noise of each pair of wires is canceled out because instead of comparing individual voltages, they compare differences of voltages between each wire in the pair. If you try to hook up an ethernet cable pair using a coax wire, you're going to end up with one wire (the shield) picking up the electrical noise and the inside wire won't pick up the noise. This is going to just make not work well. It'll work for short distances (just like if you crimp an ethernet cable but mess up the coloring so the pairs aren't matched) but over long distances of 20+ feet, it is just going to crap out.
PLUS... Dude, you're going to want gigabit eventually - and it uses 8 wires and is even more sensitive.
Bite the bullet - use the coax as a guide and hook up an ethernet jack in every room that needs one. Use CAT-5E cable or CAT-6 cable so gigabit connections will work. And then buy yourself a gigabit switch, and piggy back it onto your WRT54G to handle the internet routing (or buy a gigabit router). Good luck!
-Bill
Simple known process,
desired end result, low cost.
Well, if you have lots of money to waste on very expensive Cisco DOCSIS (cable modem) backend gear, and you are a mental masochist for wanting to configure such gear, then you might be able to use the coax to carry the DOCSIS RF signals around your house.
Think of DOCSIS as kind of like 802.11b/g/n WiFi networking, but instead of transmitting the RF thru the air over antennas, it just encodes networking into RF and transmits/receives the RF over coax cables instead, and it runs at very different frequencies than 2.4GHz.
You have more problems than just selecting 4 wires. Each pair of wires from the 100 megabit Ethernet is a balanced pair, and coax is unbalanced. Also, the coax impedance is probably 75 ohms (if I remember correctly) and the twisted pair is around 120 ohms. So you would need a transformer for each pair to match the impedances and handle the balanced to unbalanced conversion. Finally, these transformers would need to be small and broadband to avoid unintentional impedance mismatches. Like the others have suggested, just use the coax as a pull wire for Cat 5e.
As others have said, it's better just to use the coax cable to rewire the house. Ethernet at high data rates requires a differential and high frequency cable twisted pair. Coax does not give you any of this. There's also the problem that the impedance of a coax cable is orders of magnitude greater than cat5, so you'll either have to have a high-powered driver and matching terminator at both ends or a modem.
All in all, it's not worth the effort unless someone out there has already designed something like that.
I'm surprised no one has already mentioned MoCa,. Several companies make MoCa adapters that runs 100Mb/s ethernet over Coax cables: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=MOCA+adapter&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=2590185696454305965&ei=PoR9S5uIC4mWtge8z5GfBQ&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ8gIwAA# And read all about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Category 6 is better for high speed multimedia, and the small extra cost is worth it.
"And I have four wires for every two coax cables."
One of which is the shielding, and is subject to EMF interference, and one is the core, which is shielded, which would give you a potentially unbalanced system which would give you a lot of errors. Plus there's the issue of capacitance.
If speed isn't an issue, you could always put a BNC end on the coax, and pick up some 10 mbit hubs from eBay with both RG45 and a BNC coax connection. You'd be stuck at 10 mbit, but it's probably the cheapest/easiest solution.
Or as the above poster mentioned... simply regard them as your pulling wires. Attach new Cat5 and pull away.
If you resists against pulling wires, homepna3.1 equipment exists just for the thing you want:
however devices are hard to find
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ethernet uses twisted pairs to keep the signal clean and strong. Coax uses a signal wire shielded inside a grounded return shell to keep the signal strong.
If the Coax is actually grounded anywhere it might really fnuck up what your trying to do. I'd also be-aware of signal boosters inline up at the attic. This setup was obviously made for cable/antenna and not made for data transmission.
You can try it. Get the pin-outs for ethernet get a crimper for cat 5 and coax and make your own adapters but beware of the grounding issue.
1000bt (very good for macs and time machine plus bigger DVR stuff) uses all 8 wires in ethernet and probably isn't going to tolerate a jury rigged adapter even if you have ridiculous numbers of coax runs.
Many of the posts suggest to pullout the coax and rewire with cat5e. My question to the community is why not Cat6? When I bulit a small network in my house I concluded that ca6 is slightly better than cat5e, especially for gigabit speeds. If you're going to wire your house why not use cat6?
If you were building a house today, which kind of connectivity would you set up ?
Since the expensive part is probably paying someone to put the cable, it could make sense to set up both gigabit ethernet and optical fiber in all rooms. Do any slashdotters have some opinion on that ?
The key here is "twisted pair". I'm not an expert by any means, but my understanding is that the twisting design limits electrical interference and noise. Without that, you're likely to get an extremely error-prone connection.
Wiring a house isn't actually that hard or expensive, presuming you either have an attic to drop wire from or a crawl space to move up from. It takes some time, but do it yourself and you can do it right with Cat6, some higher quality coax for video distribution, and more. Look up "Structured Wiring" and go nuts.
http://www.structuredhomewiring.com/
And although I really should get around to installing proper AC outlets one of these days, you get the idea:
http://www.joshuaochs.com/Home/The_House/Pages/Home_Wiring.html#5
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I very much doubt it would be possible to directly send a "modern" ethernet signal over coax. In cat5 cabling, the wire pairs are twisted together, and around each other in specific ways. This is required for shielding. A coax cable does not have the same layout - it is a single lead surrounded by a shield. While, at DC levels, the two cables might behave the same way, they will be very different when you try to send high-frequency signals. And, I don't even want to know what kind of reflection/impedance mismatch issues you will have when trying to mix cables like that.
If you are really feeling retro, you could try to run thinnet over the coax, but you'd have to look into impedance issues to make sure you have a suitable type of coax.
Hope this helps.
Cut the coax and use it to pull the CAT6!
Do yourself a big favor, and when you pull in your shiny new ethernet, tie in some drawstrings so you never have to repeat the process.
How about Powerline Networking? See http://www.netgear.com/Products/PowerlineNetworking/PowerlineEthernetAdapters/HDXB101.aspx Russ
Cat5 expects two pairs, each of which carries a differntial signal. If the wire lengths are too far off (and off the top of my head I would imagine is about 6 cm) it will not work.
(I got 6cm by using (a) speed in coax ~ 1/2 C, lamda = speed/2*pi*freq, matching needs 1/4 lamba or better)
You really can't adapt this - the impedance for this coax is likely 70 ohm (for cable tv) and cat 5 is 100 ohms. You could build a balun, but you'd probably have some weird distance/speed related issues you've never had before. Anyhow if anyone had the parts it would be these guys:
http://www.blackbox.com/Store/Detail.aspx/CATV-Balun/IC448A-R2
I know that's the wrong way, but it gives you an idea of how much you'd have to pay.
