If your CAT6 is down to 100 Mbps, check that all the conductors have been properly crimped into the connector -- or consider re-crimping. It's possible the building has shifted and damaged the fished cable, but it's more likely the problem is with the connector(s).
Network engineer of 20+ years here, but I'm struggling with this 'fished' terminology. Does it mean when a cable is pulled through on a piece of string?
> Does it mean when a cable is pulled through on a piece of string?
That is often exactly what is meant. The problem of running Ethernet through existing structures has spawned a bunch of tools, including glow-in-the-dark "fish tape."
The process is often brutal, and looks like tug-of-war when it takes a couple men to pull the bundle through a couple 90 degree turns. As such, we have "plenum" cable, which is much tougher than typical patch cable, because the latter would just get shredded inside the structure.
> The problem of running Ethernet through existing structures has spawned a bunch of tools, including glow-in-the-dark "fish tape."
None of these tools are new (well, the glow fish sticks I think are a recent innovation) or unique to ethernet. Electrical wire is installed the same way, eg. in conduit. There's even a special lube for making your wire slide through the conduit easier.
In my case, when I upgraded from Cat5 to Cat6, I taped on to the existing 5 and used it to pull the 6 through the attic and down the wall. In the attic, you usually use a string, with a weight of some kind attached (if it's a new install), to drop down the wall seal plate, which you've drilled a hole into, down to the hole you've already carved out for your cable box near the baseboard area.
I had to buy a new crimping tool a while ago because I couldn’t find the one I had from a few years before.
I ended up buying a small kit containing both crimping tool and a couple of additional tools.
One of the tools included is an Ethernet cable tester. It has two parts; one for each end of the cable. The part on one side is powered by 9V battery (same one used in smoke detectors etc).
You connect the parts to the RJ45 plugs of each side. And it has individual LEDs for each of the eight leads in the cable. They are lit up in sequence. Any that don’t light up means that that pin is not properly connected, or the cable is broken.
And using that tool is how I found out the reason one of the router ports report 100M instead of 1000M connection. Half of the leads on the cable connected to that port are damaged or not properly connected! And the four that are working are the ones needed for 100M.
I remember that when I originally crimped that cable years ago I was struggling for quite a while, getting no connection at first until after a couple of attempts I got it connected. I didn’t notice at the time, nor for a long time after, that it was only a 100M connection. And it took until I had this tool to figure out the why of it being only 100M.
You also might have crimped it for 100Mbps specifically. 100Mbps ethernet only uses 2 wire pairs, not all 4. It was common, and intended, to carry 2 separate connections through a 4-wire cable. Ethernet and up to two landlines (or a 2-pair landline, which existed) was also a good combination.
I had a lot of trouble with this when having my contractors run cat6 in my house during a recent renovation. Their electrician kept saying "it's done!" and then I'd test it and find that I was getting only 100mbps. Then they'd re-terminate the ends and a few more of the runs would get full speed when I re-tested. Repeated this cycle a few times until they all worked.
I confess, I've read this twice and I don't really get what's going on here; and I have both MoCA and Powerline going on in my house as well, so I'm like -- why not one of those?
Fiber is much nicer. You can get as much bandwidth as you'd ever want.
10G is trivially doable on cheap hardware. You can also go 100G, 200G or 400G over the exact same cable, it just costs a lot more on the endpoints.
If you run anything modern you probably can benefit from 10G at least. A NVME does 8 GB/s easily, it's a real pity to limit speeds to 1 gigabit. And Ethernet past 1 Gbps quickly gets pretty terrible to deal with, so might as well go with fiber then.
10G on twisted pair isn't too bad either. Used enterprise NICs are cheap on eBay. New low cost cards are available, too (still costs more than used gear, but if you want lower power or multigig, it's worth a look). Switches aren't so cheap, but IMHO, 10g-baseT is comparable to sfp+ and a transceiver on each end.
Obviously, if something is wrong with your existing cabling, 10g-base-t is probably not going to work either. 10G is probably the limit for twisted pair, but I think it'll hold up as a reasonable speed for a long time.
