Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone.

Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.

You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.

Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.

When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?

So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.

If the author is hitting 940 Mbps on a daisy-chain, either the echo cancellation or the frequency diversity on these chips must be lightyears ahead of standard DSLAMs. Does the web interface expose the SNR-per-tone graph? I suspect you would see massive dips where the wiring splits to the other rooms, but the OFDM is just aggressively modulating around them.

> It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years!

Wow.

I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.

Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.

When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.

My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.

Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.

Thanks for the writeup!

I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.

This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...

But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.

I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to get, but powerline ethernet modems are sold everywhere despite barely working in most houses.

The RJ11 panels on the wall were replaced with RJ45, crimped everything. Took a full day of carefully pulling wires but in the end I got gigabit all over the home.

The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.

As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer to and from it. And it wasn't like an inch from the router either - it did it while in my hand, on the other side of the room with me sitting on our sofa.

I had a phone socket in that room and I had already discussed the possibility of converting it into an Ethernet socket but decided it's not worth it because everything ended up in a cupboard far away from my router. These adapters would have solved the problem nicely!

By the way, I have more fun stories. The cabling in my current house (which has Ethernet sockets) is still miserable. I spent a year working with my PC over USB tethering to my phone until I finally called an electrician to find which of the 11 dangling cables in the cupboard went to my office...

One day some wires in there were slightly moved and the internet got disconnected because they were badly crimped. Nothing was working so in the end I got an RJ45 connector and managed to get the wires in there.

I heard the state of the wiring also wasn't great, sometimes apartments had twisted pair wires, while some straight wires, some only have 2 or 3 out of 4 wires connected, etc.

Good to know this technology still exists.

I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.

If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.

As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!

The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!

<I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sockets. It’s not uncommon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sockets in the living room and 2 phone sockets in the bedroom and a master socket in the technical room. It’s ridiculous.>

My wife and I rented a flat in Amsterdam a few years ago. I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room, which I thought was strange. Now I know. (I was looking for the broom, BTW.)

We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.

That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.

In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.

Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/

I'm currently running MoCA over spliced coax as part of the local connection and not amused by the 5ms latency on it. Also running 100mbit over cat3 I found in a wall which does work, but cat3 in another wall can't hold 10mbit. That link actually can hold 70mbit of vdsl but after a nearby lightning strike slagged various hardware I've moved the vdsl modem back to the BT wires entry point and run the output through some fibre.

And there's a wifi bridge between two other points. And some ethernet running outside the building. Previously also ethernet-over-mains that I might bring back now that I've learned what spanning tree protocols are so the periodic reboots they inexplicably require can be tolerated transparently.

Also the connection to the internet itself is crap so bonding vdsl, starlink and 5g through the openmptcprouter project. Just lots of redundancy and self healing hacks all over the place to give an observably solid connection.

Which is a rambling way to say that if you're in Britain and your network connection brings you sorrow, it can be forced to be acceptable with application of more time and money than other countries require.

- Open your telephone socket, if the actual cable has 5 pairs, it's probably a cat5e cable. It can do 1gbps with a RJ45 connection, just replace the plug and connect tou your device to check, yo ucan get a cheap ethernet cable tester too. If it has just 3 pairs, it can probably do 100mbs automatically with most ethernet capable devices. - If you just need to connect 2 devices, you may probably just use existing cables to do it. More than 2 devices would not work. - If it doesn't work, all those cables probably go to a box, find it and check if they are connected, if not yo ucan just crimp the ends together.

Other alternatives: - As others mentioned, MoCA devices are also able to deliver 1gbps, and there is a higher chance that you may find them in most rooms, and they are almost always connected, so it shoudl be plug&play. - Powerline adapters novadays not too bad as well. I was able to use them in a 30 eyar old home, 3 floors up to provide 500mbs.

Ok, the writer could be renting a house and not wanting to do that. But sincerely, in Portugal, the landlords couldn't care less. Maybe in the UK, they really, really love their phone sockets and don't want to replace them, don't know.

In the US, houses built to code in the last 30-40 years generally have 4-wire runs to RJ-11 jacks. TFA doesn't mention it but it is possible (although hacky) to gang up two four conductor phone wires into an 8 wire Ethernet run. It's a hack because those phone wires aren't even shielded as well as basic Cat5 but it can still work for relatively short runs. With more people using mobile phones, wireless phones or IP phones instead of POTS, that's leaving increasing amounts of in-wall RJ11 dormant. It might not work, but it's pretty easy to test and much easier than running new wires.

(models https://www.gigacopper.net/wp/en/home-networking/ )

I just got the fiber installed, took less than 10 minutes, excluding the replacement of phone port to Ethernet port.

Just click "reconnect" and re-join to the EU (and Schengen area)

I am saying this because I have some friends living in UK, but I do not have the Visa for UK. Although I am on a work/residence-permit in EU, it is just extra hassle to get the visa. I am instead waiting for my years to finish to apply for citizenship...

This sounds a bit farfetched to me. I'm 40+ and lived in the UK all my life. Growing up we only had 1 phone socket in the house for the first few years until my dad got an extension put in upstairs. I've lived in multiple cities since then and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).

http://www.helicopting.de/

I used this to get an Ethernet link to the roof of a building using an old antenna feed line someone had left.

Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.

[0] https://www.aa.net.uk/

Ignoring the horrible taste of our forebears that were putting TVs where they don't belong, that does enable carrying gigabit ethernet using MoCA technology.

I get it; it's "good enough" in most cases, like USB 2.0. But it still sucks we haven't moved past it.

However, I wonder why it seems G.hn is only available in the form of adapters, and not as e.g. a PCIe NIC.

Does this mean we could have kept the good old copper lines from 60 years ago and still enjoy 1 Gbit internet in residential areas?

As a side note - it's quite difficult to find white fiber cables. They're all bright colour so that nobody cuts them accidentally but I don't want a pink line running along the walls haha

Came in handy in an older house that used to have an intercom system, we just borrowed the deactivated intercom wires (they were 4 or 6 copper wires).

My internet is pretty good, I can easily saturate my (rather dated) WiFi at about 30MB/s. But Steam downloads are extremely slow for me (can't remember the numbers but much less).

I always assumed Valve themselves were just stingy with bandwidth. Something else funny going on?

If you only have four wires available, it will usually still work at 100 MBit.

This is typical DHL. I started to believe, they put "tried to deliver, but nobody home" for any & all "UnhandledException" cases.

Time really does fly.

It's very thin fibre cable that can be glued across skirting boards etc and is very hard to see.

Really? I've never seen that many in a house. Most might have one extension in a bedroom upstairs. Which is usually the one room where you don't want a data connection. Crazy to think when I was little it was common to have a phone downstairs and another upstairs in the master bedroom. Who the hell wants to make a phone call from bed?!

I think it's easier just to run cables, tbh. If you can't put them in the walls/floors then hide them in plastic conduit. You can do a pretty good job with a bit of planning.

I've been surprisingly successful with that in the past.

Eh, wifi7 go up to 1.7gbit or something like that. Should be plenty assuming the hardware supports it. Which is a pretty big assumption.

That's nonsense. Not in a new house. Maybe one from 20 years ago.

Anyway nice find. It's always annoying when there's a product that you know should exist but simply doesn't.

I'm currently trying to find a reasonably priced Bluetooth Auracast receiver so I can play audio to multiple rooms from my phone (no way am I investing in Sonos after all their bullshit).

There should be loads of these but the only ones I can find seem to be battery powered wearable devices aimed at tour groups, or hundreds of pounds.