If you have a house with aerial outlets in more than one room, and they are all connected (and lead up into the roof to connect to the antenna) can you run a LAN through that cable?
If you can, what kind of modem or networking card/hubs do you need. And can you also have television signal coming through the same cable? And how many computers can you connect to the same cable and still have reasonable speed (with the traffic and all of a large lan with no switches)…
Thinnet Ethernet cards, which are not very common these days, used coaxial cable for the signal. Assuming all the coax outlets are on the same circuit, I would imagine it could be used to create a big Thinnet segment. Unfortunately, IIRC, the speeds are quite low by today’s standards, and there are limits on the total length of the segment.
also each end will need a terminator plug
IIRC the standard coax cable in your wall is 75 ohms and I think the spec for thinnet coax networking cable was somewhat different in terms of reccommended wire impedance and connectors ( RG 58 with BNC connector vs RG-59 and RG-6 with an F connector) , so adapters would probably be necessary and there may be some signal and impedence mis-match and connection issues using house television cable, but I never used thinnet so this is simply a guess.
You will also need thinnet NIC cards which can probably be had fairly cheap used (people are throwing old 10BTs out) but new ones are likely to be slightly more expensive than the comparable RJ45- 10/100 BT cards going for 10- 20 on sale at Staples which are almost all pure RJ-45 connectors and not combos anymore.
Wireless network interface adapters in PCI, PCCARD and USB formats and wireless routers are fairly cheap and quite relable if the distances are not extreme. That would be a better and more elegant solution if you did not want to run new cat5 twisted pair cabling. I use wireless for a portion of my house networking and it works beautifully.
I think you would get ugly results with thin net. Thin net, if I remember correctly, doesn’t put the data on the network by modulating RF, but by putting the data directly on the cable.
Cable modems would be very close to what you would want. Cable modems are actually a very poor name for what they do. Most of them are pretty much a 10base to coaxial adapter and put the data on the line by modulating RF. This works well as any cable that is good enough condition to carry a TV channel without major problems will carry the network data fine as the two type of data look about the same on the cable… just at different frequencies.
Ok… Thinnet sounds too slow for what I’m doing…
About the cable modems… How would one go about setting something like that up? Do you just buy a cable modem for each room and hook them up, or do you need some sort of hub or switch?
And say that this house wasn’t a house, it was a hotel with 200 rooms, if you had a cable modem in every room all connected to the single coaxial cable, would it still work? Would it work well?
Illuvatar, if you are trying to network a hotel cable modems are not what you want because you would have to put in Head end equipment in the hotel then you need a connection to an ISP. The more systems on a network the slower the connection. I would re-wire the hotel and use Cat 5 cable run to a switch on each floor then run that to one central switch, you can also look into wireless networking, if you want send me an E-mail to the address on my profile
For a hotel you may want to set up a wifi wireless network. People using them may have there own cards or could rent them from you. The cards themselves could be a PC-card or usb - both relitivly easy for the guest to install. THere is also a device that acts as a wireless bridge for a standard 10base t 100base tx network.
Other things you could look into would be phone line and electric line networking.
Ok thanks. I’ll google some information about wireless networking or running new Cat 5 and work out some pricing etc. Thanks for your help everyone.
Next time just come to us with the actual question - no more of this beating around the bush - OK
