Home Network Help

[UnknownCreator]

 

I live in a rentel house, we moved in about a year ago and I have only ever used wifi here but recently I have started buying parts for a PC build and it occured to me to check for ethernet which I assumed it would have. However, when I went out and bought a short cable as well as an adapter, ethernet to usb to test speed with my laptop I was very suprised to find out that the ports around my home were too small to fit my newly aquired cat 6 test cable. After some google I have come to the conclusion that what I have in my house is RJ 41 ports for phones instead of RJ 45 ports for ethernet. 

 

My questions are:

 

1) Is there a way to get ethernet to another room in my house without running a long cable from the router ?

 

2) How can I make my ethernet and wifi faster? im running AT&T wifi and im only getting 28 Mb over wifi and the same when I jacked directly into the router with my adapter.

 

The router I have is a BGW210 which seems to be an AT&T fiber router? If im understanding correctly.. 

 

 

Thank you for your time!

[Falcon1986]

25 minutes ago, UnknownCreator said:

1) Is there a way to get ethernet to another room in my house without running a long cable from the router ?

If you have coaxial runs, MoCA is the best alternative.

 

As an absolutely last resort, there is Powerline, but you'll need a lot of luck to get it to work at decent speeds consistently.

 

27 minutes ago, UnknownCreator said:

2) How can I make my ethernet and wifi faster? im running AT&T wifi and im only getting 28 Mb over wifi and the same when I jacked directly into the router with my adapter.

What speeds are you paying for?

 

What is the exact make/model of your USB to ethernet adapter? Some will be limited by the speed of the USB interface and will never achieve 1Gbps even if the ethernet side is labeled as "gigabit".

[UnknownCreator]

9 minutes ago, Falcon1986 said:

If you have coaxial runs, MoCA is the best alternative.

 

As an absolutely last resort, there is Powerline, but you'll need a lot of luck to get it to work at decent speeds consistently.

 

What speeds are you paying for?

 

What is the exact make/model of your USB to ethernet adapter? Some will be limited by the speed of the USB interface and will never achieve 1Gbps even if the ethernet side is labeled as "gigabit".

The exact model of my adapter is:

J5CREATE C J5 USB-A TO GB ETHERNET

 

Any alternatives other than powerline? Would it even be worth it ? 

 

No coax

 

Im not sure how much I am paying for I will check tommorow.

[Needfuldoer]

Sounds like you have phone lines, not network runs.

 

If you get long network cables, you can chase baseboards and run behind furniture. It's not as clean as pulling cable through the wall, but that's not an option for you unless you get your landlord on board with the project.

 

 

[UnknownCreator]

5 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Sounds like you have phone lines, not network runs.

 

If you get long network cables, you can chase baseboards and run behind furniture. It's not as clean as pulling cable through the wall, but that's not an option for you unless you get your landlord on board with the project.

 

 

I think that's what I'm going to have to do, any thoughts on how I might be able to make my network faster ? 

[Falcon1986]

3 hours ago, UnknownCreator said:

I think that's what I'm going to have to do, any thoughts on how I might be able to make my network faster ? 

As in your LAN or Internet connection?

 

With the former, wiring in as many devices via ethernet is the first step.

 

With the latter, we'll need to know what you're paying your ISP for as asked previously.

[Donut417]

22 hours ago, UnknownCreator said:

have is a BGW210 which seems to be an AT&T fiber router? I

I think they use the same box for aDSL, VDSL and Fiber. So you will need to figure out what you got. If its aDSL your screwed. VDSL should get you around 50 to 100 Mbps in a lot of areas. Fiber its the best as you know. 

 

[E-waste]

Set up Wireshark and turn on "network address" in the view menu.

 

Set up a pi-hole in a virtual machine that has a Linux install in it, and add the Unbound DNS server software.  A Windows system will cache an ip address linked to a domain for the length of time the web server has set.

 

Usually about three minutes.

 

The folks at Unbound think caching dns data for at least 1-3 days is reasonable and recommended.  It will cut about a 1/20 of a second from repeat connections, reducing bandwidth used in upload, reducing network load to repeat the same connection.

 

Pi-hole will make a great web interface to show what websites are connecting, and you can block any of them.

 

If you want a quicker setup, you could try NextDNS until you get pi-hole set up.

 

Look into browser extensions: Privacy badger claims to speed up page loads significantly, by blocking trackers

 

uBlock Origin can also do this, and getting technical, NoScript will block everything if set to untrusted, which also blocks ads and unwanted software downloads

 

RethinkDNS on android has local, on-device domain blocking now, so you can avoid unwanted websites and services from even getting to your wi-fi antenna on the device!  Outright block apps too, as well as IP addresses, and domains on a per-app basis.

 

Get it from F-droid as it is unmodified, compared to the standard android store.