First, any ethernet media converters you with coaxial as the medium, are going to be 10BASE-T 10Mbit connections. You will no longer be able to utilize 100Mbit across ethernet. Second, attempting to solder the wires from a twisted pair cable, and pinning it out over 4 shielded coaxial cables, is going to result in an extreme signal degredation and is completely out of the picture as a viable option. The posters above me stated that using one of the original coaxial cable as a base for pulling a snagless Cat5e/6 cable, and that is the direction that you need to take. If that is not an option, perhaps do some research and invest in a wireless setup that will suit your living area.
In summary, please, don't solder an RJ-45 connecter and the 2 relevant pairs to 4 coaxial cables. Please?
If you do, please, send pictures.
Coax would require a different signalling protocol to allow 100Mbps service over untwisted wires. Several companies have developed products to try to fulfill this niche market such as DLink with the DXN-221 which allows around 220Mbps over coax. The cost alone would likely make you reconsider pulling your own UTP cables. There are many creative ways to rewire a house and trust me, its worth it in the end.
Just pull new cables.
A spool of cat5e is pretty affordable. Buy a cable tester, some jacks and plugs, a good crimper and punch set, and replace your old cables with new. Tie on to the existing coax and use it to pull new cable thru the walls, crimp on new jacks/plugs connect to a switch in your attic and you are done. Its not a trivial project, but the results are more than worth the weekends effort.
Run Cat6.
HomeDepot got spools of the shit for OK prices and then there's these guys that the electricians like and they're much cheaper than the big box stores.
As bandwidth improves and since you're using it for home entertainment, get the Cat6.
The easiest way is to get some Ethernet to coax bridges: eBay, Google.
If you elect to replace the coax with Cat5 or Cat6, DO NOT try to pull it yourself. If you fuck it up, you'll end up paying someone else a lot more than if you just had an electrician do it in the first place.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Sure, youre dropping around 100 bucks per drop (less if you go with actiontec), but it saves you time and energy doing a cat5 conversion. The bitrates are pretty good too, although that depends on the quality and length of your wiring.
Powerline AV isnt bad, you can get a steady 40-50mbps with it, but that's pretty much wireless-N speeds, which is a lot cheaper.
This sounds like a question from the 90s.
Why not just make the jump to wireless? Do you really need more that 56Mbps on a home LAN?
I did that six years ago when I started having to deal with my kids having their own computers on their desks to do homework for high school. (Mostly because after five minutes investigation I decided I never wanted to go into the insulated attic of my new house ever again if at all possible. Blown insulation is cheap an effective but it kind of makes the attic unusable without significant effort.)
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Searching online only gives me $100+ coaxethernet transceiver type boxes.
Anonymusing wrote:
If the wire is nailed down (therefore not free to be pulled), perhaps he could use an Ethernet-over-coax adaptor or this one from Netgear.
Amazon wrote:
Ethernet-over-coax Converter/extender: $148.99
Netgear MCAB1001 MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit (Black): $180.91
I imagine the OP was looking for a cheaper way to do this.
Just wanted to clarify that Ethernet refers to a standard, not a cable. You can have ethernet over UTP, coax, fiber, etc...
If the coax in your walls is RG6, that's probably better than Cat5.
Homes with Fios or UVerse have nifty little coax to rj45 boxes that allow for the home networking setup.
--alop
A good coax can handle higher frequencies than the twisted pair used in cat 6 (Not sure if YOUR coax cable is good enough to handle higher frequencies than twisted pair but you can get a type of coax that can.) Of course the coax in your house might not be properly impedance matched and all that but for small distances it might not matter. I say take apart the twisted pair in a cat5 or cat 6 cable and solder it to the coax. Just make sure that you solder the stripped color wire to the same coax as the solid color wire. And yes ethernet only uses two of the twisted pair wires (meaning you only have to use two coax wires.) What is the worst that could happen? You waste a little cat 5 cable and a couple of connectors in a test that doesn't end up working? If it works then post the results of what happened and maybe you can get your sight slashdotted!
Or, perhaps, as another thought, why not just use the existing coax to pull Cat5 into place?
Toss the coax, it's junk. If it's standard TV coax then it's not even appropriate for security cameras (wrong impedence, wrong shielding, wrong insulation). Hopefully your walls aren't insulated yet, so you can run new CAT-5 down them. Don't bother with CAT-6, since it's a lot more expensive and the ends are a real pain in the ass to crimp successfully. Figure out where you want your network switch to go (almost certainly not in the attic) and where your Internet connection is going to come in and pull all of your new wiring to there. It's going to be a long weekend for you, but still a lot less time and frustration (and probably cost) than trying to get the existing junk to work.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
First, to the original question. D-Link makes a product that lets you do this. Not that I'm recommending you buy their product, but they claim that, due to bandwidth limitations, your performance would be lower than 802.11n. Now D-link is doing some signal processing, before the packets hit the wire, so I suspect that trying to run a raw signal over coax will produce less than reliable results.
To all those people recommending using the coax to pull cat5 - that probably won't work. Generally the coax will be stapled or otherwise tied to the studs.
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The amount of time and effort it will take you to properly cable and put in jacks, just go wireless-N.
I read a very good article last night, seems like its right up your street: here.
Its a comparison of different streaming options in a house that's not wired up to your specifications. Page 8 shows that with coax you should be able to get 68Mbps streaming video via UDP, which should be more than sufficient for your streaming needs. The only thing is that you'll have to buy a coax/ethernet adaptor. Not cheap, but a whole lot easier than rewiring.
1) Buy a Delorean
2) Install flux capacitor
3) Drive 88 MPH
4) Go back to the coax era
5) Don't come back
or
Get rid of the early 90's tech.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
How old is the house? It it's not too old, the telephone may be run on cat5. You can actually piggy-back ethernet and telephone on the same cat5 cable. I did that in a couple of rooms in my house and it worked great.
Wifo over coax was sold for hotel rooms. If you connect the access point and end point to coax you will have a great connection and no interference. This may be a very good solution.
Coax has huge damping at 2.5 GHz, but that should not be a problem for the receivers used.
Nothing to worry about here at all Coax is very strong and won't break on you as pull on it to bring in some cat 6. Otherwise if you really wanted you could go back to the days of vampire taps and 10base2...
Having been there, I really must recommend wiring your own house. It's a great way to learn a lot and in the end you get what you wanted where you wanted. All that being said, if at all possible, run some small pvc piping through the walls and wire things that way. If your that adverse to getting your hands dirty and doing the hardwork of wiring you could also look at things like Ethernet over power.
