Route ethernet cable through coax routing?

[Gareth Davies]

I want to route ethernet cable to a few rooms in a fairly small house.

Taking up floors is not an option because of wood flooring and I don't want visible cable although routing cable around skirting boards may be the easiest eventual solution.

There are aerial points in the house and the cable is routed within the plasterboard wall of the timber frame house.

If the coax cabling is successfully dropping from the attick to the ground floor through the wall (and from the attic to other rooms) I am guessing that there is a clear channel within the plasterboard walls which in theory I could squeeze the ethernet cable into.

Has anyone done this?

Presumably I would need an ethernet router in the attic to split the single feed cable from the main modem/router into individual feeds.

[Brian Gaff]

Network switch on one port of a router? Depends whether super duper high speed is needed on all ports at the sometime of course. As for cable routing. Well, I'd not really like running network cables for long distances near coax as things tend to leak and cause interference effects. Besides, its so easy to damage existing cables by trying to get just one more through the same holes!

Brian

[Nick]

In the attic you want a gigabit switch not a router. They are low power, small and cost about £20 for an 8 port one.

I actually run my ethernet cables through the loft and down the outside of the house. Some people suggest this is bad due to lightening risk or some such. I've had no problems in the 10 years I've done it.

With gigabit cables you have to be careful not to kink the wire or have corner bends in it. There is a minimum radius for every bend, something like 20mm, but you should look it up. If you do have sharp bends or kinks it will reduce the speed to 100Mb/s.

[The Natural Philosopher]

In fact I have.

Internal studowrk walls are hollow, and what I did was open up holes in the plasterboard where I had to, and feed stiff wire leaders through that hollow.

Making good plasterboard is very easy. Simply stuff the hole with newspaper, stick and gob fresh plaster in the hole. then sand it all flat and paint to match.

Never be afraid to rip out huge chunks of plasterboard and then put it back - it mends invisibly really.

No. A *switch*.Preferably 100mbps or even gigabit

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bollocks.

Run network and TV aerial cabling together all over the place without any issues

[John Rumm]

You mean use and existing cable to pull through more? Yup it can work. Tie some string to the end of the coax and pull that back. Then pull through as much string again and tie it in the middle to the coax so you can pull that back to where it was while sill keeping two ends of string accessible. Then use the middle of that to pull in your new wires.

A network switch should be all you need.

[Graham.]

Good practice to avoid kinks etc. certainty, but Gigabit Ethernet is a lot more resilient than you make out.

Think about an RJ45 patch panel, or a wall-plate. Doesn't the cable terminate in the Krone strip at 90 deg to the socket? And aren't the pairs effectively not twisted throughout the plug/socket interface?

So how does that differ from a 90 deg kink in the cable? (Apart from the risk of breaking one or more conductors especially with solid cable)

[Michael Chare]

Yes, I used the old coax cable to pull down a new coax + cat 5 cable. In the attic I was able to see how much free space there was in the trunking. It did get a bit stuck around the ground floor ceiling.

I wanted to use best quality tv coax for the then weak digital TV transmissions.

You may also be able to see the space could also see the space be examining the wall box for the ground floor TV socket

I run two 100mbps connections down one cable and one of those has to be connected to a switch. None of the attached equipment needs gigabit, but I do run gigabit over another length of cable from the same drum. It worked once I discarded an unsatisfactory patch lead.

[Nick]

When I wired my house. I initially only got 100Mb/s. I had to search to eliminate bends and kinks before it ran at 1Gb/s. That was ten years ago maybe equipment is better now but I doubt it. It was solid cat 5e cable, maybe 40m long. I can't remember the degree of the kinks or bends. I only remember that it didn't work at full speed until I got rid of them.

I don't know why it didn't work at full speed with kinks, but it didn't.

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