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Can I convert phone wiring in walls to act as only Ethernet network because the phone wiring is not in use and not connected to the phone company so there is no voltage in the wires

I remove the wall plate and I find 6 wires blue,blue/white,green,green/white,orange,orange/white , and I know that Ethernet use 8

Here is what I am thinking. Get Ethernet cable cut it in half and attach wires from wall to the first computer and the same with the other computer

If this is possible do I just attach wires in the same color and ignore brown wire or do I have to rearrange wires , and what will the speed will be

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    If you own the house/wiring you COULD get a cheap bundle/long-run of cat5 cable. Tape cat5 cable (& random string for future use/runs) to existing phone wiring then pull phone wiring at base where it enters house. This you'd pull out old phone wiring & indirectly pull in the next cat5. This assumes it's not split or stapled strongly in the walls, but it's an idea none-the-less to improve on the situation you're in. Cheapest & easiest too.
    – gregg
    Feb 9, 2022 at 4:30

6 Answers 6

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Options for bandwidths higher than 10 Mbit/s

Other answers here explore the possibility to use the Cat3 phone cabling for 10 Mbit/s (10BASE-T) Ethernet only.

There are ways to use Cat3 phone cables at higher speeds, as listed below. They do not run Ethernet over the cable but protocols more adapted to the phone cable medium, but all provide Ethernet at the connector sockets used to access these connections. So for practical purposes, it does not matter that it's not Ethernet.

  1. G.hn over twisted pair

    G.hn is a standard for home networking over legacy cabling (phone cables, coax and power lines). So, exactly made for the purpose at hand. It provides up to 2 Gbit/s, with commercial devices for phone lines typically providing 1 Gbit/s. That's the PHY layer signalling rate though, while the usable data rate on the IP layer would be 400 Mbit/s (source). The transmission distance is up to 1000 m.

    One nice attribute of G.hn is that it's not limited to point-to-point connections like VDSL modems are. This makes it more adapted to phone cabling, which usually branches into several wall sockets in the different rooms. See the cabling example for the Solwise E100M.

    A disadvantage of G.hn compared to VDSL / VDSL2 is that only one pair in a multi-core cable can be used for it (source), so link aggregation requires multiple cables.

    Available products (not exhaustive):

  2. VDSL P2P modems

    Available products (not exhaustive):

    • StarTech.com 110VDSLEXT. A pair of VDSL2 modems for point-to-point connections up to 100 Mbit/s (at short distance) resp. 10 Mbit/s (at the 1 km maximum). They specifically mention that a single Cat5 cable can contain up to four of these connections, allowing to multiply the speed by link aggregation. Ca. 280 USD for a pair (see).
    • Blackbox Ethernet Extender Kit. Seems to be based on VDSL, but they don't tell. Provides up to 168 Mbit/s, and can cover longer ranges (4 Mbit/s at 3 km). 640 USD for a pair of two.
    • Panoptic Technology IntraLAN VDSL2 P2P Modem. Said to provide 100 Mbit/s up to 300 m, down to 20 Mbit/s at 1.7 km. They also offer a concentrator as a central unit that allows to use these devices comfortably for distribution in larger compounds. No prices / purchase options found.
  3. HomePNA

    HomePNA was a competing standard to G.hn, but their standards group merged in 2013 with the HomeGrid forum behind their G.hn standard (source). So HomePNA is considered legacy now. There have been 40 million HomePNA devices in operation though (source), so it will still be possible to get them used. See the list of HomePNA products.

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  • Web of HPNA Alliance no more exist (as Alliance itself was merged with HomeGrid Forum in 2013), we could consider HomePNA as a dead technlogy with G.hn as a successor Jul 1, 2022 at 7:18
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Hmm... I thought that I posted an answer earlier but maybe I didn't. Anyhoo, CAT3 cable will support 10mbps Ethernet (10BASE-T) but not FastEthernet (100BASE-TX) so it should be possible to use it for Ethernet if there are enough pairs and if the connectors are terminated correctly. It doesn't matter which wires you use as long as you use the same colors on both sides of the "run" and terminate the connectors correctly.

