On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 12:29 +0000, Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
Barry, if you're going to run a cable anyway, might you not be able to put in a proper ethernet cable?
I think the point was that the telephone cable was already installed between the two rooms he wants to network.
Proper CAT cables have nuch better shielding, and the twisted-pair design gives them better protection from interference. For a telephone cable of any length, you might find that the througput is degraded.
Yes the twist of the pairs is completely essential for ethernet. a straight wired cable or a cable where tx or rx has been wired across pairs will generally not work very well for distances of over 4 meters Standard installation grade CAT5 has no shielding so the twist (combined with differential signalling) is the only way the cable can deal with noise or crosstalk.
That said if the wiring in Barry's house is reasonably new then it should have been done with CAT3 or above which as Keith points out is also twisted pair. Old house telephone wiring wasn't twisted pair however and ethernet won't run over this for any distance that you would care about.