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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."
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.
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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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Simple known process,
desired end result, low cost.
Yup, dirty tricks like pretending cables are, well, hunks of copper stop working once you go beyond 1Mhz or so. Ethernet requires twisted pair wiring. Strictly speaking you might be able to use baluns of some kind to go from twisted pair to coax and back, and it might work, but it's so not worth it (plus you'd better know your RF theory) and you'd still need two coax wires per Ethernet jack (TX and RX). Just use the coax as a guide to pull brand new Cat5e or Cat6 wiring.
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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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!