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    Joe: even though it's cat3, it's still twisted, so it does matter which wires you use. You would want one pair for pins 1 & 2 and another pair for 3 & 6. If you don't, the cross talk will prevent even 10MB from working. Jun 16, 2010 at 15:23
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    Generally on phone cable, you'll have Red/Green twisted, and Yellow/Black Twisted. My guess is the other pair in the OP's scenario will also be twisted. If I HAD to make this work, I'd probably use R/G as 1&2 and Y/B as 3&6 to eliminate crosstalk as Scott suggested.
    – BillN
    Jun 16, 2010 at 15:55
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As someone who is doing this currently, I can say that it does work. As Scott pointed out, you only actually use 2 of the pairs for standard ethernet. (the other pairs are used for Power over Ethernet though).

You will obviously get better performance from Cat5, but your landlord might have something to say about ripping out the current wiring. Over a short distance, you might even get 100Mb out of it.

I will give you one note of warning. With the old wiring in my house, the phone company had looped the same strands through multiple phone jacks and tapped into the middle of the strands. Make sure that you are putting jacks on the ends of unbroken strands, and that there arent other jacks or splices in the middle somewhere.

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    Gigabit Ethernet uses all 4 pair, it does not use 2 pair as 10 and 100 Mb did.
    – Chris S
    Jun 18, 2010 at 3:02
  • Depends on the cable used, and the distance ... I was lucky, got as well 100MBit/s out of my phone cable, See my answer for a details
    – Alex
    Mar 4, 2020 at 21:54
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No. Phone wire is Cat3, it's quality is much too low to support modern Ethernet (which requires Cat5 or higher).

HPNA adapters can use phone lines to tranmit 802.3 frames; but WiFi would be much cheaper.

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    Or replace the phone wiring with Cat5 or better, then you could run PSTN stuff over that, as well as network stuff. Jun 16, 2010 at 14:16
  • Well HomePlug systems can turn your mains wiring into an ethernet transport so why not a phone line? In fact, SolWise used to sell Powerline for phone-line products.
    – Mr. Boy
    Apr 27, 2017 at 16:40
  • Also how does your internet get into your router except through the phone socket (in the UK)?
    – Mr. Boy
    Apr 27, 2017 at 16:54
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    10BaesT was designed to work with Cat3, but requires a straight shot from terminal to switch rather than the spiced and branched mess that normal house telephone lines are.
    – psusi
    Feb 19, 2018 at 22:33
  • @Mr.Boy fibre optic & cable aren't that uncommon at least in built up areas.
    – Lex
    Jul 23, 2018 at 21:51
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Solwise sell this product: https://www.solwise.co.uk/net-ghn-tp-e1000m.html

The Solwise E100M transfers network data through the existing phone lines at the rate of up to 1000Mbps and a distance of up to a maximum 1000m. It is ideal for use in small offices, factories, mines, elevator improvements, hotels and schools, providing a high performance resolution to project businesses and system integrators. It can solve the problems of long distance data transmission, network monitoring and data collection etc.

It is a bit pricey but suggests it is possible.

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  • Great find. Not Ethernet though but G.hn technology. The device converts to Ethernet, so practically equivalent. It seems possible to connect one such device next to each phone socket in a branched phone cabling typical for a house, and even to use the phones in parallel (source).
    – tanius
    Oct 5, 2018 at 22:19
  • Before buying extra hardware which will cost extra money and eat extra power, it should be chekced if the current cabling is sufficient .. 100MBit/s are possible for some cable types.
    – Alex
    Mar 4, 2020 at 21:47
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According to Wikipedia you can only get 10MBit/s or some special 100BASE-T4 if it is a Cat3 cable, which mostly was used in US.

I have a J-Y(ST)Y installation in my house (germany). I use it for ethernet and get 100MBit/s out of it (effectively measured 93MBit/s) For my 50MBit/s internet-connection, that's more than suficient. Though the speed will depend on the length of your cable.

My suggestion would be: Just take a try!

Note that most telephone cables are slightly drilled in pairs. It is important to always catch the right pairs. Here how I connected my cables:

1-2 red-blue
3-6 white yellow
5-4 white green
7-8 white brown

Be sure to connect them in the same way on both sides. I used some cat6e wall socket and a patchpanel on the opposite site.

It even seems to be sufficient to only connect the first 4 wires.

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