I was just searching for this same thing today and a friend of mine suggested this product:
http://www.netsys-direct.com/proddetail.php?prod=NH-310CEKIT&cat=27
It's a 200Mb ethernet-over-coax solution that makes use of existing coax installs and uses traditional cable. We'll be testing it soon for a 200 metre install.
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
I researched this and found that the Actiontec MI424WR router that Verizon provides for their FiOS service makes a nice, high-speed coax-ethernet bridge. You can purchase them used from BCD Electro. I bought a pair to utilize the coax under my house that ran from the main cable splitter to my office. I re-routed the cable under the house to the location of my wireless router and hooked everything up so that my desktop internet connection went this way: desktop <-ethernet-> MI424WR <-coax-> MI424WR <-ethernet-> WRT54GL. There are guides on how to set them up to act as bridges and it's pretty simple. For the cost of a decent USB WiFi adapter, I have hardwired connectivity that provides me with 2x the throughput as my now-dead USB WiFi that it replaced.
Try this:
http://www.netgear.com/Products/PowerlineNetworking/PowerlineEthernetAdapters/XE104.aspx
Turn Any Electrical Outlet into a Home Network Connection
* Extends home networks by using existing electrical wires
* Turns any outlet into four new Ethernet network connections
* Simple plug-and-play installation
Features
* Turns electrical sockets into home network/Internet points
* Delivers up to 85 Mbps wired speed
* Simply plug one XE104 into your router and a second XE104 into as many as 4 networked devices
* Connect desktop or laptop PCs, gaming consoles, network storage devices (NETGEAR SC101) or print server (NETGEAR PS121).
* Ideal for LAN gaming parties
* Supports Windows® Vista
Fortunately the internet is not a big truck that you just dump something on. Otherwise you would have to build roadways in your house.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
The HPNA Coax adapters are only about $70, and the best solution if you can't repull new Category 5 cable. Google Products shows plenty of stores with them in stock. You will get 100Mbit and the reliability of the ones I've used has been quite good. They are also available in phone line versions if that's the sort of wiring you have around.
I'd say give it a try -- either it works, or it doesn't!
The characteristic impedance of cat5/cat6 is 110 ohms. Assuming your house is wired with RG6, that's 75 ohms. You have an impedance mismatch, but it's not a really bad one -- swr around 1.4:1.
Reasonably good RG6 used for cable (or even broadcast) TV signal distribution should perform well up to 500 MHz, so frequency response shouldn't be a killer.
It might not handle gigabit, but mash it up, try it, and let us know!
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You cannot use RG-59 (CATV COAX) in any useful fashion for networking. Don't bother thinking about it any more.
Pull CAT-5 or better. Bite the bullet. Ignore the coax.
Even if it's RG-6 or whatever, if it's F connectors (screw-on) forget about it.
Now, if by some chance, you got RG-58 and BNC connectors, then you can maybe run 10MB over it. Another supreme waste of time.
I suspect all the media convertors that claimed to drive 100MB over wacko coax are finally gone, since none worked worth a damn.
And if you've got so much coax, you can use one as a pull string. At least for one run. You might be able to bribe a buddy to help you. Once.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I deiced on a house before the sheet rock went in. So I had Coax and Cat5 routed to every room (x2 for the office). Usually in different locations at my best guess of where a TV and a PC/telephone might be. It was well worth it. In hind-site I would have put more than one run to a room (e.g. opposite walls to cover more layout possibilities). I might have even put more cat5 in for other applications such as serial, IR routers, sensors / hacks, USB extenders etc.
I'm using some of the cat5 for phone, some for mixed phone (2 conductors) +100 Mbit/s (4 conductors) network and some for Gigabit.
Everything terminates to a handy spot in the basement where I have punch down panel and a switch and the incoming phone line for the cat5 runs and a amp+splitter for the CATV.
How about this: Try to just attach some connectors and see how it works.
Try these converters. http://www.veracityusa.com/products/products.php
Folks, the latest and greatest wiring is Augmented Cat6 cable. It is rated for 10 Gig speeds. If you are going to install new cabling, and in this case I would, this is the stuff to get. Wiring categories range from 5 to 5E to 6 and now 6a.
Coax cable might behave a bit differently, because one of the conductors is exposed and can pick up signals, but the other isn't, unlike a twisted pair. Differential signaling relies on both picking up the same signal, so that it can be rejected at the receiver by finding the difference between the two. You mentioned it having five coax cables; with that, you could use four coax cables, with the outer layer grounded on each. This way neither will pick up much of anything extra. It sure seems worth a try to me.
5 or 8 port, many had a 10 base 2 coax uplink port, this will limit you to 10mbps, also is the coax for CATV or data? there is a difference.
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Many years ago I was a network admin at a state agency which was converting from all 3270 (IBM mainframe terminal) wiring, which of course is coax - to IBM TokenRing, which started with expensive STP (shielded twisted pair) wiring but was transitioning to UTP. There was a cool little device which would run the token ring over coax; it required two coax wires. Worked great.
Thing is, coax is great wiring - the shielding makes the signal run across the inner wire very clean. This is why it is used for cable tv. Cat5, I believe, is widely used not because it is better than coax but because it is cheaper.
Still, as said by others, Ethernet over Cat5 goes as far as depending upon certain of the wires being twisted along with certain others. Anyone who has crimped a rj45 knows that you can't even mix the pairs, let alone hook up to coax.
I would never recommend actually doing this, but way back in college....
We ran coax (10base2) through our hall of the dorm, as did the guys in the floor below us. However being a concrete dorm, we really couldn't drill through a foot of concrete in the ceiling/floor. One of the guys did work for comm & could get us into the telephone room. We ended up finding a pair of cat3 (phone line) in a room upstairs & downstairs & got everything all patched together. We then proceed to solder the shielding to one wire & the center conductor of the 10base2 to another wire of a single twisted pair. We had a coax hub at each end, and maybe 50+ feet of twisted pair spliced onto about 20 feet of coax at each end.
Disturbingly it actually worked. Not fast & probably a lot of errors on the line, but it worked good enough for Duke Nukem & Quake.
I doubt you could get modern speeds doing anything like that, but it worked back in the 10 megabit half duplex days.
You'll be much better off fishing Cat5e using the old coax if you can, or just running new cable completely.
Verizon FiOS uses the Actiontec MI424WR router to bridge Ethernet to coax using MoCA (Multimedia Over Cable Alliance) technology. This allows them to provide Internet access to your set top boxes without having to string Cat5 to the TV location.
