alt Hacker NewsDoing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
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Ah, mate. I sure wish you'd figured this out and told me about it 10 years ago. I fought with this exact same issue for years.
I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.
Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.
When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.
My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.
Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.
Thanks for the writeup!
This is a fantastic result, but I am dying to know how the G.hn chipset creates the bit-loading map on a topology with that many bridge taps. In VDSL2 deployment, any unused extension socket in the house acts as an open-circuited stub, creating signal reflections that notch out specific frequencies (albeit usually killing performance).
If the author is hitting 940 Mbps on a daisy-chain, either the echo cancellation or the frequency diversity on these chips must be lightyears ahead of standard DSLAMs. Does the web interface expose the SNR-per-tone graph? I suspect you would see massive dips where the wiring splits to the other rooms, but the OFDM is just aggressively modulating around them.
> Basically, you need to follow the tracking regularly until the package is tagged as lost or failed delivery, which is the cue to pay import fees.
> It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years!
Wow.
> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets. There is still no regulation that requires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).
I think this is true in the sense of there's no regulation it's just up to the developer, but my house (new build, 2021) has an RJ45 patch panel downstairs with 4 ports that lead to 4 areas of the house.
This was actually a surprise to me when I got the place because when I was speaking to the sales associates they had 0 clue what I was talking about when I enquired about network cabling. If I had known they were installing it as standard I'd have asked for more ports in more rooms, but hindsight...
But yeah, there's also 4 phone sockets as well, which I don't use. This solution might be interesting to try out, but phone sockets are in the same place as where the ethernet sockets are and I've no real need to expand in those rooms right now.
I've been using this for a couple of years in my home now, with the same German Gigacopper devices. It's rock solid, very much unlike my attempts at power-line ethernet in the past. I used ethernet over coax in my last house too, which was also great.
I think many (most?) UK houses could get gigabit ethernet to at least some rooms without any new wiring. It's strange that the devices for doing it reliably are hard to get, but powerline ethernet modems are sold everywhere despite barely working in most houses.
I had a similar issue but instead I opted to replace all the wiring with CAT5E. I used the old phone wiring as a pull-wire to get the CAT5E through the walls very, very slowly. CAT5E was used as I needed all the flexibility I could get and 1Gbit was enough at the time.
The RJ11 panels on the wall were replaced with RJ45, crimped everything. Took a full day of carefully pulling wires but in the end I got gigabit all over the home.
The next owner will probably call me an idiot for using CAT5E in 2019.
The apartment block I live in in Ireland has converted phone sockets into Ethernet using similar converters, except (a) it was in 2004, so 10Mbit base, (b) they ordered whole socket replacements, eliminating the need for separate box outside the walls, (c) the goal was to buy 1 business high speed line, and split it across all apartments, which became obsolete when ADSL, DOCSIS, and later FTTH became affordable options.
I heard the state of the wiring also wasn't great, sometimes apartments had twisted pair wires, while some straight wires, some only have 2 or 3 out of 4 wires connected, etc.
Good to know this technology still exists.
In the UK, pull the socket front off and look what the wires actually are.
I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.
If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.
As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
Here in the states, when we moved into our house that was built in the late 60's, every room had a phone jack. The exterior of the house had cabling strung onto the back and one side with lines installed, through the brick, into the separate rooms. There was also a line or two in the attic. Sometime in the early 90's, after I fired Southwestern Bell, I striped away all the wiring. Two of out kids had new homes built, both were wired with Ethernet cable only for communication.
<I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sockets. It’s not uncommon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sockets in the living room and 2 phone sockets in the bedroom and a master socket in the technical room. It’s ridiculous.>
My wife and I rented a flat in Amsterdam a few years ago. I noticed that there was a phone jack in the water heater room, which I thought was strange. Now I know. (I was looking for the broom, BTW.)
When we bought our house (1950s semidetached) it needed a full electrical rewire. I’m so glad I asked the electricians to run Ethernet all over the house at the same time, including to the ceiling in some rooms for WiFi access points.
