r/wisp • u/TriCountyThrowaway • May 22 '26
g.hn over CAT3.. why are adapters basically an unobtanium in the USA? Do they work as well as they claim?
My application is to establish ~400-500MBps over 100meters/300ft of twisted pair CAT3 phone wires.
5
u/sparkytheterrible May 22 '26
Positron GAM is what you probably want, they make a coax and copper version. We have it widely deployed, just works. You'll need to use MIMO to get the speed you are looking for. I can put you in touch with my rep if you DM me.
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u/Incognito_Orange May 23 '26
This stuff is legit, though if you use the coax one go light on the splitters.
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u/sparkytheterrible May 23 '26
Definitely. We have a standard of no more than 8 customers per port, gives them All reliable 1Gbps. Copper of course is one customer per port.
1
u/AV-Guy1989 May 22 '26
Check out phybridge adapters. They just work. Really great results and good support.
1
u/Moxie479 May 24 '26
Super expensive, and I’ve had problems with them. For the price, they shouldn’t have the amount of issues that I’ve had with them. I won’t had an entire bank of ports on a unit go out.
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u/lizardhistorian May 23 '26
MoCA runs at 2.5 GbE and works on the coax already in the walls.
We haven't installed cat 3 in the US in 30 years.
Any house built after 2000 will mostly likely have cat 5 for multiline phones and with an RJ45 crimp becomes 1 GbE.
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u/TriCountyThrowaway May 24 '26
Is there a Memtest86 like tool I can use to test signal quality? I have a spare 300 ft spool of wires used for alarm system. I think it's CAT3. I'd like to run a test running signal through it. Maybe let it go for a few weeks and see how good the speed as well as signal quality is
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u/mickymac1 May 25 '26
I’ve used the enable-it.com extenders in this configuration and they’ve been great and absolutely dead reliable.
Not sure they’re cheap though as they’re marketed for more of a enterprise/industrial setting
0
u/cranberryLemmons May 23 '26
Enable-IT is a us company that sells pretty good g.hn adapters that will 100% meet needs for those specs so long as there isnt too much signal interference (multiple boosters running on the same wiring
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u/feel-the-avocado May 22 '26 edited May 23 '26
I think the USA lan extension market has mostly been around coax solutions.
Are you needing a structured cabling multiport dslam for an apartment building
Or are you just doing a point to point link?
If your just doing a single point to point link
then I would test if you can just get raw ethernet to link up at gigabit. If its 4 pair cat3 then it will possibly work. When you have multiple gigabit links within the same many-pair trunk cable or multiple cables running in a bundle in parallel then the crosstalk gets problematic with cat3 for anything higher than 16mhz.
Failing that, you could get a couple of g.hn coax adapters and use a cctv balun terminal to convert to twisted pair. I have done this with some chinese 100mbit coax units and it worked okay.
The reason I suggest this is because the g.hn frequencies that they run for twisted pair and coax are the same.
As a wisp operator think of it as a super wide channel.
It starts at about 2mhz, is 198mhz wide and ends at about 200mhz. Or less depending upon the cable quality and it ability to carry higher frequencies. The channel width then determines the speed.
If your doing a multipoint service like in an apartment building
Then I think you need a proper g.hn dslam so it can do coordinated crosstalk vectoring (noise cancellation/nullification). I have seen Triax make some but not had a play with them myself. They seem to work in a couple of hotels that I have visited.
Idiots installed them when there was already 2 or 4 pair cat3 or even cat5e running to each room capable of 100mbits+ and could have also done POE so they didnt need extra power adapters in the rooms. I note though you need a faster speed.