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."

Comments

ATT Uverse runs over coax

[your_mother_sews_soc]

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.

Re:ATT Uverse runs over coax

[mcgrew]

Yes it did -- it gave me an idea. I don't know if it would work, but maybe he could use cablemodems to connect ethernet to the coax. Of course, he probably doesn't have enough cablemodems laying around, but if he does, or can get a cheap supply of used ones it might work.

Related Questions

[godrik]

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 ?

Worked for me with 6-conductor phone cable

[noidentity]

In the current house I'm renting, I needed a connection between a computer in a bedroom and the living room, and didn't want to use wireless. There was some 6-conductor phone cable in the jacks, and a single phone line only needs two (I like having a landline), so I figured I could use the other four for 10BASE-T Ethernet. It worked once I got the pairs right (the phone cable is three twisted pairs, and I had to have TX on one pair, and RX on the other, rather than split across two pairs). There's about 100 feet of phone cable between the two. On the dining room end, the phone jack isn't next to the computer, so I ran about 25 more feet of 6-conductor phone cable to the desk for the computer and phone. Again I had to get the Ethernet pairs next to each other. In the end, 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX work, though I notched it down to 10BASE-T just to be on the safe side, and my Internet connection is less than 1 Mbps anyway. And yes, I realize I'm probably broadcasting every bit of data I send across this connection, due to the phone cable being unshielded.

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.

what??

[Lord Ender]

You can afford a huge house, but you can't come up with $100 for a tranceiver? That's absolutely daft.