One of my biggest mistakes during the renovation of the apartment was deciding not to install Ethernet sockets that the electrician had offered. I thought, “I have Wi-Fi.” Not to mention that back in the ’90s, I had installed 10BaseT network cables, then 100BaseT came along, and I figured if I installed 1000BaseT now, it would be outdated in a few years anyway. I had already tried many solutions—Powerline (internet over power lines), Google Wi-Fi, Orbi, and at one point even an AVM Fritz mesh network, but that was awful. AVM seems to be particularly sensitive when it comes to Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS). So-called prioritized users, like military, weather stations, and air traffic control, use radar in the same frequency ranges as parts of the 5GHz spectrum, and as soon as another user is detected, the router drops out of that range. With AVM, this seems to immediately switch to the 2.4GHz band.
With the rise of working from home, Wi-Fi issues have become much more apparent. Sometimes, nothing would work at all. My gigabit connection would only deliver 100Mbit or less to the office on the other side of the apartment, sometimes more, and sometimes nothing at all. The following speed test from Vodafone shows one of the better moments, which were only possible thanks to the new Orbi-system. Many others would probably envy this performance. But during a 90-minute video conference, this speed doesn’t hold up, and interruptions are just annoying.
Old buildings can have really thick walls, and on top of that, there’s the R.A.D.A.R and neighbors with their own Wi-Fi networks. But then I thought, why not use the telephone cables that are already in the walls? Almost every room has a telephone socket that we don’t use. First off, the cable isn’t designed for this purpose. It’s physically impossible to use telephone cables as Ethernet cables. But is there really no way around this?
Actually, there is a way. But it takes a bit of fiddling. I’ll spoil the result right from the start: these are the values I was able to achieve with this solution:
That’s more than perfect. And on top of that, it’s stable. No more outages. How does this work? Of course, I couldn’t repurpose the telephone cables as Ethernet cables. But there is a technical solution that can be implemented with a bit of extra hardware. The G.hn Wave 2 approach, which is used in devices like those from GiGa Copper, allows you to plug an Ethernet cable into a special modem and receive the internet signal again via Ethernet on the other side. The small master modem is plugged directly into my cable router.
The purchase didn’t work out for me via eBay— I don’t have PayPal, and there were constant errors with the other payment methods. Apparently, you can only pay a few times without a PayPal account. However, when I called GiGa Copper directly, I got expert advice and was able to order at a slightly better price. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed on GiGa Copper’s website, though. The devices didn’t establish a connection through the telephone cables right after being plugged in. Although the telephone sockets in my apartment were correctly wired and connected, it seems that the GiGa Copper modem expected a slightly different wiring layout. In addition to the 230€ for the modems, I had to pay someone to fix the wiring. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but the result was worth it. Especially for important presentations and lectures, it gives me “peace of mind,” knowing I don’t have to constantly worry about whether the Wi-Fi will hold up.