I have a (UK) telephone socket in the same corner of each of the three floors in my house. My broadband router is connected to the socket on the bottom floor. The wiring looks like the following:
Top floor:
Middle floor:
Bottom floor:
What type of cable is it? Can I use it for ethernet? If not, would it be pretty straightforward to run an ethernet cable alongside it?
3 Answers
Base1000T
If you need to Base1000T, you're out of luck and will have to run new wires with CAT6 cabling. It's likely not that difficult depending on your house. It seems like these jacks are above each other in the same place on each floor. Thus, you could easily drop a cable down from the upper floor and run them all down to your bottom floor. If the cables are in different spots, it'll be more challenging. However, you could just cut a small hole in your wall and then you'll need to cut another small hole in your frame using a bit like this. It's not as bad as it seems - especially if there's already a wire you follow (ie: your telephone line).
Base100T
If you're only interested in Base100T (ubiquitous), you can rewire those telephone lines to become ethernet lines without much work, provided the existing cables are CAT 5 or better. Check the outer sheath of the cable to determine what you have. If it is only CAT 3 then you are out of luck. You'll have to make a few concessions for that to work:
- You'll have to have a switch on your middle floor
- You're giving up your telephone lines (as they will be ethernet instead
The telephone wires in your house have 3 twisted pairs. Ethernet is usually ran with 4 twisted pair wires. However, for Base-T100, 2 of those twisted pair wires aren't used as only the orange and green are used for transmit and receive. The blue wires are used for Power Over Ethernet. From your pictures, you should be able to wire a RJ-45 Keystone Jack with all 3 pairs of your wire.
Basically, you'll need to take your orange, green, and blue wires and connect them to the terminal on your RJ-45 jack on each floor. On the middle floor, where you have 2 wires, you'll need 2 keystone jacks. Then, you'll need to put an ethernet switch in the middle floor and connect both the top and bottom floor (along with the middle floor). If you're only interested in connected the top and bottom floor, you can put in a small 6" patch cable to connect the top and bottom floors together. Obviously, you'll need to remove your telephone jacks to replace them with the RJ45 keystone jacks mentioned previously. While this solution isn't the fastest, it take minimum effort to get up and running.
I would inspect to see if the telephone cable is run in some type of conduit, but in UK that, sadly, is not always the case.
If you are lucky and it is in a conduit then I would use a cable puller and run cat 6 cable up to each floor.
If you are not lucky, then you could take the risk of disconnecting the telephone cable and using that to pull through two lines. One to put back the telephone cable and one to pull the cat 6 through.
The cable type is almost certainly BT spec CW1308, 3 pairs would be normal for UK extension wiring.
It won't be to Cat5 or better spec, but over a short run and without external interference you will probably get 10MBs over it, maybe even 100MBs.