I wish I knew about this when I lived in a house without Ethernet sockets! I needed it in the attic for my PC and servers and all I had were slow, unreliable TP-Link Powerline adapters. My first speed test gave me 37.1Kbps (after painfully loading Cloudflare's test page). On a really good day I could get 3MBps. I'd get disconnected multiple times a day and I had to try all sorts of methods to get the adapter to connect again. I had to write a program in the end to tell me if I didn't have internet because the Powerline broke or my DNS server broke (normally it's always DNS but turns out it wasn't) :D
I had a phone socket in that room and I had already discussed the possibility of converting it into an Ethernet socket but decided it's not worth it because everything ended up in a cupboard far away from my router. These adapters would have solved the problem nicely!
By the way, I have more fun stories. The cabling in my current house (which has Ethernet sockets) is still miserable. I spent a year working with my PC over USB tethering to my phone until I finally called an electrician to find which of the 11 dangling cables in the cupboard went to my office...
One day some wires in there were slightly moved and the internet got disconnected because they were badly crimped. Nothing was working so in the end I got an RJ45 connector and managed to get the wires in there.
I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets.
We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.
That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.
In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.
Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.
You are a god send! I have the same issue. My house (2013!!!) is fully phone wired but has zero Ethernet. I have 3 floors which each running on a different phase (the electrician wired it like that). I have a power line adapter in my fuse box to connect directly to the three phases. But I can’t stream content or large files. Even worse the power line adapters bring noise into my power sockets. A guitar amp gets ground crackling etc. will look into this solution!
Excellent article! I think another take away is that we should all take a class on electrical wiring safety. Wiring is fun and very interesting, but can be very dangerous. Classes and the literature that comes with it are invaluable. However, Youtube and the literature will only take you so far, safety wise. (I'm not affiliated with any tech school, I learned by being in the trades under the guidance of trained electricians, with test stands and real life testing.)
Lots of sympathy with this plight. Great to hear that someone has done the needful and rendered MoCA style modems over pairs of copper. I'm probably a customer for that.
I'm currently running MoCA over spliced coax as part of the local connection and not amused by the 5ms latency on it. Also running 100mbit over cat3 I found in a wall which does work, but cat3 in another wall can't hold 10mbit. That link actually can hold 70mbit of vdsl but after a nearby lightning strike slagged various hardware I've moved the vdsl modem back to the BT wires entry point and run the output through some fibre.
And there's a wifi bridge between two other points. And some ethernet running outside the building. Previously also ethernet-over-mains that I might bring back now that I've learned what spanning tree protocols are so the periodic reboots they inexplicably require can be tolerated transparently.
Also the connection to the internet itself is crap so bonding vdsl, starlink and 5g through the openmptcprouter project. Just lots of redundancy and self healing hacks all over the place to give an observably solid connection.
Which is a rambling way to say that if you're in Britain and your network connection brings you sorrow, it can be forced to be acceptable with application of more time and money than other countries require.
I connected self powered crank telephones to my home phone wiring for use as intercoms. Crank one and the others ring. Pick up to engage the battery powered talk circuit and you're chatting with Mabel like it's 1915. I did replace the old dry cell batteries with lithium camera cells so I don't need to think about them for a decade.
The German suppliers they link do European centric MOCA too! Looking seriously at these guys - the previous owners who renovated put decent CoAx absolutely everywhere, 4 BT lines for the outside office, and 0 Ethernet in.
I have been using the exact same G4201TM devices at home for approaching five years now to do much the same: reuse some unused telephone wiring for a meaningful purpose. They are rock solid and have needed exactly zero attention since being installed.
> It’s not uncommon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sockets in the living room and 2 phone sockets in the bedroom and a master socket in the technical room. It’s ridiculous.
This sounds a bit farfetched to me. I'm 40+ and lived in the UK all my life. Growing up we only had 1 phone socket in the house for the first few years until my dad got an extension put in upstairs. I've lived in multiple cities since then and no flat or house I've lived in has had more than 1 phone socket including the house I eventually bought and live in now (which is not small by most UK standards).
> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps – 75 Mbps – 150 Mbps – 300 Mbps – 500 Mbps – 900 Mbps, each one costing a few more pounds per month than the last. This makes the UK simultaneously one of the cheapest and one of the most expensive countries to get Internet.
Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.
It sounds like his phone lines were already cat5, which is not surprisingly capable of 1Gbps.
However, I wonder why it seems G.hn is only available in the form of adapters, and not as e.g. a PCIe NIC.
I've been eying the phone sockets too wondering what I can do with them. Think i'll end up running fiber though because internet is 1.6 so gigabit would be a bottleneck.
As a side note - it's quite difficult to find white fiber cables. They're all bright colour so that nobody cuts them accidentally but I don't want a pink line running along the walls haha
I've noticed this company also has coax modems. I wonder if they will work better than MOCA adapters. I've tried MOCA at my house and the quality of the signal is not good, connection keeps dropping every 10-15 minutes for no apparent reason...
Wait, but you get 63MB/s down from steam?
My internet is pretty good, I can easily saturate my (rather dated) WiFi at about 30MB/s. But Steam downloads are extremely slow for me (can't remember the numbers but much less).
I always assumed Valve themselves were just stingy with bandwidth. Something else funny going on?
Another option is invsilight (https://lightera.com/invisilight-home-fiber-kit/).
It's very thin fibre cable that can be glued across skirting boards etc and is very hard to see.
A lot of British houses have coaxial cable TV in all bedrooms.
Ignoring the horrible taste of our forebears that were putting TVs where they don't belong, that does enable carrying gigabit ethernet using MoCA technology.
I have an 8-wire phone line (twisted pair) between floors. I connected it with an RJ45 socket and it connects at Gigabit speed.
If you only have four wires available, it will usually still work at 100 MBit.
>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything.
As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer to and from it. And it wasn't like an inch from the router either - it did it while in my hand, on the other side of the room with me sitting on our sofa.
And here I am struggling to get gigabit Ethernet over brand new cat6 cabling with devices bought in 2025…
Wild to me that this developer has no access to a device with gigabit ethernet.
Time really does fly.
My current apartment also had a bunch of phone sockets spread around... In a couple of hours, I've removed the existing wires and passed Ethernet wires. Quick, easy, ubiquitous and cheap.
Ok, the writer could be renting a house and not wanting to do that. But sincerely, in Portugal, the landlords couldn't care less. Maybe in the UK, they really, really love their phone sockets and don't want to replace them, don't know.
What I did in all my rentals (in Germany) was to outright run new cable. All you need is a bunch of drills - if you want to pull Ethernet, a 10mm drill will be sufficient, if you want pre-fab LC fiber you'll need a 15mm drill (better 17mm), and if you want to pull pipe (which I prefer) a 27mm drill for a DN20 pipe. And when you move out, take out the pipe, put some plaster over, smooth and paint, and no one can ever tell what has been there.
I mean on fairly short runs you can run Ethernet over water pipes if you want to. I'd try the cable on its own first without any fancy chipsets.
I've been surprisingly successful with that in the past.
This seems like a lot of effort and expense to avoid either figuring out the current ethernet cable layout, or pulling new cable. It's not that hard.
> A new house bought today could have 10 phone sockets and 0 Ethernet sockets.
That's nonsense. Not in a new house. Maybe one from 20 years ago.
Anyway nice find. It's always annoying when there's a product that you know should exist but simply doesn't.
I'm currently trying to find a reasonably priced Bluetooth Auracast receiver so I can play audio to multiple rooms from my phone (no way am I investing in Sonos after all their bullshit).
There should be loads of these but the only ones I can find seem to be battery powered wearable devices aimed at tour groups, or hundreds of pounds.
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I think Hitler had some good points.
Worth knowing in this context:
Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone.
Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.
You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.
Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.
When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?
So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.