I have had these jump outside of my house. I realize how crazy it sounds, but I had a pair (they were not encrypted - this was long ago, and I don't even know if encrypted ones existed) and my neighbor had a pair. I would, very occasionally, end up getting DHCP answered by the router in their network.

It took forever to figure out what was causing this, and I eventually figured it out by doing a (very slow) IP scan of every device on the network I was connecting to and finding a machine named with their first and last name. Unplugged the thing, and the problem went away forever.

If it hadn't happened to me, it's something I would have thought impossible!

(edited a small typo)

Doesn't sound crazy at all, there's not really anything in your breaker panel or your meter or the outside wiring designed to stop these signals, it's just that there's also nothing designed to help the signals make it through all that, so you wouldn't expect it to continue beyond your house. Just like they tend not to work very well when used on different circuits, they shouldn't work very well outside your house, which is certainly not on the same breaker at all.

I think the newer ones all have some sort of encryption/pairing system which at least helps you ignore your neighbors transmissions.

There are phase bridges to ensure powerline signals are on both phases in the typical US house, and phase filters available that filter the powerline frequencies - they were originally conceived not so much for leaking out, but preventing noise from leaking in and interfering with powerline stuff.

X10 users have used them for years - you can find them with vendors that specialize in dealing with the X10 community or home automation; although with the wireless mesh networks like Zwave or Zigbee a lot of the powerline stuff has (thankfully) fallen by the wayside.

Another way to get wired internet without possibly running new cable is with MOCA - ethernet over coax. You can find cheap DirecTV branded MOCA adapters all over the place. Most are 100Mbps but if you watch the newer ones are gigabit capable.

Ethernet over coax? That’s some OG networking. Break out those 10base5 adapters from ur possibles box. I guess this is also the time to bring up the obligatory Ethernet over barbed wire solution: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm

They're talking about MoCA, multimedia over coax. The standard is from 2006 and runs over regular household rg59 or rg6 coax.

That being said, I've worked with 10base5. Drilling for a vampire tap in an open elevator shaft is its own form of exciting.

Personally, I've had much better luck with MOCA than with powerline. Full gigabit speeds in an older 1940s house using basic Motorola adapters off of Amazon.

Same. Plugged in the device-side one of a pair and the device started working before I plugged in the router-side one. It'd connected to a house two or three doors down.

I've used these for over a decade with limited success. Their performance is very specific to your wiring and can be fouled up with lots of things. Mine was sometimes no faster than WiFi. MoCA (Ethernet over coax wiring like for cable/satellite TV) seems to work better.

I had a lot more success with them after popping my electrical panel open and rearranging the relevant outlet circuits to all be on the same AC phase (making sure not to unbalance the amperage load since some were 15As and some were 20)

I can't believe I haven't thought of that!

I'm using a pair of TPLinks to feed a wifi router on the opposite side of my house. The outlets are definitely on opposite phases, but the powerline adapters still work reasonably well. (~80Mbps). Now I'm realizing I should probably swap a couple of circuits and improve that connection.

It would be far easier to just get a phase coupler http://cache-m2.smarthome.com/manuals/4826a.pdf

But brute force works too :)

It would be more practical in many places now to use leftover "hardline" phone plugs, especially because when they are disconnected from service they are sometimes quite literally disconnected and you have much fewer concerns about bleedover into neighbors.

Speeds won't be great for that sort of ethernet-over-phone wire, especially because most landlines used awful, cheeap wires, but in some cases it is faster than powerline adaptors.

Unfortunately all the companies that produce such equipment for "phone line adaptors" sell only to the phone companies and never directly to consumers.

So many houses today have vestigial phone wires that no one is using for anything.

Even if you could manage to find some ADSL+ equipment, you are going to tap out at around 48Mbps, I'm not sure if you can push unshielded, twisted 2-pair wire any faster. One downside would be that all of the phone jacks in the house are tied together, it would be a A->B kind of connection. I regularly get much faster speeds with my powerline adapters and if you have multiples paired, they create an actual network on the powerlines.

If you've got two pair, you can probably run 100BaseTx, even if the cable is not up to cat5 spec, especially if the runs are short and separated from other lines; Ethernet specs are for 100 meter distances most of which is in a tight conduit with other high frequency data transmissions. Old in-home phone wiring is likely not tightly packed or very long.

If you've got an old house with old telephone wiring, it's probably wired as a bus, if you want to re-use that for ethernet, you'll want to split it up so each phone jack gets wired as two ethernet jacks; one in each direction. If you're using ethernet in the room, you'll need a (small) switch, and you'll want to be careful to buy 10/100 switches if you've only got two pair as Ethernet autonegotiation can easily do the wrong thing and you don't want to pay for managed switches in each room. If there's no ethernet use in a room, still wire it up for two ports, but put a small patch cable between the two.

