Extended Phone Line and DSL Signal Quality

Question

I am thinking about changing my internet service. DSL I know uses the telephone line but the one issue is the telephone jack is on the other side of the room.

If I was to take a 50ft phone cord I could easily reach the other side of my room. If I use an extended phone cord will I see a degradation in my signal? Would it be better to run a long Ethernet cable to the PC than a long Phone cord to the router?

Note: I am looking for hard information not what ifs. IE: Per every 5ft you see (roughly) this much drop in signal quality. I also realize that there could be local factors that could effect signal strength. I am looking for the most common scenarios. Also I could use a wireless connection and may go that route but I prefer a hard line connection for my desktop.

Answer 1

It shouldn't make any difference either way. 50 feet is easily tolerated by either DSL or Ethernet.

Answer 2

I did a bit more research on this topic and as David mentioned 50ft is easily tolerated by Ethernet. However, running a standard 50ft telephone cable to connect to your DSL modem could be problematic. The reason is in most cases the cables are unshielded and could pick up interference thus degrading your signal quality. To overcome this issue you could either run an Ethernet cable to your computer from where the DSL Modem is installed (by the phone jack). If that is not an option (as it was not for me) you can buy a High Speed Internet Modem Cable. The difference is this is an Ethernet cable with rj11 connectors or aka "normal" telephone connectors. (The connectors from your DSL Modem to computer are rj45). There are DIY methods out there for taking an Ethernet cable and installing your own connectors if you do not want to buy a cable or need longer.

Answer 3

If for example you ran the telephone-line 50' and it passed by a number of high-interference-devices the quality of your signal would change and depending on severity you could lower your DSL bandwidth, say that you pay for 50/10MBPS maybe you are only synced for 42/7 or lower, you often do not get the entire amount you pay for anyways, you can also often see this information in your DSL Modem Web UI.

If for example you ran ethernet 50' you could run into the same high-interference-devices on the run but since you are now switching to a packet-based transmission system with usually at least 100MBPS bandwidth on the run, even if you dropped half the packets they would be retransmitted and you would not lose any Internet bandwidth just bandwidth on the ethernet run. In fact CAT6 ethernet cables are shielded and CAT5e are slightly, not that you couldn't run a telephone-line down one of their twisted-pairs.

I am not 100% sure about a 50' run from bridged modem to router setups for PPPoE login but that would be an odd setup as you would usually have the modem and router together, but I believe you would not run into loss of Internet bandwidth.

As for cost, the telephone-line would probably be cheapest unless you already have a 50' ethernet cable or know someone who has wire and crimpers and can make you a specific length. I personally would invest in a quality CAT6 or higher cable for the future or start thinking of another transmission method altogether like wireless which as of writing this wireless 802.11ac Wave 2 is just starting to become available.