My neighbor has already wired up his house with a Linux Server powerhouse, complete with Ethernet and X10 devices galore.
Essentially the wired connection would allow us to connect our computers through the wall, down to a hub in the garage, and back up to the server with one or two external hard drives connected to it. All at around ~100mbps speeds.
I believe that you can also hook up a router to the hub and any computer wired up to the hub would get faster speeds, though I haven't researched this yet.
I've been using AT&T Uverse wireless for a few years now, and I can say I've almost never had an issue with it(Roughly ~20mbps). However, as everyone knows, it could always be a lot faster on a wired connection, and while I wait for Google's fiber to come to our neighborhood(Curse you Kansas), I'll have to settle with this.
The Process:
First I needed go to the phone box outside and figure out which wired led to which room. This point is where I figured out my house was installed with CAT5 cables instead of CAT5e, which essentially means I can only have 100mbps instead of 1 Gigabit per second , which was a bummer. (Note: read this on the difference between Gigabit per second and a Gigabyte per second speeds).
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| Look at that beautiful mess. |
Once I figured out which line went to which room, there was the process of drilling a hole through the wall and stuffing the wires I wanted to use for internet through it. It was a too narrow of a squeeze to drill from the outside of the house inside as the telephone box was blocking it, however locating a wire (so many wires) going from the inside to the outside just above the phone box allowed me to drill from the inside.
And then I had my hole.
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| Hole |
I then needed to replace the wall plates on each room with an Ethernet wall plate, known as RJ-45. Telephone ports, or RJ-11, were the plates I had installed at the moment. I managed to replace the wall plate behind my bed in my room, and half replace the wall plate behind my parent's desk, as they required a telephone and an Ethernet connection, which leads me into my topic of pairs.
Pairs:
Pairs, from what I've learned, refer to the individual pairs of wires inside an Ethernet CAT5) cable. Each pair is colored with a solid and striped wire. There are four pairs in each cable, one blue (referring to telephone line 1), one orange(referring to telephone line 2), one green and one brown. By default(in my house), the blue and orange lines were plugged into the phone box while the green and brown lines were curled around the wire unused.
For 100mbps Ethernet speeds, only two pairs are required, while 1gbps speeds require four pairs. NOTE: this is internal internet speed, not external, so you won't be download movies in half a second if you do this. You will, however, be able to transfer movies from one computer to another in a much shorter time span than using a flash drive or uploading it to a site like mediafire.
Now, since I can only have up to 100mbps speeds through my cables, I only need two pairs to get the job done, which means 2 pairs are left, allowing me two plug a phone outlet and an Ethernet outlet into the wall plate. I bought a plate with these two plugs(RJ-45 and RJ-11) at Lowes, and plugged it in. The phone works fine for it, though I still have yet to test whether or not the internet works, since I still need a couple things to get that working.
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| Looks much better. |
Once I've replaced all the wall plates I need to, their's the process of crimping the cables (yay). Crimping Ethernet cables is essentially taking all of the eight copper wires within the CAT5 cable, putting them side-by-side in the right order, straightening them into a line, shoving them into a RJ-45 plug(the plastic head at the end of an Ethernet cable), and crunching it down with a special tool, available at Lowes(I'm not advertising for them, I swear).
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| Crimped Ethernet Jack. |
With this goal in mind, I've ordered a 4TB (you read that right) WD My Book External Hard Drive off of Amazon, and will hopefully be able to set everything up by next week (the hub will be arriving "before or on Jan. 18th").
I'm also planning to build a Linux server to manage the external HDD, though that'll be a project for later, since it will require a long time to order all the parts and assemble the machine. It's going the be the first computer I've ever built, so wish me luck!
And with that, you're up to date with all my most recent projects. I'll be posting regular updates of how things are going, and what I find out along the way. Thanks for reading!
