I’m currently using a DSL connection. CAT5 was run into three rooms. It required crawling in the attic and fishing wires through walls.
My provider is forcing me to upgrade the connection to fiber. They lease DSL lines from AT&T. AT&T is shutting off DSL in my area.
Will the new Fiber router include CAT5 ports?
Running wire in a attic isn’t trival. I know wireless connections will be available. But that’s slower than a direct CAT5 line. I’m also concerned about privacy. Eaves dropping is a concern with Wireless.
Your new router will almost certainly include at least 1 Ethernet RJ-45 port. But probably not 5 of them. Since you have 3, you might or might not have enough connections. in which case you’d need to buy a switch to stick between your router and your CAT5 wires.
Fiber provider will bring a strand from nearby pole [or vault, or yard pillar…] to an ONT [Optical Networking Terminal] on the side of your building, or occasionally indoors. The ONT requires power, that you provide, and has a variety of ports - depending on the services you subscribe to, the coaxial port may be enabled and run to a rented set-top box and/or a cable router with standard RJ-45 ethernet ports. I’m that rare bird who ONLY wanted ethernet, so Verizon/FiOS enabled the ONT’s ethernet port and I ran a patch cord to my own smart switch and wireless router. There are often phone jacks on the ONT as well, so that it can be provisioned to supply landline phone service. The CAT5 in your walls should be just fine for almost anything you would want to do - maybe in 10 years when we’re all streaming 16k surround video with Smell-a-vision you might want to upgrade it. Only in very rare instances does anyone need, want, or get FTTD ‘fiber to the desktop’.
For the OP, like others said, you’ll be just fine. Make sure they either give you a router or you have your own. The cable from the box outside may have raw Internet, which you certainly don’t want to use.
Well, there’s two of us out there now!
I have an Ethernet cable coming in from the Verizon box and feeding my Ubiquiti UDM Pro appliance, a far better gateway/firewall than what Verizon was going to provide IMHO.
If you don’t want wifi, you can get a non-wireless router and just connect your CAT5 to that.
But its probably cheaper to just get a wireless router and turn off the radios on it, or set some impossibly long password on it and never use it.
But wifi security these days should be good enough for home use. Especially since almost everything goes through HTTPS anyway, adding another (stronger) layer of protection.
In my apartment, the fiber runs to a box in the wall, and to a gizmo supplied by AT&T. The AT&T box broadcasts a WiFi signal, and also has ethernet ports. My main computer connects via that port (since I had the cable lying around anyway, and since a cord is more robust than WiFi), but I’m not sure how many of those ports it has.
You might WANT CAT6, but if what’s in your walls is CAT5, it will continue to work well enough - and various flavors of WiFi keep getting crazy faster, so it may be moot. The bottom line for the OP is that the transition from DSL to fiber will NOT require rewiring the house, just plugging any existing ethernet patch cord into whatever fiber modem/router/switch Brightspeed provides. If it does not provide enough ethernet ports, small ethernet switches to add more are dirt cheap - so don’t get talked into renting something from them!
CAT5 would still work, it’d just be slower (in terms of bandwidth). But if rewiring is a hassle and the OP was previously happy enough with DSL speeds, CAT5 + fiber would probably still be a huge upgrade? 100 Mbps is still pretty fast for a lot of home uses.
PS if you did want to fish new cable through (which would let you use the full speed of the fiber)… is it already in conduit or otherwise “slippery” enough? If so, you MIGHT be able to tie the end of a new CAT 6/7/8 cable from a spool to the existing CAT 5, and then pull it through all the way to the other end…
I’ve never seen any real-world home wifi get gigabit speeds. Usually they max out at like 500-700 Mbps, even right next to the router with fancy MIMO setups, whereas CAT6 would get you pretty consistent 900+ Mbps. 5/6 GHz sucks at wall/floor penetration too, so if you’re a few rooms away, it’ll be even slower. And meshes are a pain to set up and add a bunch of hops/latency.
Granted, a few hundred megabits might not matter all that much if you’re just browsing the web (and especially if you were used to DSL speeds before that)… but when bandwidth or reliability actually matter, nothing beats hardwired cables!
Just try it. If it’s fast enough for you, don’t worry about it. If not, you can worry about fishing or wi-fi or other options (MoCA, powerline, etc.) later…
I absolutely agree on preferring wired connections - even though the average home ethernet ‘built-in’ wiring, when it is done at all, is done to amateur standards. Honoring the cable bend radius limits, minimizing the untwist during termination, avoiding proximity to AC power, etc. are all important [and more so at every increment of the CATx standard] but rarely tested for or inspected in domestic installations - and yet the results generally satisfy the home client.
I was never able to get those kinds of speeds on anything I’ve tried it on, or seen in people’s houses, including recent Apple devices. Maybe wifi 7 is finally good enough?
This a 6e router from the provider, they just launched a WiFi 7 version for an extra $10/month but I actually run my own OpnSense router with UniFi access points so I don’t need it.
Wired ethernet may not match the theoretical speed of newer WiFi, but then most wired connections are on switches, so basically operate with no collisions. and unless your internal communications are going crazy, your bottleneck will be the internet connection and how fast the rest of the world can service your requests.
I believe any internet service for home nowadays includes the router as part of the modem, and at least one wired connection. You can cascade your own router into that, or if there are not enough ports (my last two modems had 4 ethernet ports) then buy a small ethernet switch - typically $50 or less. With 5 devices plus the link to the switch in the basement, I have a small switch in the office/bedroom too.