Well the broadband dongle worked..but..

[Brian Morrison]

I got one rated to 50m of CAT-5 cable for about 11 quid including postage from eBay. Works just fine.

[tony sayer]

In article , Grimly Curmudgeon scribeth thus

Do you know anyone who sells them?..

[PCPaul]

Lindy etc. do the expensive version (£50+).

EBay is your best bet for a cheap one (£15ish), e.g.

Most of them are only USB 1.1 (12Mb/s) but for connecting to an ADSL router/dongle that should be enough.

[tony sayer]

Cheers.. If you know .. does that just extend the wire conductors as it were, or does it do a USB to Ethernet conversion so you can put it through a switch like an ethernet signal?..

[PCPaul]

I'm pretty sure it just uses the twisted pairs as wires - wrapping it in all the IP headers etc would be a lot more expensive. You'd need the transmitter end to have a USB hub, CPU etc. all of it's own.

Also, USB is quite sensitive to latency - I've seen mention of treating every 10m extension as 'a hub' and you're only allowed so many hubs, hence the 50m or so limit over cat5.

[tony sayer]

Right.. Suppose for that price you couldn't expect it;!..

[Duncan Wood]

Well USB-ethernet print servers aren't much

you can always buy a

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

You miss the point. You can extend the dongle up onto a pole, either on its own or in front of a small parabolic dish.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Brian Morrison saying something like:

Wow. Plummeted in price since I last looked at the possibility of doing that.

[Owain]

Most of them just extend the wires, but Lindy do a USB-over-IP converter.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

Already did that. The pole, anyway

It was the mention of miles of cable and extra electronics needing power that triggered the sarcasm.

[PCPaul]

A few places do them, for a price. Also you can get 'USB device sharing IP hubs' which are USB hubs with ethernet out which are intended to share USB devices to multiple computers over properIP.

I've not used those - I assume you need a driver at the PC end to handle the back-to-USB conversion and the allocation of devices to computers, so I guess they will only work for some devices and some OSes.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

Try it and see, you'd be surprised.

is wi-fi, but the principle holds good for 3G dongles too.