Can’t fish Ethernet? Use “invisible” fiber instead
momandpop.network
momandpop.network
As to the author's core complaint (CAT5/6 degrading to 100mbps), I've found that the issue is almost always the termination at the jacks. Reseating the wires with a punchdown tool, or failing that, cutting a bit more off the ends and ensuring that the pair twists run all the way to the punchdowns has been enough to restore 1000mbps negotiation the few times I've had this issue.
It is genuinely invisible until you get up close. You're far more likely to notice the spots where someone got sloppy with the glue in some corner than the fiber itself. With proper attention to detail during installation (and assuming you have white door jambs and baseboards) it would be basically invisible.
That is often exactly what is meant. The problem of running Ethernet through existing structures has spawned a bunch of tools, including glow-in-the-dark "fish tape."
The process is often brutal, and looks like tug-of-war when it takes a couple men to pull the bundle through a couple 90 degree turns. As such, we have "plenum" cable, which is much tougher than typical patch cable, because the latter would just get shredded inside the structure, or snap when pulled with a few hundred lbs of force.
None of these tools are new (well, the glow fish sticks I think are a recent innovation) or unique to ethernet. Electrical wire is installed the same way, eg. in conduit. There's even a special lube for making your wire slide through the conduit easier.
Recrimping is always the best first step. Sometimes running 2.5gb instead of gigabit will help too.
I ended up buying a small kit containing both crimping tool and a couple of additional tools.
One of the tools included is an Ethernet cable tester. It has two parts; one for each end of the cable. The part on one side is powered by 9V battery (same one used in smoke detectors etc).
You connect the parts to the RJ45 plugs of each side. And it has individual LEDs for each of the eight leads in the cable. They are lit up in sequence. Any that don’t light up means that that pin is not properly connected, or the cable is broken.
And using that tool is how I found out the reason one of the router ports report 100M instead of 1000M connection. Half of the leads on the cable connected to that port are damaged or not properly connected! And the four that are working are the ones needed for 100M.
I remember that when I originally crimped that cable years ago I was struggling for quite a while, getting no connection at first until after a couple of attempts I got it connected. I didn’t notice at the time, nor for a long time after, that it was only a 100M connection. And it took until I had this tool to figure out the why of it being only 100M.
10G is trivially doable on cheap hardware. You can also go 100G, 200G or 400G over the exact same cable, it just costs a lot more on the endpoints.
If you run anything modern you probably can benefit from 10G at least. A NVME does 8 GB/s easily, it's a real pity to limit speeds to 1 gigabit. And Ethernet past 1 Gbps quickly gets pretty terrible to deal with, so might as well go with fiber then.
Obviously, if something is wrong with your existing cabling, 10g-base-t is probably not going to work either. 10G is probably the limit for twisted pair, but I think it'll hold up as a reasonable speed for a long time.
IMO, if you want 10G just go with fiber, it's less of a pain and more reliable. With twisted pair you may find out that the module overheats at times and the link drops out.
And the benefit is I didn't have to run new cable. Lots of homes have some twisted pair in the wall, very few have fiber in the wall. Homes from the late 90s on probably have cat5 for phone lines.
The (US) electrical code requires AFCI (and GFCI) in general, and not just your city. The Electrician U channel from a few years ago, "Where and Why Do We Need AFCI Protection?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMjBGzyoWUY
Also "Where Should We Be Using Dual Function [AFCI and GFCI] Breakers?":
Quite frankly, people should be doing fiber LANs more, even if the WAN is coax or wireless.
But our townhouse was renovated in a post-cable era so Coax was never put in. If it was a 1-2 decades older it would've had coax.
And it'll carry 10gig just fine.
Good stuff even though it's a bit of a pain to route it along a path that makes sense, has the right bend radius & doesn't get squished by doors etc.
Currently trying to decide whether to do the same for other rooms.
The biggest part is the LC connector, and you can just take that apart and put it back together -- just remember which was the left and which was the right wire.
That should save the need for special hardware.
It's actually standards compliant (unless they screwed something up). IEEE 802.3 clause 158: 10GBase-BRx, where x = 20 in this case, at least the ones on the Amazon link say 20km. The 1G/2G support is "bonus" beyond the spec.
You can get them with LC connectors too, which I'd in fact recommend because those are smaller, a bit more precise, and waaaaaay more common these days. https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/36351.html (note you need a pair of "23" and "32")
I’m sure there are some safety issues I’m not considering that make it impractical to pump a high-powered laser into a wall cutout, burn a line-of-sight through all the studs, and install an optical link along the resulting path...
Of course, you also think shooting a laser will stop wherever you desire it to stop, so I realize I’m not dealing with The Braintrust here.
Some other notes for those trying to adapt things to their own situations and set ups:
- As others have said, give ample time to trying to recrimp the cables first. It seems this post skips past that as it didn't work out for the author, but it should be the first step for anyone reading.
- RJ45 SFP+ adapters that don't get super hot and do the full range exist now if you need to use them somewhere. Just don't expect them to be the cheap ones!
- If you do try to go with a wireless mesh, make sure it's APs which can mesh on the 6 GHz band. It won't help you punch through lead lined walls or anything but stuff like the HP25s with only 2.4+5 GHz can only ever give misery to begin with. Not that Wi-Fi will compete with glass regardless, but it can actually be pretty decent with 6 GHz mesh.
- The media converters and SC transceivers do use IEEE standards. Functionally they are 2 port switches in transparent mode. More expensive to build something custom when the goal is just to transport Ethernet with Ethernet media anyways, plus it increases the use cases of the product to be normal Ethernet on both ends rather than just a paired device for solely this scenario.
- As such, if you do multiple runs consider putting a switch with SFP/SFP+ ports at the head end instead of media converters. Try not to spend more than ~$120 on an 8 port 10G switch for this if you go this route, it's easy to spend more to get less.
- Instead of media converters, consider getting mini 4+2 switches (4 RJ45 up to 2.5G + 2 SFP+ up to 10G) from Aliexpress or wherever. They tend to be about the same size as a media converter and go in the ~$30 price range. The benefit being if you ever need to plug another device in near that one you have 3 other ports already available to use that 10G uplink with. You can also daisy chain them with the 2nd 10G port, which works great so long as you don't need all 10G to a single device all the time. The only case it's not great is when you really want to turn that run into a single 10G RJ45 port, here the media converter would be significantly cheaper.
- Unless you have another reason to (e.g. have existing cables or free stuff), I'd recommend going with single strand LC fiber. SC is pretty much only found in service provider networks these days and also has a bulkier end. Not that LC is "wrong", but if I were buying new for home networking I'd probably do LC. Regardless what you go with, make sure to get the bidirectional transceivers for it.
- If you're cheap you can go for 1G transceivers & switches, but if you're doing all of this instead of dealing with Wi-Fi you're probably in the group that would like to just spend slightly more for a 10G network.
You can spend a lot of time reading about singlemode vs multimode, APC vs UPC, SC vs LC, and further details of each but none of it will really matter in a home. E.g. if you take an SR optic connected to an APC cable which is butted to a UPC cable and then plug that into your switch it'll probably work fine. Just don't let your local network guy see it or they might throw up. The only things you REALLY have to get right are:
- Match the bidi optics on each side. If you order a pair this is done for you, if you order individually make sure to buy both types instead of 2 of the same type.
- Connect them with a fiber cable.
But if you want a chef's kiss from your local network guy get LR, OS2, and consistently order APC/UPC, with APC being the preferred all else equal.
https://momandpop.network/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/PXL_202...
Zoom in on the black box. There's an orange ethernet cable plugged in, and the other plug is the "invisible" fiber.