10G on twisted pair is terrible, it's power hungry and the SFP modules have a tendency to overheat. You need decent ventilation and not have 10G twisted pair connectors next to each other. Also only goes to 30M or so.
IMO, if you want 10G just go with fiber, it's less of a pain and more reliable. With twisted pair you may find out that the module overheats at times and the link drops out.
I don't use sfp+ modules for twisted pair... It didn't cost anymore to get nics and switches with the ports I need vs sfp+ and transceivers; although there's a lot fewer switches to choose from. 30 meters feels like a lot for most homes. 10g-base-T spec calls for 100m on cat6a and 55m on cat6. Running on cat5(e) isn't to spec, but largely works in a home environment where you tend not to have to deal with a lot of crosstalk from dense conduit.
And the benefit is I didn't have to run new cable. Lots of homes have some twisted pair in the wall, very few have fiber in the wall. Homes from the late 90s on probably have cat5 for phone lines.
Sure, 10GBASE-T works. It's just not very good overall and you should plan to put your 10G on fiber any time you can. It's not particularly expensive or complicated. If you can't, then sure, use -T.
Until everything moves to SFP it's gonna be hard to make that transition for anything other than core runs. Especially if you need PoE - I've doubled my cable runs and lost a ton of flexibility.
Powerline struggles to reach gigabit and has all sorts of interference issues, and MoCA is expensive and also not full duplex. Bandwidth goes down as you attach it to more nodes.
I had to ditch my powerline network after an electrical upgrade to arcfault circuit breakers (which my city's code requires - there are AFCI breakers that work with powerline networking but I'd have needed to replace my entire electrical panel). I suspect that's going to be very common in future as AFCI becomes require more.
> […] (which my city's code requires - there are AFCI breakers that work with powerline networking but I'd have needed to replace my entire electrical panel).
The (US) electrical code requires AFCI (and GFCI) in general, and not just your city. The Electrician U channel from a few years ago, "Where and Why Do We Need AFCI Protection?":
This is how my apartment complex retrofitted all 300ish units with AT&T fiber. Fiber runs from your building's telecom room to a small hole they drilled above everyone's front door, then along baseboards and around door jambs until it reaches ~the center of the unit (concrete walls...) in the living room.
It is genuinely invisible until you get up close. You're far more likely to notice the spots where someone got sloppy with the glue in some corner than the fiber itself. With proper attention to detail during installation (and assuming you have white door jambs and baseboards) it would be basically invisible.
You can fish standard fiber very well too. It's thinner than pretty much all network cable.
The biggest part is the LC connector, and you can just take that apart and put it back together -- just remember which was the left and which was the right wire.
GoCoax/MoCA is a fantastic non-destructive option if your copper can handle it. Just make sure you install a filter at your ingress point to prevent sending data to neighbors (MoCA does have encryption, but why trust math when you can trust physics and math?).
Last time I cabled my house I laid out two cables between the switch and every spot, precisely for this reason. I think now I’d lay fiber as well, for future use.
I recently switched to "invisible" fiber after having used various generations of MoCA/G.hn/Powerline ethernet over the years. The best part is that you can get such cabling down to 0.6mm thin (akin to fishing line) and get it pre-terminated, meaning you don't have to drill holes anywhere as it can easily fit through doorways and supports very tight bend radii without breaking (exceeding G.657.B3). Also, pairing it with bidirectional transceivers means you only need to run one cable to each endpoint.
Yes, it's the width of the cable. If your cable is pre-terminated, then yes you have to be aware of the dimensions of the connectors if you are having to feed it through small openings. However if you're like me and go the non-destructive route of routing the cable through doorways and along baseboards, walls, and ceilings there is no issue.
German here, living in single digit distance to military areas.... The shit they buried under argon et al decades ago, man ... tap in if you have the patience ... gives you seconds around the globe
These days you can get a cheap-o chinese fiber splicer kit for like $500-800. They work pretty well and are in many ways simpler than terminating ethernet. Super convenient for wall pulls and so on.
