Ethernet Over Telephone Wire

When [Bobo1on1] upgraded his Internet connection from ADSL to Fiber he ran into an issue of actually getting that speed to his desktop computer though his LAN setup. Before he had been using a telephone extension wire which ran from where the DSL entered the house, through a splitter, to his computer where the modem was located. Now that the router used by the fiber system is located at teh entry point, he has no easy way to run Ethernet cable to his computer room. Wifi is predictably slower than the 50mbit WAN connection, and he was unable to use the telephone cable as Ethernet directly.

The solution turns out to be a pair of TP-Link home plug adapters. These are designed to use your home’s mains wiring for data transfer. But [Bob] rigged it up so that they can push 224 mbits/sec over the telephone wire. Since you can’t run mains voltage through the telephone wire he had to hack a method to separate power for the devices from the data I/O. This was done with an external power supply and some passive components for filtering. The drawback is that this is half-duplex so up/down communications cannot happen at the same time.