convert home phone wiring to Ethernet

Question

can i convert phone wiring in walls to act as only Ethernet network cause the phone wiring is not in use and not connected to the phone company so there is no voltage in the wires

i remove the wall plate and i find 6 wires blue,blue/white,green,green/white,orange,orange/white , and i know that Ethernet use 8

here is what i am thinking get Ethernet cable cut it in half and attach wires from wall to the first computer and the same with the other computer

so if this is possible do i just attach wires in the same color and ignore brown wire or do i have to rearrange wires , and how much the speed will be

thank you in advance

Answer 1

Hmm... I thought that I posted an answer earlier but maybe I didn't. Anyhoo, CAT3 cable will support 10mbps Ethernet (10BASE-T) but not FastEthernet (100BASE-TX) so it should be possible to use it for Ethernet if there are enough pairs and if the connectors are terminated correctly. It doesn't matter which wires you use as long as you use the same colors on both sides of the "run" and terminate the connectors correctly.

Answer 2

As someone who is doing this currently, I can say that it does work. As Scott pointed out, you only actually use 2 of the pairs for standard ethernet. (the other pairs are used for Power over Ethernet though).

You will obviously get better performance from Cat5, but your landlord might have something to say about ripping out the current wiring. Over a short distance, you might even get 100Mb out of it.

I will give you one note of warning. With the old wiring in my house, the phone company had looped the same strands through multiple phone jacks and tapped into the middle of the strands. Make sure that you are putting jacks on the ends of unbroken strands, and that there arent other jacks or splices in the middle somewhere.

Answer 3

Tut Systems sells baluns that can be used to use phone wire for low-speed ethernet, however, using wifi is going to give better performance. You could use VDSL adaptors, but, the cost of those for the short range 100mb/sec is going to exceed the cost of getting 802.11n adaptors and a gateway. Getting anything above 100mb/sec over those wires is going to be almost impossible.

Answer 4

Solwise sell this product: https://www.solwise.co.uk/net-ghn-tp-e1000m.html

The Solwise E100M transfers network data through the existing phone lines at the rate of up to 1000Mbps and a distance of up to a maximum 1000m. It is ideal for use in small offices, factories, mines, elevator improvements, hotels and schools, providing a high performance resolution to project businesses and system integrators. It can solve the problems of long distance data transmission, network monitoring and data collection etc.

It is a bit pricey but suggests it is possible.

Answer 5

Options for bandwidths higher than 10 Mbit/s

The possibility to use the Cat3 phone cabling for 10 Mbit/s (10BASE-T) Ethernet, but not for 100 Mbit/s (100BASE-TX) Ethernet or faster, has been explored in the other answers.

There are alternatives with higher speeds, as listed below. They do not run Ethernet over the cable but protocols more adapted to the phone cable medium, but all provide Ethernet at the connector sockets. So for practical purposes, it does not matter.

(1) G.hn over twisted pair

G.hn is a standard for home networking over legacy cabling (phone cables, coax and power lines). So, exactly made for the purpose at hand. It provides up to 2 Gbit/s, with commercial devices for phone lines typically providing 1 Gbit/s. That's the PHY layer signalling rate though, while the usable data rate on the IP layer would be 400 Mbit/s (source). The transmission distance is up to 1000 m.

One nice attribute of G.hn is that it's not limited to point-to-point connections like VDSL modems are. This makes it more adapted to phone cabling, which usually branches into several wall sockets in the different rooms. See the cabling example for the Solwise E100M.

A disadvantage of G.hn compared to VDSL / VDSL2 is that only one pair in a multi-core cable can be used for it (source), so link aggregation requires multiple cables.

Available products (not exhaustive):

• Solwise E100M, as mentioned in another answer here. Ca. 120 USD per piece.

• ALLNET ALL-GHN101-2wire. Ca. 115 USD per piece.

• Sendtek PES-821 / PES-822. No prices found.

(2) VDSL P2P modems

Available products (not exhaustive):

• StarTech.com 110VDSLEXT. A pair of VDSL2 modems for point-to-point connections up to 100 Mbit/s (at short distance) resp. 10 Mbit/s (at the 1 km maximum). They specifically mention that a single Cat5 cable can contain up to four of these connections, allowing to multiply the speed by link aggregation. Ca. 280 USD for a pair (see).

• Blackbox Ethernet Extender Kit. Seems to be based on VDSL, but they don't tell. Provides up to 168 Mbit/s, and can cover longer ranges (4 Mbit/s at 3 km). 640 USD for a pair of two.

• Panoptic Technology IntraLAN VDSL2 P2P Modem. Said to provide 100 Mbit/s up to 300 m, down to 20 Mbit/s at 1.7 km. They also offer a concentrator as a central unit that allows to use these devices comfortably for distribution in larger compounds. No prices / purchase options found.

(3) HomePNA

HomePNA was a competing standard to G.hn, but their standards group merged in 2013 with the HomeGrid forum behind their G.hn standard (source). So HomePNA is considered legacy now. There have been 40 million HomePNA devices in operation though (source), so it will still be possible to get them used. See the list of HomePNA products.

Answer 6

No. Phone wire is Cat3, it's quality is much too low to support modern Ethernet (which requires Cat5 or higher).

HPNA adapters can use phone lines to tranmit 802.3 frames; but WiFi would be much cheaper.

Answer 7

Like they said, no. If you truly do not need it in a couple of rooms though... you can always use the phone cable as pull cable for your cat 5 (crimp the ends on after the pull).

Answer 8

Yes, you can have 10Mbit/s etherhet and for that you only need 2 pares (4wires).

I have actually done this in the past, and 10baseT was design to work on phone lines.

But if you would like higher speeds.... newer cables.

So put some connectors on the cable, and give it a go. Maybe the speed is good enough?

Answer 9

Plain old telephone cable (two twisted pairs) is good for 10Mbit Ethernet for runs of 10..20 metres. Your switch will automaticall fall down to 10Mbit if the quality of the transmission is not suitable for higher speeds.

Answer 10

It seems to me that the above info that phone lines will only give 10Mbps is false. AT&T came into my house to upgrade my Uverse internet from 6Mbps to 45Mbps (ATT had to change out the ATT router/modem), I let the technician know that one room in my house has a terrible wifi connection, he gave some solutions of buying an adapter to turn my phone wiring into an Ethernet cable. However, he also said that another phone jack of mine, in a different room, could be turned into an Ethernet cable - He said that he could not convert my other phone jacks to Ethernet, because only this one was connected to the uverse service (years earlier ATT used this jack to give me uverse phone service - later I cancelled this service) - So I'm not sure if this means that this particular phone cable is terminating inside the phone box outside my house or if this phone cable runs outside and then comes back into my house where all the other att cables (uverse & direct tv) come back into the house and plug into my uverse router/modem. Regardless of how this one phone cable is terminated, the only thing that the att tech changed in my upstairs bedroom was the RJ11 jack was changed to a RJ45 jack. My computer that plugs into this new Ethernet jack, when I run a speed test, is consistently getting 47Mbps. So not sure why everyone is saying that you can only get 10Mbps over a phone line. The ATT tech, neither years ago when this one jack was configured to carry att voip service, nor when the att tech recently came to change out the att router/modem, did either att tech change out the phone cabling with Ethernet cabling, this is just regular phone cabling.