If you've got star topology phone wiring, there's a better chance of cat5 cabling and 4-pair and you can run gigE. GigE will sometimes run on cat3 for small distances too though. The only question is if the central location where the star wires meet is convenient for a switch. In a pinch, you can use a PoE powered switch and power it from one of the other ends of the star.

Of course, some houses are a mix of star and bus or generally some form of tree. Anywhere that there's a branch, you want to put one ethernet port for each direction. And hopefully all the branches are accessible.

There's really no need for DSL equipment in your own home, unless you've only got one pair wiring.

>If you've got two pair, you can probably run 100BaseTx

Well, 100BASE-TX will also run on single pair in half-duplex mode.

Alternatively you can also use powerline adapters over any cabling (twisted pair/coax/whatever). Just instead of connecting adapter prongs to power socket, connect to your cable and feed there enough power to supply the adapters. Around 50V DC (as commonly used by PoE supplies) will probably be enough.

> Well, 100BASE-TX will also run on single pair in half-duplex mode.

I mean, kind of, but I don't know how you get network cards to run on a single pair? I'm actually interested, because if it works for 100BaseTx, it probably also works for 10BaseT, and I've got 10BaseT half duplex device I'd like to network, but only one pair available (there's a 3-pair cable run, but two are used for voice communication). I've tried a commercial product (ETSLAN Monoline Balun), but while I can get it to work a bit when testing on parts of the line, it doesn't work across the whole line; if I can just wire something more simple, that'd be worth a try too.

You just connect single pair, it should auto-negotiate if other device supports it, otherwise you need to set mode in network card settings manually. https://i.imgur.com/xIsJJiN.png

So just connect pin one and three to the white wire and two and six to the solid color wire on both ends and it should work as long as both ends are half-duplex?

I would think the NICs would sense their own transmissions and declare a local collision?

I'm sorry, I got things mixed up. You're right there would a collision with their own transmission. So there needs to be circuit that cuts offs their RX port while it is transmitting.

Oh, you can push old aluminum phone wire faster than 48 Mbps! The VDSL2 service I use can reach up to 135 Mbps, and while the wiring in my apartment is new, the building's isn't at all.

I've seen a lot of phone runs done with cat5e. Phone line adapters might not even be necessary in many cases, only new wallplates!

It is nice if you are lucky and the installers weren't cheap. I've seen a few of the places that use Cat 5 to service phone cabling do crazy things in the walls like split twisted pairs to different wall plates and bad cheap phone transformers (that grossly bleedover noise across the twisted pairs, entirely removing the benefits of twisted pairs in the first place in some cases) in long Cat 5 runs.

There's a lot of things that made Cat 5 cheap for running phone lines in houses and most of them make Cat 5 useless for Ethernet, unfortunately.

You can actually use old-fashioned four conductor phone wiring for Ethernet, but it's limited to 10 mbps. Still useful in a few situations if it's all you have available.

My house has all cat5e, and I've been very happy with it. Much faster and more reliable than wifi.

This happened to me. The phone lines are actually cat5 so just need a new socket for home ethernet. That was a happy day.

In practice, my problem with these is reliability. They can have noticeable issues with maintaining an uninterrupted, low latency connection suitable for real time use, in my experience; and this was with a fairly high end powerline adapter. This is unfortunate, because it would be very convenient if you didn’t have to deal with making ethernet cable runs all over the place…

> In practice, my problem with these is reliability. They can have noticeable issues with maintaining an uninterrupted, low latency connection

True,especially when a microwave, washing machine or other motor starts sending noise down the power line...

They are excellent solution where you cannot run Ethernet to, and do not want to use WiFi.

I used it in home automation (Thank you Home Assistant) for mostly sensors, and less important actuators, where I had power, but could not get Ethernet, or WiFi.

Anything else, very unstable and too much latency.

These are useful, but they add ~16 ms of latency, and depending on the quality of wiring and appliances in your building they can be very unreliable. A better option if you have RG-6 wiring is MoCA.

Can confirm, these are legit. Make sure you're aware of any outlets on the outside of your building though, as these could be plugged into with malicious intent.

> Make sure you're aware of any outlets on the outside of your building though

I guess this also means inside your neighbor's home, if you live in an apartment building, right? That's why those devices typically use AES for encrypting the signal between the paired ones.

I would assume any neighbor's houses that come off the same transformer too.

You can also get these for running ethernet over coax as well. Can't speak of the experience, though I'd bet it would be better than over power because it is isolated.

My apartment has some places that have coax runs but not ethernet runs.

> Off-topic, but I just learned about another, practical networking utility, yesterday. "powerline adaptors"

Their performance depends on the electrical wiring in your house.

Ironically for me I’ve only managed to make them work on older electrical installations, and even then it was at best 802.11n speeds.

In my current house (newly built 2018), I can’t even get them to handshake. I suspect it’s due to improved electrical standards and better isolation between different circuits internally in the house, but I honestly don’t know.

Does it work between two outlets in the same room. If that works but multi room does not then probably you have different circuits internally.