Used MI424WR routers can be found cheap on eBay. Get a pair of them (or three or four or whatever), turn off the DHCP stuff, and you've got yourself a nice set of Ethernet-to-coax bridges.
As an extra benefit, these have wifi in them, so you're also going to get a whole-house wifi setup at no extra charge. And by the way, MoCA runs at >1000 MHz so you can run cable TV on the same wiring plant without interference.
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http://fourpair.com/ccp6_09/index.php?app=ccp0&ns=catshow&ref=CAT6CAB I ran one 'backbone' from north to south side of house and homeruns from various rooms to that point. Bought the cheapo crimpers, a bag of connectors, some wallplates. Done. Streaming hi quality video doesn't bottleneck. You'll be glad you did it later when gigabit ethernet is not the ceiling anymore.
http://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=13855
If the link doesnt show go to cyber guys dot com, and search for product 13855
What, no talk of the electromagnetics? This could be a fun experiment.
From what I remember, twisted pair uses differential signaling. The magnetic fields oppose and cancel each other and the electric field is contained in the gap between the conductors. The proximity between the conductors also means they tend to experience the same interference. What is important is that the difference in potential between the two conductors remains pretty much the same even if both have big changes in their potential relative to a fixed potential (eg ground)
Coax works entirely different using a fixed reference for the shield and the center conductor for signal. The cylindrical geometry means that the electric field is set up in a radial pattern and the magnetic field is normal to the radius. This contains the fields in the insulation of the coax and blocks outside interference.
So, in theory, if you had a transceiver, you could get away with using just 2 of the cables, 1 if you turn off full duplex. But the only ones I have ever seen were for 'thicknet', ran at 10Mb, and connected via AUI.
But I have no idea what the bandwidth of the cables are, or how the waveform used for twisted pair comes into play on the coax (it's not strait digital, at the very least, the clock is encoded into the signal, and I think it uses pulse amplitude modulation).
For fun, you could try using the center of each coax cable for each of the 4 wires used in 100BASE-TX to see what happens. But I suspect there will be issues with the signal from each half of the pair arriving at different times and screwing up the data.
read up on what cat 5 is and you'll understand why that idea won't work. The impedance(resistance, ohms) is wrong and you need to have twisted pair to enable reliable 100Mbps transmission speed. The twist of the wire is critical for noise cancellation.
Anyway, by the time you solder up a jig on both ends to make such a solution work you could've pulled new cat5e and have gigabit for your LAN(or Cat 6a for 10Gbps)
If it does work you'll be likely to get errors.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
So if the cable companies can do it why can't somebody do coax at 100Mb inside the home? (theoretically speaking)
Gefen makes a coax bridge I use for connecting two apartments, it's been up for over a year and transmits consistently above 100mbit.
It has some thermal management problems, so keep it out of the sun or in warm environments.
http://www.gefen.com/gefentv/gtvproduct.jsp?prod_id=5275
Lots of good suggestions here! Actually today there's also something called 'wireless ethernet'. You should look it up. (Ethernet N is fine for multimedia...)
You can have up to 16 devices on MOCA. Try these ActionTec devices, they are the ones who make moca equipment for Verizon.
http://www.provantage.com/actiontec-hme2200-02~7ACTI04X.htm
It's not the prettiest option, but I'm too lazy to fish cables through walls, so when I move to a new place I usually just buy a box of Cat5e or Cat6 the same color as my baseboards and run the cable outside of the walls and around door frames as needed. If your house is carpeted, you can run it underneath the carpet edges to hide it completely--just watch out that you don't impale any cables on the tack strips. The liberal use of cable staples holds the cables in place and they're not very noticeable. You can also use the "two cables down one cable" trick by splitting off the unused conductors to another termination point--be it a wall box or cable ends. But note that this restricts that cable to 100 megabits.
I have found that some of the newer ethernet-over-powerline adapters work quite well in the home for this sort of bridging, and can handle up to a couple hundred mbps. I have a 200mbps Netgear pair that I use to bridge my home-office network to my wife's home-office network that is on another floor and other end of a long house.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
What you need is a set of 4 75-Ohm unbalanced to 100-Ohm balance transformers (aka baluns). But as you have found those are pricey. You could instead try a set of these:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062054
Use them in pairs at each end of the coax. Connect the F connector end to the coax and the screw terminals to the appropriate pins of an RJ45 jack.
Other than biting the bullet and pulling some Cat5, you might consider some different wireless hardware. I've used the WRT54G and found the performance to be dismal compared to high power Engenius stuff that costs about the same. I manage a real 20-24 Mb in A or G mode / WPA2 around the office with ours. Pair that with some sort of traffic shaping to prioritize what's going on (higher priority to media and lowest priority to backups, etc) IPCop maybe?
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
Anyone else with me that just suggests to use wireless instead?
Sure, i have gigabit and 10gb in my server room, and one gigabit wire going from the server room to where i watch 1080p movies (which i have used once for about 5 minutes), but otherwise, 802.11b/g/n works fine. If it is an issue with conflicting channels with the neighbours, you are not trying hard enough.
And for the next time you build a house: There is no standard wire that will last forever. Coax was the standard about 20 years ago (and it /really/ appeared to be that way, especially as it can handle more GB/s reliably than the cat5), and the cat5 will only last until 1gb/s (with Cat6) or 10gb/s (fibre) is the standard.
Thus, you should have wire conduits, with fibre's limited ability to turn corners in mind. Another option is to have the ability to drop wire easily from the attic between the walls all the way to the basement, and/or to have removable ceiling tiles. Be careful with insulating though, because a big whole in an outside wall can ruin your heating bill.
Well, if you want to go inexpensive (not cheap) I would still avoid the coax except as a wirepull -- and even then I would really look at putting your switch somewhere other than an attic. For inexpensive I would go with base Cat-5 if they still make spools of it (they should). While I'm not a fan of the PVC sheathing, it's less stiff than Plenum and decent for what it is. But if you're feeling it I would absolutely go with the plenum sheathing and the extra cost a 1000' roll would bring. Plenum is more fire resistant and IMO more resistant to the kind of stress you're going to exert pulling that stuff through drywall and ductwork. If you spend a bit more for Cat-5e you can slap in some better connectors and theoretically get 1Gb/s out of those lines.
But if I had my options and I was investing in this house? I'd wire the place in Cat-6a, Cat-7a if you can actually find it. It's compatible with modern Ethernet and standard RJ-45 heads and 6a is the 10Gb/s option, 7a takes it up by another factor of 10. Wire it with 10-20 feet of slack in the walls where you can so you can move it wherever later, upgrade the termination points when you're ready to take it to the next level (start with 6a heads and upgrade once your network cards can handle 7a speeds), and make sure you have at least a drop in every room in the house. Offices use Power over Ethernet phones and while I think we're going to just go to cellular for personal communication, I can see appliances relying on this idea later. (Ever want to see who's been drinking the orange juice and leaving an empty carton?)
