Go ahead and pull em in the wall! Don’t be scared. Worst case the world is ending anyways
Well that’s reassuring
When I was 15, my dad purchased me a plaster saw (still have it) and handed me his drill.
Then told me to make it look neat, but “don’t fuck up because your mother will kill us both”.
I ran about 4 network points through the house.
Nothing like fear to produce a 100% perfect finish 😉
And then there’s me who just screwed up installing a new door knob. I stripped the threads on the screws cause I used the wrong size screws drilling. Now if the new knob fails in the future, I need to buy a new door lmao
If it’s a wooden door that you’re screwing into, dab some match sticks with a little bit of liquid nails and gently hammer them into the stripped-out screw hole, and cut them flush with the hole. Once the glue dries, you can drive the screw back into the matches and it’ll have enough wood to bite into.
I’m tempted to do this, do you have any tips?
If you can, re-use existing sockets! Old telephone or antenna lines can work! You tie the cable to the end of the old cable and pull it through the existing PVC pipe.
For me it was like
Join forces and do link aggregation for double the speeds.
A tale as old as time. Before Ethernet cables we were running phone extension cables through the house to connect up the modem to the only phone jack.
I had to buy carpets to hide the cable under them when running across the floor. Only exposed parts go through the doorways, and the wife complains about them. Well, I am not complaining about our craptastic wifi anymore.
If you own your house you could learn to pull cable and how to do punchdowns. It’s not a super difficult job. That way you could impress the lady of the house with your technical skills while also hiding the mess.
I’d be careful giving broad advice like this.
In my country (Australia) it’s illegal to run cabling yourself unless you’re a registered cabler.
I’m sorry you live in authoritariansville.
Even low voltage? That’s kinda crazy to me.
Even for an Ethernet cable? Surely not.
I seem to remember that yes, it was even for low voltage data cabling.
Not that I would imagine anyone’s enforcing it strongly
I think the enforcement would come with insurance when your house burns down, they can point at “unlicensed” cables
Would they be able to prove it wasn’t installed by a licensed contractor? Ok, if you have it installed legally then you’ll likely have an invoice/receipt, but if you lose it that doesn’t mean the cable is illegal. So if you did it yourself, how would they know it’s not just a case of a missing invoice?
I’m not saying it would go anywhere, but with how scummy insurance companies are they might try it. Still, it’s a bullshit law
I did this for every device in my house. used flat ethernet cable and just fished it under the carpets. Was significantly cheaper than trying to make wireless reach the other side of the house.
Flat ethernet cable
What?!! I did not know this existed!!
Yeah they’re great! I got a super long flat white one and those little white plastic staple things you can lightly hammer into the wall, and ran it along the baseboard of the walls, makes it nearly invisible! It was a bit tedious to do (which is why I haven’t yet redone it in the place I live now, although I will), but honestly I super recommend it. My partner wanted to try and run cords through the walls but I was way too nervous about what might go wrong, so found this solution instead lol
You can also buy devices you plug into the wall and route your network through your power network. Used them to give my detached garage wifi. Works pretty well.
Can be unreliable though based on what else is on the circuit. Had a portable ac that completely took my power line ethernet connection out whenever it ran.
Based on my research, you get the speed of 2.4 ghz wireless (which while it works, it could be better) with the inconvenience of having to use a cable. Performance also depends on wire insulation, which often isn’t built for running PLC. However, you can’t beat the “plug-and-play” of wired there, which might be attractive.
I’d recommend getting a mesh router setup, gives you 5ghz wireless over the whole house (assuming proper setup), and some mesh points support wired output (effectively having a wireless bridge)
I always wonder if I’m introducing bad latency by running a 100 ft ethernet cable.
Then I remind myself it’s the speed of light.
You could just use 2 Ethernet Over Power adaptors (not to be confused with power over ethernet).
After all, it’s not as if the powerlines aren’t already installed at home and connect all power plugs with all other power plugs.