I'd be curious to see what the actual link speed is between the two endpoints, rather than a speed test out to the ISP. Are you able to do a speed test with something like iperf3 locally?
I have old cat5e and it can do 10Gbps - Wondering what you're hoping to see here? If the endpoints negotiate 100Mbps then thats the top speed of the link - could be the endpoints (worth trying others) but chances are its the ends that are bad, not the middle unless you're pounding nails in where the cables go.
Article really offers no explanation of what "invisible fiver" is. Its just fiber with a thin, white jacket meant to be glued along baseboards where it is discreet.
I’m sure there are some safety issues I’m not considering that make it impractical to pump a high-powered laser into a wall cutout, burn a line-of-sight through all the studs, and install an optical link along the resulting path...
As to the author's core complaint (CAT5/6 degrading to 100mbps), I've found that the issue is almost always the termination at the jacks. Reseating the wires with a punchdown tool, or failing that, cutting a bit more off the ends and ensuring that the pair twists run all the way to the punchdowns has been enough to restore 1000mbps negotiation the few times I've had this issue.
Exactly this. And if not this, it’s the transceiver. And when you crimp, pay attention to the tricky color pair routing so common mode noise is rejected properly.
> The SFP+s use the same SC connector used in PON networks, but otherwise use Active Ethernet. I’m not sure if they’re using IEEE standards or are proprietary on the glass, but I’ll assume the latter.
It's actually standards compliant (unless they screwed something up). IEEE 802.3 clause 158: 10GBase-BRx, where x = 20 in this case, at least the ones on the Amazon link say 20km. The 1G/2G support is "bonus" beyond the spec.
You can get them with LC connectors too, which I'd in fact recommend because those are smaller, a bit more precise, and waaaaaay more common these days. https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/36351.html (note you need a pair of "23" and "32")
Great post! In every apartment I've lived in I've done something similar and it keeps the wife happy enough, even though there are technically cables running everywhere (just make sure to not make a mess of things at the switch side if you run a lot...).
Some other notes for those trying to adapt things to their own situations and set ups:
- As others have said, give ample time to trying to recrimp the cables first. It seems this post skips past that as it didn't work out for the author, but it should be the first step for anyone reading.
- RJ45 SFP+ adapters that don't get super hot and do the full range exist now if you need to use them somewhere. Just don't expect them to be the cheap ones!
- If you do try to go with a wireless mesh, make sure it's APs which can mesh on the 6 GHz band. It won't help you punch through lead lined walls or anything but stuff like the HP25s with only 2.4+5 GHz can only ever give misery to begin with. Not that Wi-Fi will compete with glass regardless, but it can actually be pretty decent with 6 GHz mesh.
- The media converters and SC transceivers do use IEEE standards. Functionally they are 2 port switches in transparent mode. More expensive to build something custom when the goal is just to transport Ethernet with Ethernet media anyways, plus it increases the use cases of the product to be normal Ethernet on both ends rather than just a paired device for solely this scenario.
- As such, if you do multiple runs consider putting a switch with SFP/SFP+ ports at the head end instead of media converters. Try not to spend more than ~$120 on an 8 port 10G switch for this if you go this route, it's easy to spend more to get less.
- Instead of media converters, consider getting mini 4+2 switches (4 RJ45 up to 2.5G + 2 SFP+ up to 10G) from Aliexpress or wherever. They tend to be about the same size as a media converter and go in the ~$30 price range. The benefit being if you ever need to plug another device in near that one you have 3 other ports already available to use that 10G uplink with. You can also daisy chain them with the 2nd 10G port, which works great so long as you don't need all 10G to a single device all the time. The only case it's not great is when you really want to turn that run into a single 10G RJ45 port, here the media converter would be significantly cheaper.
- Unless you have another reason to (e.g. have existing cables or free stuff), I'd recommend going with single strand LC fiber. SC is pretty much only found in service provider networks these days and also has a bulkier end. Not that LC is "wrong", but if I were buying new for home networking I'd probably do LC. Regardless what you go with, make sure to get the bidirectional transceivers for it.