Oh, and I'd find a nice closet on the first floor near your ISP tap to wire it all to, improve the ventilation and then slap a deadbolt on the door.
But again, that's just me. :)
I mostly agree with the folks who suggest using the coax to pull cat 5 cable as a replacement strategy.
But I would be remiss to not mention MoCA, which aims to standardize home networking over coax in such a way that existing cable TV or terrestrial antenna signals will still work.
Why not just use the coax to pull cat5e/cat6 along the same runs? You're making it more complicated than it is, I think.
My Babylon
you might try 2 cable modems, one at each end and create a bridge
This is a good option if the coax is a relatively straight run, such as up the wall into the attic. It is very difficult if the coax was run through several studs, possibly making a turn or two in the wall cavity. You also want to be careful if the coax was run parallel to a power line. I know this is not code in most areas, but you never know if a contractor or previous homeowner got lazy and used the existing holes in a row of studs or joists. My advise, if the coax does not easily slide when you pull on either end, leave it alone and run the Cat5 by itself.
I'm not expecting all of Slashdot to have gone through an EE E&M course, but some of the things I see in this thread are just off base.
The beauty of transmission line theory is that you can abstract away the wires and conductors into a sort of tube with a particular impedance. RF engineering is all about matching impedances and ensuring efficient power transfer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line
Then you're a dickwad. Tape snags and/or comes off.
Just pull CAT 5e. It's not that much work.
I know I'm being redundant; but, it's in the hopes you'll get the message.p>
Have you thought of trying Ethernet over power adapters instead? I'm using older Linksys Ethernet over power adapters and they work very well. I've had no problems with streaming, playing games, downloading torrents, etc.
http://www.linksysbycisco.com/US/en/products/PowerLine
10base2 used 50 ohm coax with 50 ohm termination resistors to deliver a baseband ethernet signal. Unfortunately as noted it does not work on 75 ohm coax
What you need is something that was common in the early 90s which is a baseband to broadband Ethernet bridge. This was the technology that has evolved into the DOCSIS Cable Modem standards. Unfortunately, no vendor ended up making a low cost consumer grade bridge other than cable modems which are by design tied to a cable modem provider network.
- Awp
...don't try to use it for data transfer. Using wifi G or N bridging is going to get you a better experience from a performance and a pain perspective.
I bought everything from http://www.deepsurplus.com/ for $100. I paid a guy $125 to run 8 drops. It's less than a $250 problem.
Easiest solution:
http://cgi.cafr.ebay.ca/SMC-EZ-Connect-Coax-Ethernet-Adapter-SMCHCNA2-ETH-New_W0QQitemZ140372974872QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCOMP_EN_Hubs?hash=item20aee19d18
You are welcome,
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
What is "HomePNY" ? Is it the same as HomePlug Powerline which would be my suggestion (to not answer your question !!).
Just stick the coaxes into antenna plugs on wireless routers, and simulate point-to-point wireless. Possibilities are:
- 2 average home routers for 2x$20 with 802.11b/g over coax, can-do 25Mbit real. Not sure how 5Ghz 802.11a would do, I would guess 30-40Mbit.
- 2 better routers (mikrotiks) for around 2x$45 each - specifically mikrotiks can do several nstreme interfaces easily with 150Mbit on one cable (tried that)
- 802.11n - not sure how efficient this would be, imho can do 70Mbit real. cost is for 2x$30 approx.
MoCA with the older actiontec verizon fios routers, they can be had cheap, and are firmware compatible to just be a bridge.
You can transmit a wireless AP signal through the coax. 75ohm coax will result in some signal loss but it will work for your needs.
http://flakey.info/antenna/waveguide/
or use a balun to match the impedance or use one of these.
http://www.etslan.com/Ethernet.htm
Such as going though the same stud hole, you just don't want to run them side by side for any long length, and even then, you more than likely will just lose a bit of thuroughput.
Me?
I pulled 2 cables of Cat5e to every room. It ended up being a HUGE boon for me when I got one of those fancy routers w/ a display on it. I keep the cablemodem in the garage, w/ the home run / patch panel and the router in my office hung nice & pretty so I don't have to go to the garage unless i'm sure the router isn't getting an IP address.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I'm suprised that no-one has mentioned any of the PLC (Ethernet over Power Line) solutions. Depending on your setup it may be cheeper to place on of them in each room with a simple switch, then wait until you re-decorate before you pull new Cat5e cable.
It's what AT&T uVerse uses by default for the gateway to reach the set top boxes. AT&T's set top boxes also bridge to ethernet. However, as there is STP, creating a loop makes things go thud.
http://www.homepna.org/
for the organization behind the spec.
As someone else mentioned, there are plenty of hits with google products.
Given time and resources I'd really prefer to replace the connections to the set top boxes with cat5e.
I can't believe someone hasn't already pointed out MoCA its what Verizon is using for their in house wiring for FioS installs. You will need an adapter per device, which is kind of a drag since they are ~ $150.00 or so, but the 1.1 spec offers 175 mbps of through put.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance
http://www.ecost.com/detail.aspx?edp=44551040&source=k232270&cm_mmc=Affiliates-_-Performics-_-k232270-_-Primary
If AT&T Uverse is available in your location, you have a better solution - just get Uverse. Since you have coax run everywhere, the installer(s) will use that to connect the boxes, and the unused ethernet jack on each box is still functional and tied into the network over the coax. I've got a media streamer in the living room connected to the Uverse box there, my bedroom PC connected to the Uverse box, and in my son's room his Xbox and PC are connected to a 4-port hub connected to the Uverse box. It all works perfectly!
If you are looking for strictly media solution, you may want to consider a different aproach. it may be wise to keep the coax and invest in a media distribution system. So you do not NEED to bother with running media clients and media servers all over the place, but instead put all your equipment in a single location (living room or attic) and simply use TV with coax and a remote as a controller for it. The SD versions of this are dirt cheap now (and if you are using 100Mbit, you are unlikely to do HD), but HD distribution systems are coming out now (though they are still pricey). But it makes live SO much nicer and is so much more reliable (and much more wife-friendly). Plus you can watch/listen to same thing on 3 TVs at same time if you want to.
Of course this is for media only, and you may still want to run cat* for computers.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
To use CATV cable for cat5 all you need to do is you run X-Base-II with L ohms terminators. Or would those be LXXV ohms?
