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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.
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. :)
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.
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??
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
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
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!
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 ?
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.
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
Or, perhaps, as another thought, why not just use the existing coax to pull Cat5 into place?
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.
Slashdot used to be friends with Unicode until vandals started abusing Unicode bidirectionality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try these converters. http://www.veracityusa.com/products/products.php
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.
> Anyone else with me that just suggests to use wireless instead?
He said the house is pretty big, though. When you start getting multiple floors and a lot of walls and things in the way, wireless performance (with affordable gear) starts to suck pretty hard.
On top of that, you have to worry about encryption and data security.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its uses. But there are also VERY GOOD reasons to want a wired network.
I totally agree with you about the conduit. If you're building a new house, absolutely you want conduit, with accessible faceplate-covered junction boxes wherever it turns corners. Conduit seems expensive at the time, but it's *WAY* cheaper than ripping the walls apart later and then paying drywall guys and painters to come in and fix it up, and it's WAY worth it for the convenience of being able to run new cabling later for whatever purpose you happen to need it for.
Thirty years ago, would you have predicted the need for CAT6 cable? How awesome would it be to be able to put it in now just by taking the faceplates off a couple of junctions and threading it through the conduit? That kind of flexibility is *worth* the cost of the conduit, several times over, if you use it even once in the entire lifetime of the building.
I didn't get the impression that the article submitter was building a new place, though. Why would there be only coax and no cat5/6 in a place that was just built? The way I read it, he bought an existing house. In which case, retrofitting conduit would be a hassle.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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?
I am all fingers when crimping cables but I punched down around 20 cables in around 2 hours.
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.
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
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We have cat5 and they're worthless. They pee on my stuff, don't guard the house and require expensive stinky canned food.