Turning existing coaxial cabling into ethernet
As you can probably immediately tell, this blog page of mine is going to be pretty unhinged in terms of content curation. I think and do things and I figured why not jot them down. It’s a crime to have fun.
So in my apartment there’s this useless coaxial cabling that runs through the walls that used to serve as like the dial up internet or cable TV transmission. It comes into the apartment and plugs into the Wifi router and that’s really all it’s good for these days, so it was cut and coiled up and forgotten.
I work from home and was getting shitty connection to our wifi and kept getting dropped off meetings so I really wanted to set up a wired ethernet connection to our router for speed and stability. Running ethernet cables all the way to the router though is a huge pain. I’d have to go through walls, and the whole route is like 75 feet. Then I see this coaxial cabling already run all the way from the router to my room, and I start to think this has to be good for something. Turns out, coaxial cabling can transmit the sane connection as ethernet with a couple tweaks. I just had to convert the ethernet to coaxial coming out of the router, use the existing coaxial cabling running to my room, then convert it back to ethernet and into my work setup. Turns out it’s not that simple and I learned some lessons along the way:
The coaxial cables are probably just a clean cut, so you have to strip them back and install your own coaxial plugs onto them
You can only run one line from the router at a time, you cannot split the coaxial cable and provide two connections
Coaxial cabling is most likely limited to 100mbs transmission speed, even if you’re using cat 5 or 6 ethernet cables
You need a fancy converter for the ethernet to coaxial connections, I used these
Other than that it’s really not that hard, and a good way to get a clean looking ethernet connection with the cables that are probably already set up in your apartment. Photos of the process below <3
