TiVo Community Forums Archives - Ethernet down phono (not cat5) cables?

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Ethernet down phono (not cat5) cables?
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Posted by: sunscreem

Hi All,

Has anyone ever tried running "ethernet" down non-cat5 cable?

The reason I ask is that when moving into my new house, I hid all my new cable behind a new wall. I never thought at the time to run some cat5 cable as I couldn't see that I would need it. I did however run a couple of nice long phono-phone cables (about 10m in total).

I'm wondering if I chopped the ends off and tried putting the cat5 connectors on, would this work (for TivoNet) - or should I stick with my origanal (if expensive) plan of installing a wireless lan?

Rob

Posted by: stevel

Go wireless. The phono cable is all wrong for Ethernet, and if it works at all, will tend to be unreliable.

Posted by: sunscreem

Cheers Steve,

You've just confirmed what I was really wanting to hear! Oh well - I guess I'll start saving :-)

Rob

Posted by: stevel

Heck, wireless is getting very cheap nowadays. Wireless routers going for $60 or less, etc. But you may want to see if you can run some CAT5 anyway - it can be very handy.

Posted by: Cletus

It does work. This is exactly my setup - I didn't have a 50ft ethernet cable to run from my TiVo to the PC, so I chopped the ends of a 50-ft phone cord and crimped on ethernet connectors. The 2 wire pairs are all you need - works like a charm, no problems whatsoever in over 1 year. :)

Posted by: gjustice

quote:
Originally posted by sunscreem
Hi All,

Has anyone ever tried running "ethernet" down non-cat5 cable?

The reason I ask is that when moving into my new house, I hid all my new cable behind a new wall. I never thought at the time to run some cat5 cable as I couldn't see that I would need it. I did however run a couple of nice long phono-phone cables (about 10m in total).

I'm wondering if I chopped the ends off and tried putting the cat5 connectors on, would this work (for TivoNet) - or should I stick with my origanal (if expensive) plan of installing a wireless lan?

Rob

PHONO (Speaker wire) won't work, only has 2 conductors.
PHONE (Category 1, 2, 3, or 5) should work, as long as it has 4 conductors.

So both reply streams are correct!

Need to clarify what kind of wire nice long phono-phone cables (about 10m in total) are.

Posted by: Onibroc42

Phone cable may work but here are some of the risks you face by not using properly twisted wire (cat 3 or better for ethernet of any flavor, cat 5 for 100 mbps):

high packet retransmission counts (leads to congestion on network, could cause Tivo to time out on connections)

Impedance mismatches could cause hardware failures in network cards and/or hubs.

induced noise can cause hardware failures as well. Induced power spikes are of particular concern.

You are probably better off with wireless or HPNA

Posted by: jafa

Hi,

If you have a straight length (no joins) of solid core twisted phone cable that is not shared with anything else then it will work fine for 10baseT.

With 100baseTX it would depend on the distance... 10m should work fine (compare this with the 50' multi-core flexable patch cables you can buy at Frys).

My only concern is that you may have problems if you have other cables running in parallel that carry strong 1MHz + signals... espically if you have multiple ethernet runs beside each other in the wall.

Hay, if you are worried - just try it... it is easy enough to check for packet loss.

Nick

Posted by: stevel

I had missed that Rob had also run phone wires - I just saw "phono", hence my response. As Nick says, phone wire can work ok with 10baseT.

Posted by: weaknees

I can't tell you how many times I see people in offices with those old flat, silver phone cables plugged into their network cards. They are RJ-45 - I think they might have been from Merlin systems.

Anyway, they work, for short distances.

Michael