This is what HomePNA is for. The 3.0/3.1 spec provides for something like 200MB over coax. The adapters are generally simple bridge devices. You can have 20 devices on one segment.
It works great, I'm using it to distribute ethernet in my apartment for MythTV and other stuff best not run on wifi.
HPNA will play nice with DirecTV, Dish and other DSS/DBS equipment--but not with DOCSIS. Also, you may need to split the feed at the end for the adapter and a set top box--the passthrough sometimes doesn't work as advertised.
I also can't speak to compatibility with the new DirecTV SWM standards (or stackers/destackers--they may step on the freqs used by HPNA.)
The competing, less open standard is MOCA. MOCA is compatibile with DOCSIS but not with DSS/DBS (if I recall correctly.)
This is why cablecos use MOCA for triple-play services in homes, and satcos use HPNA.
Where are my BNC connectors and 50ohm terminators!
Seriously coax is a nightmare and like others said use the coax as a wire pull for some nice CAT6.
Important to do:
1. Get that special in-wall drilling kit. It saves REAL $ & time in the long run! It makes it so you cut your box hole in the wall, fit your drill bit into that and you can now drill through the subfloor or ceiling while staying inside the wall making your cable job look pro instead of done like Best Buy. (I'd show pictures of some stuff of theirs I repeaired, but I don't want to scare anyone)
2. Get a fiberglass fishing stick &/or fishing tape. (Not to be confused w/ Uglystick or Shakespear!)
2.5 If you are crazy & have some extra $ lying around like my best friend, buy some nice conduit to run the cables through. He's stark raving mad I tell you, as this was about a doubling in time, but only requires you to go under the house or in the attic one time. Pulling cables goes a bit faster, and makes things look really nice for the next owner.
3. Buy your Cat5e or Cat6 cable from an electric supply store, and NOT home depot. You'll save enough right there to buy the above tools.
4. Decide if you ever want to crimp again, if the answer is yes, then get a good cable crimper, if it is no, then buy a cheap one from radioshack.
Plan a weekend to do it (it won't take that long if you plan).
Plan your runs on paper, with labels for each cable, where they will all meet.
You can buy a fancy schmancy box or you can use a small old electrical panel like I did. It's clean, looks good, has a door, and was deep enough for everything I need. It was free and holds a plugstrip, cable modem, small patch panel, and a switch.
Decide how much you really need. Wireless works good enough for streaming most content, but that will change, so will wireless speeds.
When wiring,
Label one side of the cable (a,b,c,d,e,f, etc...)
Pull / fish the cable
THEN cut.
Then label other side!
Never assume you can guess the length because you'll always need a longer piece than you think, or you'll burn through 2x the cable you really need. Of course you've done this a few times, you can probably go ahead and do this.
Why Label your cable on both sides of the cable? So when testing, you don't go round and round in circles. All cat 5 ends start to look the same at the end of a long day drilling and pulling, and you'll greatly speed things up if you do this, trust me!
BTW gigabit througout the house is really handy sometimes! Makes connecting new devices a snap. Wireless bridges work well, but they just aren't the same, and are prone to drop-outs right in the middle of that all important scene.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Seriously, why cant you just use WiFi? All this trouble seems worthless to me, unless your are working with Gigabytes of data that need to be access by these devices and have a genuine need to Gigabit Ethernet. If all you are going to get, at best, is 10Base2, just think of WiFi.
It was brought up before in the conversation and I just wanted to chime in. I set up my house which is three stories and needed a internet connection in every room with a TV for my DVR's.
I bought a lot (5) of used Actiontechs on ebay for like 30 or 40 dollars and used the b side of coax cable which was no longer used as the bridge for my XBMC server downstairs and 2 DVRs. One of my five routers didn't work and was happily replaced by my seller.
Its not the fastest compared to fiber (If I remember it clocked in just under my FIOS Speed, so faster the 10b but not 100b but I regularly watch movies downstairs over MoCa and have done so with the computer upstairs hammering away on a torrent. without so much as a hick up.
Some people give actiontech a bad rap mostly about it's NAT tables but I have 4 running & 1 in the closet as a backup with little trouble including using torrents and these routers can be programmed six different ways to sunday.
how to set up a Actiontech moca bridge:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1145636
If the Original poster or someone setting this up has any other questions, I'll be happy to answer.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Can you pull new wires just as easily using a thin wire? My two-story house includes a flexible pipe from the attic to the closet in the master bedroom. The last time I checked the HOT attic, the pull-cord had turned to white powder.
I am all fingers when crimping cables but I punched down around 20 cables in around 2 hours.
it this way: In your attic, place a switch, with runs to each of your upper floor rooms, and a run to the basement. In your basement, place another switch, with runs to each of your lower floor rooms, and connect that attic switch in. Now your whole house is chatting at up to 1000baseT if you splurge on the gig switches. I've seen the attic/basement connection ran out a window and down the outside of a house. I've also seen that line get hit by lightning and take out a bunch of gear, so think twice about that, or at least put some grounding straps on it (check with an electrician who can advise you on this) to keep the lightning at bay. Typically, your older houses have hollow, easily accessible internal walls. Good for fishing wires up and thru.
Oh - if timings your issue, how about token-ring over it? I'm sure you can find TONS of token-ring cards that use coax CHEAP..... :^)
you cant sub two pairs of coax for 2 pairs of twisted pair. actually, it might work, but only for really short distances....
Actually you were part way there... There are consumer coax IP transceivers that you can buy. You'll have to run the math to decide whether it's more cost effective to pull CAT 5e/6 through the house (which could actually be pretty easy if you use the existing coax to pull it) or buy a coax transceiver. Unless there's a persuasive reason against it, I personally would probably just set up 802.11n and pull CAT 5e/6 between the device(s) that actually need the speed.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I used a combo wire which is 2 RG-6 and 2 Cat5e runs shrink-wrapped together into an impressive snake (http://www.smarthome.com/868261J/2-Cat-5e-2-RG6-Quad-Cable-Jacket-500-Feet-RG6-Coax-Cable/p.aspx). I fact, I still have 200+" of it in my garage if you're going to pull new cable. Very nice stuff, hit me up if you're interested.
In the world of cable you have a friend known as Moca. Moca is a standard for delivering ethernet packets over RF. It uses a frequency range up over 1Ghz to stay out of the current standard range for cable. For it to work for you, you will need a Moca hub for each location in the house. And you will need a choke at your house entry point (so that your traffic does not go to a neighbors). Other than that, existing wiring should work, especially since the devices push at a whopping 70db to help deal with S/N issues caused by old wiring.