- If you're cheap you can go for 1G transceivers & switches, but if you're doing all of this instead of dealing with Wi-Fi you're probably in the group that would like to just spend slightly more for a 10G network.
- You can spend a lot of time reading about singlemode vs multimode, APC vs UPC, SC vs LC, and further details of each but none of it will really matter in a home. E.g. if you take an SR optic connected to an APC cable which is butted to a UPC cable and then plug that into your switch it'll probably work fine. Just don't let your local network guy see it or they might throw up.
This also comes in translucent type - basically looks like fishing line so very close to actually invisible. When it's against a wall you can't see it unless you've got a flashlight and are centimeters away.
And it'll carry 10gig just fine.
Good stuff even though it's a bit of a pain to route it along a path that makes sense, has the right bend radius & doesn't get squished by doors etc.
Currently trying to decide whether to do the same for other rooms.
57 comments
[ 26.5 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadThat is often exactly what is meant. The problem of running Ethernet through existing structures has spawned a bunch of tools, including glow-in-the-dark "fish tape."
The process is often brutal, and looks like tug-of-war when it takes a couple men to pull the bundle through a couple 90 degree turns. As such, we have "plenum" cable, which is much tougher than typical patch cable, because the latter would just get shredded inside the structure.
None of these tools are new (well, the glow fish sticks I think are a recent innovation) or unique to ethernet. Electrical wire is installed the same way, eg. in conduit. There's even a special lube for making your wire slide through the conduit easier.
Recrimping is always the best first step. Sometimes running 2.5gb instead of gigabit will help too.
I ended up buying a small kit containing both crimping tool and a couple of additional tools.
One of the tools included is an Ethernet cable tester. It has two parts; one for each end of the cable. The part on one side is powered by 9V battery (same one used in smoke detectors etc).
You connect the parts to the RJ45 plugs of each side. And it has individual LEDs for each of the eight leads in the cable. They are lit up in sequence. Any that don’t light up means that that pin is not properly connected, or the cable is broken.
And using that tool is how I found out the reason one of the router ports report 100M instead of 1000M connection. Half of the leads on the cable connected to that port are damaged or not properly connected! And the four that are working are the ones needed for 100M.
I remember that when I originally crimped that cable years ago I was struggling for quite a while, getting no connection at first until after a couple of attempts I got it connected. I didn’t notice at the time, nor for a long time after, that it was only a 100M connection. And it took until I had this tool to figure out the why of it being only 100M.
10G is trivially doable on cheap hardware. You can also go 100G, 200G or 400G over the exact same cable, it just costs a lot more on the endpoints.
If you run anything modern you probably can benefit from 10G at least. A NVME does 8 GB/s easily, it's a real pity to limit speeds to 1 gigabit. And Ethernet past 1 Gbps quickly gets pretty terrible to deal with, so might as well go with fiber then.
Obviously, if something is wrong with your existing cabling, 10g-base-t is probably not going to work either. 10G is probably the limit for twisted pair, but I think it'll hold up as a reasonable speed for a long time.
IMO, if you want 10G just go with fiber, it's less of a pain and more reliable. With twisted pair you may find out that the module overheats at times and the link drops out.
And the benefit is I didn't have to run new cable. Lots of homes have some twisted pair in the wall, very few have fiber in the wall. Homes from the late 90s on probably have cat5 for phone lines.
The (US) electrical code requires AFCI (and GFCI) in general, and not just your city. The Electrician U channel from a few years ago, "Where and Why Do We Need AFCI Protection?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMjBGzyoWUY
Also "Where Should We Be Using Dual Function [AFCI and GFCI] Breakers?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVyLSkEN908
It is genuinely invisible until you get up close. You're far more likely to notice the spots where someone got sloppy with the glue in some corner than the fiber itself. With proper attention to detail during installation (and assuming you have white door jambs and baseboards) it would be basically invisible.
The biggest part is the LC connector, and you can just take that apart and put it back together -- just remember which was the left and which was the right wire.
