Telephone Cable vs ethernet

[Kyratic]

There was a Reddit thread, where people were discussing the advantages of having your adsl router closer to the wall connection point, ie minimizing the amount of phone cable between the two...

My question is realistically, is it making a difference to my latency/bandwidth/packet loss at all if my router is at the end of a 20m phone cable to the plug at the wall.. after all its a phone cable from the plug on my wall to the telephone box on the street corner a block away, I'm not seeing that changing what is effective 1% of that connection's length is going to have a significant impact..

 

If i switched it out for a 20m Ethernet cable that I had crimped RJ-11's on to, would this have a measurable impact? would shielded cable be better?

 

[Adalhelm]

Personally this sounds like the same people that say a shorter phone charging cable makes the phone charge faster. Now if you were having major interference issues on the line I would just recommend a higher quality cable but over all I dont think making short cable will change anything.

[WINcon_Gaming]

You're not going to notice any difference unless your CAT5 cable is around 100 meters or you are running it parallel to a power cable that's not shielded properly. You should be more than fine good sir.

[System Error Message]

for some things like phone cables, usb, PCIe extensions, shorter cables are always better. It may not significantly matter but it does improve things a bit. Good cables are also important.

 

In the case of charging your phone a good cable includes some sort of resistor/circuit that tells the phone about the cable and the charger also needs to have a circuit and be able to output a stable 5V voltage at higher amps. Some phones like android if they dont see a chip that tells them how many amps they can pull will pull amps until they see the voltage dip below a set voltage. When it goes below they wont pull any more amps than they already do.

 

You can run ethernet over rj11 cables but you will only get 100Mb/s. The cable must have 4 pairs instead. gigabit ethernet rj45 cables have 8 pairs. You can tell by the number of pairs by looking at the tip and seeing how many conductors are at the end.

[dalekphalm]

5 hours ago, Kyratic said:

There was a Reddit thread, where people were discussing the advantages of having your adsl router closer to the wall connection point, ie minimizing the amount of phone cable between the two...

My question is realistically, is it making a difference to my latency/bandwidth/packet loss at all if my router is at the end of a 20m phone cable to the plug at the wall.. after all its a phone cable from the plug on my wall to the telephone box on the street corner a block away, I'm not seeing that changing what is effective 1% of that connection's length is going to have a significant impact..

 

If i switched it out for a 20m Ethernet cable that I had crimped RJ-11's on to, would this have a measurable impact? would shielded cable be better?

 

For phone cables, it can make a difference, but generally speaking, the difference is either going to be negligible or very small. Despite the fact that it only goes out the door and down the block to the telephone box, that distance can often be significantly longer "as the cable is buried". In other words, the Telco doesn't usually bury a straight line from your house to the box, but rather, it'll loop around the block, meeting up with other cables on the way.

 

As for switching out the Cat 3 (Telephone) cable with a Cat 5e/Cat 6, etc, I doubt that'll make any difference. The added twists in an Ethernet Cable could provide better stability and range, but honestly, unless you're already having issues, it's certainly not going to make anything better.

 

What is your current ISP Plan (Download and Upload, as advertised), and what are your Speedtest results? Let's compare the two.

[Kyratic]

15 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

What is your current ISP Plan (Download and Upload, as advertised), and what are your Speedtest results? Let's compare the two.

Lol, I'm in South Africa, those details would scare you, US has dream internet from our perspective. I get about 80% of what my ISP offers, and that's because of noise/attenuation im told.

 

Our telecom provider only uses overhead cables, I can sort of track my cable's path.

 

You did provide clarity tho, effectively I was asking if there is a performance difference between cat 3 and cat 6, i see that now.

I also realize that the cable length is possibly less of an issue, and the three joins on it would likely have a bigger effect.

 

The source of my interest is that I already get 200 ping when gaming on European servers, even if I can shave a tiny bit off its a help to me.

[System Error Message]

80% of a connection is typical. Most ISPs use PPPOE which has a significant overhead. When i do a benchmark it is always lower than my sync speeds but my router shows the speed as being the sync speed as it performs the PPPOE so when you add the overhead you get those sync speeds.

 

What it really is is the sync speeds whether you get whats claimed or only 80%.

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, System Error Message said:

80% of a connection is typical. Most ISPs use PPPOE which has a significant overhead. When i do a benchmark it is always lower than my sync speeds but my router shows the speed as being the sync speed as it performs the PPPOE so when you add the overhead you get those sync speeds.

 

What it really is is the sync speeds whether you get whats claimed or only 80%.

PPPoE overhead should be a lot less than 20% though - I've seen many DSL installations (including my old ADSL2+ 16Mbps line) where my actual speeds (including, but not limited to Speedtest) were right in line with what I was paying for. Maybe 5% overhead would be acceptable.

 

A 20% overhead is not from PPPoE, but simply due to signal loss due to distance from the connection to their exchange.