It is about more than just having the correct number of wires. You have to look at the impedance of the lines. One company was able to do a demo with 100baseT over barbed wire seperated by several inches of air, but only because that width of free space matches the impedance of cat5 UTP.
Unfortunatly Cat5 is 100ohm and RG6 is 75ohm. Every incidance of impedance mismatch causes a reflection. Going from 100ohm to 75ohm gives a negative reflection, and the reverse causes a positive one. Realy short mismatches (like a conector) largely cancel out but long cable runs...
The short answer is that for a reliable high bandwidth solution you are probably better off ignoring the coax. 802.11n should give you all the wireless bandwidth you need, g tends to have a real throughput of around 20Mb but n claims 100Mb (DVD rate about 5Mbps, broadcast DTV up to 19.4Mbps, BlueRay up to 40Mbps). Or you could future proof yourself and run Cat5e, works with Gigabit ethernet.
And yes, IAAEE (I Am An Electrical Engineer)
Instead of trying to muck around with using cables to do something they weren't designed to do, why not just buy some WIFI gear? You will get supported equipment, you don't have to screw around with soldering irons, you'll get faster access (100+mb versus 10-mb), and don't have to worry about what to do if any of the hard to find equipment ever fails.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That might be acceptable for running one link. You'll need one $170 adapter for each end of each cable. Wiring the entire house that way would be pretty darn expensive.
What you are looking for is MoCa Alliance approved stuff. MoCa 1.1 can do 175/175. Verizon Uses Moca Equipment with their fios installs . The problem is its expensive. Dlink has this http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=668 but its $239 This is the Moca Alliance webpage. Its a list of certified products. http://www.mocalliance.org/industry/certified_products.php
'This got me thinking: 100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables.'
Four wires are only rated for 10mb. Eight wires will do 10 and 100mb but 1gb will work too. You should follow the good advice of others and pull new wire. Cat5 will cost a lot less then cat6 in every way (wire/jacks/tools). Pull sting is cheap. Pull two pieces through and tie them on each end to make a loop. You will never need another string in the wall.
You can afford a huge house, but you can't come up with $100 for a tranceiver? That's absolutely daft.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If you've got coax you can get a good 45Mbps DS-3 line going on it. Just find some surplus telco gear and go to town. I wouldn't mind a DS-3 in my house, just for historic grins and giggles. Of course getting the 48 Volt power for the CSU/DSU may be an issue. Dang, pull the cat-5.
Made by motorola, they are coax to ethernet bridges, 400mbs on the coax side 100mbs on the ethernet side. the default on the coax side is the 169.x.x.x addresses and bridge the ethernet. I use 2 in my house for areas that don't yet have ethernet, and they get the eth address from my dhcp server probably cost prohibitive unless you can get a deal on them somewhere
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
It would be easier to use it with a removable 802.11 BNC antenna connector . That's basically how cable TV got started, and it would probably handle the ohmage differences better.
- Sig
after all, it's what data craves.
electrolytes.
-- Sig under construction...
"media server + squeezeboxes + remote time machine"
Maybe you can use your remote time machine to travel to the time of construction. Bring some ethernet with you...
Far simpler.
2 plugs.
No effort.
Signal runs over the earth wire.
If I recall, it is up around 200mbit now too.
coax has 1 core, and a sheath. the core could probably serve well enough, but the sheath? a mesh of metal that wasn't in any way designed to carry (or even ground for) data at 100Mb with little to no data loss? Uhhh....no.
Others have suggested you use the coax to pull the cat5. Unfortunately, I happen to know that if the coax was put in as the walls were going up, it was likely put in the same way the romex (electric) was; staples along studs will prevent you from just pulling it out. Best bet is to just cut it, shove it in the wall, and start over. Hate to be the 50th person to say that, but having a house full of coax doesn't in any way get you any closer to having a cat5 wired house.
All that said, the overwhelming expense - even if you're doing it youself- of putting in cat5 cable is the labor, not the cable. So, you should go for the gusto and put in cat6, if not even cat 7. That way, 10 years from now you won't be looking at your house full of cabling that is as out-dated as coax, and needing to scrap it all and start over.
Use them to pull some nice Cat5e (or Cat6) of your own. Those coaxial cables are pretty strong, and as long as they are not stapled to studs inside the wall you should be able to lop the connectors off the far end and pull some nice Cat5e/6 using the old coax as the puller. Grip it and rip it, baby!
As others have suggested, just use one of the coax lines to pull the cat5+ through. If that for some reason doesn't work, just run your own wires. It might be a pain, but those coax wires got installed SOMEHOW, so it can probably be done again.
As far as trying to throw together a solution with mixing multiple wires to achieve a pseudo cat5 connection, you probably don't want to bother. Attaining the high speeds is highly dependent on shielding, resistance, and wire balance, not to mention the fact that each of the coax wires is likely a different length. The speed of light might be fast, but it IS finite, and it starts to matter when you're working in the 10+ mbps range. You can suffer serious speed reduction if you have so much as half an inch of wires untwisted at the connection point... So yeah, trying to adapt the coax wires for an application they weren't designed for is not likely to have beneficial results.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
We have cat5 and they're worthless. They pee on my stuff, don't guard the house and require expensive stinky canned food.
Instead of rewiring have you looked into a HPNA solution? Actiontec makes a HPNA device that converts cat5 to coax. I have tested up to 6 systems on one HPNA network with speeds up to 60 MB for each. This protocol is designed to not interfere with current cable channels. The only downfall is that you will need one Actiontec device for each room. They run between $40 and $80.
This really makes me feel old: I seem to be the only one here who remembers that Ethernet was originally coax-only.
OK, that's not quite the same as the coax cabling used for TV signals. But you can still run Ethernet over TV coax. There are two gotchas: maximum speed is 200Mbs (which is probably not a deal breaker for most users) and you have to spend about $100 a node for new transceivers (which probably is a deal breaker).
The cheapest (and probably one of the fastest) solution would be to go to ebay and buy a couple verizon fios routers and use them as a MoCA bridge. Google is your friend to learn more about MoCA and old verizon fios routers. I picked up a pair of routers for about $30 shipped but that was 6 months ago..
I used some cat6 ethernet I bought at newegg for cheap, and already crimped. Then I bought some of these from newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812993025. I have seen other sites that carry them too, and they worked great in the plates that I got at home depot. Finally, a trip to home depot for some low voltage boxes and some modular wall plates. I have done 2 rooms for around $40 bucks, but most of my cost was the couplers and tools. The boxes and plates are really cheap and I also picked up a bag of blank plugs and some coax cable plugs.
