Max speed with 4 wires?

[chrismin1302]

Hello everyone!

 

Yesterday I found out that there are 4 copper wires running from the kitchen (where my router is) to my bedroom that are currently unused and part of the telephone infrastructure in my house. So, I wanted to see how much data I could push through those 4 wires and if it would be better than investing in an AC Wireless solution.

 

Currently, I've got a gigabit router hooked up to a homemade FreeNAS from some older Gigabit compatible hardware. That network works fine, and with a USB 3.0 Adapter to Ethernet I can transfer files at upwards of 100MB/s to my Surface Pro 4, the device I plan to be using.

 

Originally, I thought of using 2 pair Ethernet, which I actually tried and it works, so I'll go ahead today and buy an Ethernet Port to hook this up to the wall. However, since this is 2 pair Ethernet with only 4 wires, I'm limited to 100mbps, which is slower than my current WiFi for file transfer.

 

Another idea I've had was to use these wires as USB wires. This is a bit more complicated than it sounds. USB 2.0 should work fine, but I am a bit over the distance limit. This should give me about 30mb/s transfer speeds, which is certainly an improvement. My Surface Pro 4 only supports up to 867mbps WiFi, so this might actually be faster than investing in a better WiFi solution.

 

USB 3.0 is where stuff gets interesting. According to some research, I can ditch the USB 2.0 part of the connector entirely, since I can provide power on one end and the new USB 3.0 wires are enough to get the connection to work as intended on USB 3.0 devices. However, USB 3.0 has 5 wires. I've been trying to figure out what the middle wire does and see if that could be avoided on one end. On Wikipedia, it's listed as GND_SIGNAL, but I can't fully understand how it's used. Explanations would be much appreciated!

 

Is there any other way I could achieve faster internet through those 4 wires? Any standards that I missed? It's a real shame that Ethernet only goes from 100 to 1000 mbits, it would be great if we could use two pairs to get 500mbits.

 

I'm open to any suggestions and criticism!

Thanks in advance,

Chris.

[jj9987]

4 wires what? What size? What kind of wires?

 

Standard Ethernet cable (Cat.5, Cat.5E, Cat.6 etc) has 4 twisted pairs, total 8 wires. You need to use all of them to get Gigabit connection, otherwise you will be limited to 100Mbps which is around 10-11MB/s (that is the real speed, taking overhead into account).

[chrismin1302]

I know, that's the issue here. These are 4 copper wires. I don't know what category, I can't find anything mentioned on them, however they are a bit thick and relatively hard to bend.

[chrismin1302]

Here's a picture of the 4 wires, don't know if it helps with anything.

[chrismin1302]

3 minutes ago, James Evens said:

USB 3.0 is more then 5 wires. 

Also you can not do usb 3.0 over such wires. Even usb 2.0 can be a problem: no shielding at all and those telephone cables are not optimized for high speeds. At the moment the limit for vectoring is 300 Mbit/s.

I know USB 3.0 is more than 5 wires, I'm just saying that under specific circumstances you can skip the USB 2.0 wires entirely and just use the USB 3.0 wires.

 

At this point, I'm just throwing ideas around to see what's possible. I won't know if it works until I actually try it. I'm just looking at what is theoretically possible for now.

[Dujith]

A few things:

The wires in question were meant for analog phones and are not twisted. Depending on the range you might get issues since the signal will interfere with itself.

Having said that, we did the exact same thing 10 years ago in some old houses where it was not possible to get the old cable out and ran it as a 100Mbit connection without any issues.

The Wifi speeds are half duplex, so anything saying 300Mbps will be 150 up and 150 down in a perfect situation. So in most cases 100Mbit wired will still be faster then Wifi.

 

Best bet is to see if you can pull out the wires. Before you do attach a cat5 cable to one end and use the old cables to guide the cat5 cable.

 

If you use the old cables to connect, remember you will need to use pin 1,2,3 and 6