I have an outside workshop/office that I ran some cat5 cable to some years ago. This link is now playing up a bit - intermittent - and I have been looking at replacing the cable, which I know has become a bit fragile in places - a bit of a tedious job.
I understand that such a link can be achieved with suitable adaptors through the ring main. Has anyone here done this who can offer advice/guidance as the best and most economical way to go about it?
Their use was deprecated, particularly by radio hams because of the interference they chuck out.
I had limited success with them in the past (although oddly enough, when my wifi extender failed the other day an old Powerline unit gave me a perfectly adequate connection from my latest FTTC box until I got a replacement).
How far is it to the workshop? Is there anything like a line of sight through a window or not too substantial wall to the workshop?
A standard Wifi range extender might be all you need. Assuming your workshop has its own consumer unit, a "powerline" signal has to get through a bit more hardware than it it is just on the same ring-main.
I believe you can set up more dedicated links with a decent range, depending on how much you want to spend.
You might want to set up better security, if there are lots of people who might be in range.
Buy a pair and see if they will do what you want. Linksys ones have worked for me and they even work across two different MCBs - the main house ring main and the more recent extension ring main. That really isn't guaranteed though. Mine are the previous generation of these:
Radio hams don't like them but apart from that they work pretty well.
In message <UPadnXirg snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, Farmer Giles snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com writes
I was using them.
Amongst other things, I had a Raspberry Pi connected up at one end, which (apart from anything else) was pinging my router every minute, and recording the time. It was regularly (most days) not getting through to the router, and the when it did, the times were not good. When I was able to run Cat 5 into a suitable location, I stopped getting lost connections, and the average ping time fell to about 10% of what it had been.
So, of you need a reliable and fast connection, fix your Cat 5.
Adrian
They may be disliked, but that doesn't amount to them being deprecated.
That said they don't seem uber-reliable, needing to be powered-off and on again too often, replacing the cable would be better.
I found that for anything more than 'within a house' sort of distances networking over the mains wiring was really not very useful.
We have a house with a detached garage about 20 yards away and a cabin/office a similar sort of distance (from the garage). Our mains incomer is actually in the garage. I had an overhead UTP cable from house to garage which connected to (among other things) a backup system in the garage. When it finally died a few months ago (after working at gigabit speeds for many years) I tried networking over mains from house to garage. It did work, just, but was only capable of around 1MB/s (i.e. 10Mb/s) which for backups and such was marginal.
As I was also aiming to provide a connection to the cabin which would be better than the existing WiFi (not *that* bad because it was 'outside') I bit the bullet and buried some ducts with UTP cable.
I would be surprised if that's a common feature of all makes and models.
Agreed, but unless can be changed by a simple 'pull' of changing old with new isn't always a trivial process.
300 metres! They must be joking.
... and it says 'up to 600Mb/s but the interface is only a 10/100Mb/s port so I don't really see how that works.
my Devolo kit seems pretty reliable. A re-boot every 6 months or so might be needed.
Thanks to everyone for the very useful replies.
I'm persuaded to go for cable replacement. It's probably about 25 metres in total, a real pain to route but I think the better option overall.
Frankly it doesn't work
speed is vile, and reliability is poor. If possible sort the cat 5 out or use optical link or wifi dishes
+1001
When I get a round tuit my mains ethernet bridge will be replaced by CAT5...
I would have thought Yagis would be more suitable, smaller, discrete and less susceptible to wind as well as cheaper?
If the cable is underground it will be easier to replace in the future if you have it inside a pipe such as a blue plastic water pipe. Wrong colour of course but easy to buy.
High gain wifi antenna at the remote end is a possibility. I do that to make my home internet accessible from the village hall (or at least I did until they got their own connection). Solwise sell suitable antennas and Morgan have Wifi USB dongles with socketed antennas.
FWIW apart from a six monthly reboot (which is only necessary if the mains stays up that long here) I find mains internet fine for anything other than high bandwidth streaming. Certainly well up to internet browsing and printing across the network.
That's what mine is in, MDPE water pipe. What do you mean by wrong colour - blue is underground, black is above ground. ... or did you just mean it won't have water in it?
Flat panel phased array are the typical offering. eg
If you have or can get compatible switches on either side (supporting GBIC/SFP pluggable modules), it might be worth costing up fibre?
- 30m of OM2 LC-LC cable, £15
- two SFP transceivers, £5 each, used eBay
Good isolation from lightning strikes.
ARe you sure it is the cable itself rather than the terminations ?
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