Convert home phone wiring to Ethernet

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

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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):

   • Solwise E100M, as mentioned in another answer here. Ca. 120 USD per piece.
   • ALLNET ALL-GHN101-2wire. Ca. 115 USD per piece.
   • Sendtek PES-821 / PES-822. No prices found.

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.

Solution 3:

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.