The ongoing DSL saga
Today I bought a crimping tool and some RJ11 jacks. I stripped some shielding off a length of CAT5 We happen to have from when we were planning to use the basement room in Hayward (the one that flooded), and crimped a jack onto four of the wires from the cable. Really you only need two, but I figured the other two would hold the necessary ones in the right place. The crimping tool kinda failed to crimp one of the wires, luckily one of the extra ones. Still makes it hard to fit into a plug with that little bit sticking out that's supposed to stick into a wire, so I did what I could with a pair of pliers to at least smooth out the form of it. I stripped more shielding off the other end, and from a short length of the wires that will carry the DSL signal so they could be connected in the box outside the house.
Before I messed with anything, I checked the speed on the DSL router. It was saying 4480 kbps downstream, which is respectable I think. I tried connecting directly to the test plug in the box itself and got 5120 kbps. That's 640 kbps lost in the wiring somewhere in the house. Nothing to cry about, but considering the real purpose of this exercise is to get the modem out of the kitchen, any amount of that bandwidth we can reclaim will be gravy. I tried wiring up my homemade cable, and I came to the conclusion that I hate wiring. I came to this conclusion the last time I had to mess inside a box like that, but that was years ago and I'd forgotten just how frustrating it can be. I finally got the beast in place and connected it to the modem. Now we were getting 4576 kbps which is at least better than when we started, even if not enough to notice. It at least reassured me that the theory was sound, and that my Frankensteinian networking skillz weren't going to drop the connection to 56K. We might even get better results when all is said and done because the length of that cable may be trimmed somewhat since it's longer than I believe we actually need.
Field test completed, I set about restoring everything to its original order, modem in the kitchen and all. I checked the speed again and got 4640 kbps. It's settled down now to 4448 kbps. I suppose the speed across the modem has a certain amount of fluctuation. But since the purpose isn't to optimize the speed of the network, I'm really not going to go through all that again in order to take repeated measurements. At least I know know that what I'm thinking of doing can be done. And moreover, it can be done by me.
Before I messed with anything, I checked the speed on the DSL router. It was saying 4480 kbps downstream, which is respectable I think. I tried connecting directly to the test plug in the box itself and got 5120 kbps. That's 640 kbps lost in the wiring somewhere in the house. Nothing to cry about, but considering the real purpose of this exercise is to get the modem out of the kitchen, any amount of that bandwidth we can reclaim will be gravy. I tried wiring up my homemade cable, and I came to the conclusion that I hate wiring. I came to this conclusion the last time I had to mess inside a box like that, but that was years ago and I'd forgotten just how frustrating it can be. I finally got the beast in place and connected it to the modem. Now we were getting 4576 kbps which is at least better than when we started, even if not enough to notice. It at least reassured me that the theory was sound, and that my Frankensteinian networking skillz weren't going to drop the connection to 56K. We might even get better results when all is said and done because the length of that cable may be trimmed somewhat since it's longer than I believe we actually need.
Field test completed, I set about restoring everything to its original order, modem in the kitchen and all. I checked the speed again and got 4640 kbps. It's settled down now to 4448 kbps. I suppose the speed across the modem has a certain amount of fluctuation. But since the purpose isn't to optimize the speed of the network, I'm really not going to go through all that again in order to take repeated measurements. At least I know know that what I'm thinking of doing can be done. And moreover, it can be done by me.