It helped that I have a drop ceiling, full basement, but Lowes sells a long flexible drill bit just for doing wiring. I ended up putting a gig-e switch in my office and one in my basement. I don't know how fast they are since I only have one gig-e computer, but the switches say they connect at gig-e.
I have some photos of what I done on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianjpugh/sets/72157621578462074/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianjpugh/sets/72157622296384977/
See If you can find some moca bridges (like the ones used in early verizon FIOS installs). I got a pair of motorola NIMS, and can pull 100mbit over the coax in my house all day long (internal signaling is 250mbits, but the port on the device is only 100mbit) . WAY more reliable than the wireless bridge it replaced, and WAY faster than a powerline or phoneline network!
I've got to add, if you want a heavy-duty industrial punch tool; Krone
These things get used by telecom guys all over the Benelux; I've used it for +11 years in our in-house datacenter to get the job done.
Even those boxes without springloads are easy to install with these tools; it's push and play.
When lucky you'll be able to find a "Krone LSA tool" for cheap on e-bay but watch out for imitations! These will damage your connection blocks overtime; giving bad connectivity as result.
Need extra shielding? use STP cable together with Hirose plugs for pull-protection; available in many colors and sturdy till the end.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Google "Transmission Line Theory." After reading you will realize that both the characteristic impedance of the coax and the far end crosstalk associated with soldering would sufficiently degrade the carrier waveform such that the BER would significantly reduce your data transmission rate. My advice is to use the coax as a cable puller.
10BASE2 is always a possibility if you don't mind going back to the 1990s and 1Mbps LAN speeds...
Furries make the internet go.
Im pretty sure this would work, from a tech point of view cat5 is just 8 wires, if you split it up it shouldnt be a problem. The twists in cat5 are just there to reduce crosstalk between the pairs so i dont think that would be an issue. Im pretty sure you will get a good signal across the middle cable of your coax but im not so sure if you will be able to use the outer shield as part of your pair, you may be able to but from memory only the middle in a coax cable is used for data in 10BASE-T
remote time machine backups to a linux box
Finally someone who is responsible with their time machine use. Now when you go back in time and do something nasty that changes the future, just roll back to last Saturday morning with the nice bacon and eggs.
You could try 75ohm to 120ohm Baluns, then some kind of point to point DSL setup, eg the Zyxel P-841C.... you might have some luck with that
what about http://www.netgear.com/Products/PowerlineNetworking/PowerlineEthernetAdapters/HDXB101.aspx ? no need to install/rip up any cables, plus it's faster than wired and wireless (gigabit not withstanding).
but honestly, i would just wire up the whole house with cat5e cause as it was mentioned before, you will want gigabit at some point in the near future.
Slashdot administrators appear to want comments to be written in English prose. A lot of Unicode code points are far more useful for what is called "ASCII art" than for English prose. If the code point whitelist were expanded, the "junk characters" filter would have to be expanded to match so that vandals don't get the idea to post gay pornography. If you thought ASCII Goatse was bad...
I've been thinking all night about this post, and it came to me that you could put a WiFi router up in the attic and from there, build antennas for 2.5GHz at the end of all the coaxs, at the other end of the cables you do the same (build 2.5GHz antennas). This way you are using the cables to boost (or transmit) the WiFi signal to the rooms where the coax ends. The antennas can be built right out of the same coax as a 1/4 wave antenna, without spending any money. An even better thing would be to have a RF splitter for 2.5 or 5 GHz, but I doubt you could get one of those, if so, you can directly connect the coax to the WiFi router, getting a better RF signal in the rooms.
This may be code, but if I was doing it myself, I wouldn't follow it.
This code came into practice I think when large buildings rans lots of wires through the vent ducts of buildings. There were a couple cases of fires in one part of the building that caused the PVC to outgass and poison people in another part of the building while the evacuation was in progress.
The NATIONAL code only requires plenum rated wire in spaces where the HVAC system moves air. In some buildings the space above the suspended ceiling was used as return air path. I've heard these decisions go both ways.
There is so much other PVC in most houses that adding another 20 pounds of wire sheath isn't going to matter. And you aren't running it through the ducts.
(Plastic water line is PVC -- cross linked PVC for hot water. PEX radiant tubing is PVC. "vinyl" flooring is PVC. You've got a ton of it clinging to the outside of your house if you've got vinyl siding. Vinyl clad windows.)
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
ethernet has 8 wires and why dont use us a cable modem??
I see what you're trying to do. I know it seems clever, but it'll never work.Cat5 is manufactured as twisted pairs of cable to reduce crosstalk (better known as electrical interference). At high speeds, (like 100 mbit), even a little interference is deadly. If you look at the differences between cat5, cat 5e, and cat6, you'll actually see that most of the difference is just in how tight the twists are. (In other words, the twists are important). Coax is straight, not twisted. Not only that, one of the two wires in the coax cable is not really a wire at all, it's a shield. That wire is guaranteed to have interference problems from external sources, and I almost guarantee you if it carries current (instead of just ground like coax does), it'll interfere with the wire inside it too. I know it sounds brilliant, but it just ain't gonna work. If you really want to avoid wiring up the house with cat5, you could just use the existing wire and run a 10 base 2 network, but do you really want to do that? Your best bet is to just buy a spool of cat5 (or cat5e or cat6), tie one end to the coax cable, go to the other end, and pull. Viola - cat5 running through your walls.
So make the lameness filter reject posts with a large proportion of non-ASCII characters.
Besides, who cares. This is why we have moderation.
So make the lameness filter reject posts with a large proportion of non-ASCII characters.
A proportion greater than 0 is large by some definitions. If you have checked Slash out of Git and made and tested a patch that expands the Unicode support of Slash, feel free to run it by one of the maintainers.
Besides, who cares. This is why we have moderation.
The vandals were posting so many messages from so many IPs that it overwhelmed moderators.
No problem, put a cmts head end in your garage and a cable modem in every room, fire up DOCSIS and start charging your kids for network service. "Uh, yeah, you can get unlimited bandwidth for $99, oh and bundles, we have bundles too.." Bundle up, cough up, it beuuutiful. "Sorry we spontaneously reset Bit Torrents..."
BPFH (bastard parent from hello operator, give me number nine)
The best solution is to use the existing coax to pull Cat5 throughout your house.
Another partial solution would be to use old 10BT-to-coax transceivers. This would be easy. It'd cost rather little. But it'd probably end up being too for your needs.
The *best* solution is to re-wire or pay someone to do so. Even with newer technology, coax won't be as good.