This isn’t even new: I’ve been using this solution for about a decade, back when it could do a mere 20Mb/s (which was still way faster than my Internet connection could handle back then ;))
Unless having a 500Mb/s limit on bandwith is somehow unacceptable when you could have Gigabit ethernet. Then again, why not fibre all the way ;)
Do y"all not use the magic adapters that you plug in by your router, then by your PC to make a lan cable out of the electric wiring? That improved my cable management so much
Power over Ethernet adapters have some serious limitations. MoCa adaptors which use existing coaxial connections, even if you have cable internet, can provide greater speed and better latency than Poe. To be honest though, copper ethernet or fiber ethernet or generally the best way to go.
Drill through the walls or be lazy and run a cable over the roof
To clarify, powerline adapters are what you mean. Power over Ethernet is just that, providing a current over an ethernet cable.
1.21 jiggawhats worth of power over Ethernet
Do people not know power line ethernet adapters are a thing? Look if up on Amazon, you just plug one into the wall by your router and one next to your PC. Clean and strong connections.
What in tarnation is this black magic? I don’t know how I’ve never heard of these before.
They’re good/reliable enough that it’s worth the £20-30 to try a set out. Although like another guy commented bad wall wiring can sometimes have effects if your router is really fast, I get my full 11MBps through my walls easily enough in relatively old housing.
11mbps, even if that’s megabytes not bits, is pretty fuckin slow as far as network speeds today. That’s either 1/100th or 1/10th of gigabit speeds, and a good Ethernet cable can provide well over gigE nowadays
Which only really matters if your actual internet connection can do the same.
Or in other words, it depends, so each one should try to get the right solution for their situation.
I didn’t realize that the only thing people used network connections for was Internet connections. Wow thanks for letting me know.
Lots of ISPs offer way more than 100mbps, many places offer past 1gbps. Even if they don’t, there are many LAN-based things that run even if you don’t know they do. P2p software updates are widespread now. So yeah “it depends” on whether you care about a fast and stable network connection.
Not to mention, power line is a shared medium, much like wifi, so if you have two computers, kiss even your already slow speeds goodbye
First, I suggest you read the last 12 words of my post rather than reacting to your own interpretation of my comment as a personal dig at you.
Second, Ethernel over Power sharing is only up to the first circuit breaker, whislt WiFi sharing is only limited by metal surfaces, walls and distance.
This means that in some situations (for example appartments in appartment buildings) EoP “sharing” is entirelly dependent on what devices a person puts on the same electrical network (i.e. the power line branch sharing the same circuit breaker) whilst WiFi is a complete total hellhole of everybody screwing everybody else.
Further, people sometimes rent the place they live in, not own it and getting permission to run wire along the walls might be impossible whilst investing in improving the landlord’s property by having wire run within the existing paths inside the wall (usually shared with power wire) is usually not exactly smart.
So Ethernet Over Power is a possible solution that should be considered in light of the situation and used if appropriate or discarded if not.
Looking at and evaluating the various solutions in light of the context is the Engineering approach to solving problems, so it makes sense to present a possible solution in a public forum when one’s intention is to help others.
A self-centred “it’s not good in my situation hence it’s shit and anybody who says otherwise is insulting me” take does nothing to help others.
My original comment was about how slow Ethernet over power was and you claimed that only matters if your internet is faster. There are lots of situations where you’d run cable where that statement isn’t true. If you had said “sure it’s slower but it still works sometimes” that’s a wildly different statement than the equivalent of “speed only matters if it’s the bottleneck to the internet”
Power line adapters are usually fairly separated by different circuits, but that’s far from a hard limit. Just because there’s not a reliable connection between two circuits doesn’t mean the medium isn’t shared and interference can’t happen - it is very much like wifi through a cement wall or two.
In no way am I personally offended, I just used some sarcasm to show how inane that original statement is; and those kind of statements are everywhere in networking discussions.