That should save the need for special hardware.
But our townhouse was renovated in a post-cable era so Coax was never put in. If it was a 1-2 decades older it would've had coax.
I’m sure there are some safety issues I’m not considering that make it impractical to pump a high-powered laser into a wall cutout, burn a line-of-sight through all the studs, and install an optical link along the resulting path...
Of course, you also think shooting a laser will stop wherever you desire it to stop, so I realize I’m not dealing with The Braintrust here.
As to the author's core complaint (CAT5/6 degrading to 100mbps), I've found that the issue is almost always the termination at the jacks. Reseating the wires with a punchdown tool, or failing that, cutting a bit more off the ends and ensuring that the pair twists run all the way to the punchdowns has been enough to restore 1000mbps negotiation the few times I've had this issue.
It's actually standards compliant (unless they screwed something up). IEEE 802.3 clause 158: 10GBase-BRx, where x = 20 in this case, at least the ones on the Amazon link say 20km. The 1G/2G support is "bonus" beyond the spec.
You can get them with LC connectors too, which I'd in fact recommend because those are smaller, a bit more precise, and waaaaaay more common these days. https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/36351.html (note you need a pair of "23" and "32")
Some other notes for those trying to adapt things to their own situations and set ups:
- As others have said, give ample time to trying to recrimp the cables first. It seems this post skips past that as it didn't work out for the author, but it should be the first step for anyone reading.
- RJ45 SFP+ adapters that don't get super hot and do the full range exist now if you need to use them somewhere. Just don't expect them to be the cheap ones!
- If you do try to go with a wireless mesh, make sure it's APs which can mesh on the 6 GHz band. It won't help you punch through lead lined walls or anything but stuff like the HP25s with only 2.4+5 GHz can only ever give misery to begin with. Not that Wi-Fi will compete with glass regardless, but it can actually be pretty decent with 6 GHz mesh.
- The media converters and SC transceivers do use IEEE standards. Functionally they are 2 port switches in transparent mode. More expensive to build something custom when the goal is just to transport Ethernet with Ethernet media anyways, plus it increases the use cases of the product to be normal Ethernet on both ends rather than just a paired device for solely this scenario.
- As such, if you do multiple runs consider putting a switch with SFP/SFP+ ports at the head end instead of media converters. Try not to spend more than ~$120 on an 8 port 10G switch for this if you go this route, it's easy to spend more to get less.
- Instead of media converters, consider getting mini 4+2 switches (4 RJ45 up to 2.5G + 2 SFP+ up to 10G) from Aliexpress or wherever. They tend to be about the same size as a media converter and go in the ~$30 price range. The benefit being if you ever need to plug another device in near that one you have 3 other ports already available to use that 10G uplink with. You can also daisy chain them with the 2nd 10G port, which works great so long as you don't need all 10G to a single device all the time. The only case it's not great is when you really want to turn that run into a single 10G RJ45 port, here the media converter would be significantly cheaper.
- Unless you have another reason to (e.g. have existing cables or free stuff), I'd recommend going with single strand LC fiber. SC is pretty much only found in service provider networks these days and also has a bulkier end. Not that LC is "wrong", but if I were buying new for home networking I'd probably do LC. Regardless what you go with, make sure to get the bidirectional transceivers for it.
- If you're cheap you can go for 1G transceivers & switches, but if you're doing all of this instead of dealing with Wi-Fi you're probably in the group that would like to just spend slightly more for a 10G network.
- You can spend a lot of time reading about singlemode vs multimode, APC vs UPC, SC vs LC, and further details of each but none of it will really matter in a home. E.g. if you take an SR optic connected to an APC cable which is butted to a UPC cable and then plug that into your switch it'll probably work fine. Just don't let your local network guy see it or they might throw up.
And it'll carry 10gig just fine.
Good stuff even though it's a bit of a pain to route it along a path that makes sense, has the right bend radius & doesn't get squished by doors etc.
Currently trying to decide whether to do the same for other rooms.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2FbzCyiNr4