My office is about as far from our router as it could be. That did not matter much for normal work, but online games made every spike in latency impossible to ignore. I was done blaming the Wi-Fi and decided the apartment needed a wired connection.
Living with lag
When we moved in, I noticed coax and phone jacks in my office. I assumed I could put the Comcast router there and get a direct connection. The building was less than five years old, so why else would every room have cable and phone wiring?
The coax jack had no signal. I moved the router to the living room, where the incoming connection worked, and forgot about it for a few months.
Then the latency got bad enough that gaming while anything else used the network became miserable. As a try-hard PC gamer, I took this personally.
I found a video called 10 Gigabit Network Retrofit for Renters. No Drilling Required! and immediately ordered two MoCA adapters. MoCA carries Ethernet over the coax already inside the walls. In theory, one adapter beside the router and another in my office would solve the problem without drilling anything.
The adapters arrived the same day. I connected both and got one lonely status light. The living room and office coax jacks were not connected.
This made no sense to me and even less sense to my fiancée, who was watching cables spread across the apartment while I insisted the new adapters were not the problem.
What was behind the faceplates
After being bummed out for a few minutes, I grabbed a flathead screwdriver and removed the living-room faceplate. The jack I had assumed was for a phone line was actually RJ45.
I sprinted to the office. That one really was a phone jack.
Behind the living-room plate, Ethernet conductors were connected to the RJ45 jack. Behind the office plate, the coax cable was not connected to anything. That explained why MoCA failed, but not why the unused jack existed.
Deeper inside the wall was a bundle of cables. I pulled it out slowly, hoping I was not about to discover a creative new way to electrocute myself. The bundle contained three unterminated Ethernet cables.
I ordered RJ45 connectors, a crimper, a cable tester, and couplers for next-day delivery.
Crimp, snip, pray
My first job, about fifteen years earlier, was at a computer repair store. I had learned how to strip and terminate Ethernet cable there. Standing in the office with a crimper brought some of that back, but not the wire order.
Brown-white, brown, blue-white, blue. No, that was not it. I looked up T568B before confidence turned three useful cables into three shorter useful cables.
I crimped connectors onto all three and attached the tester. The first cable showed nothing. The second showed nothing. The third also showed nothing.
At this point I tried to explain the situation to Destiny. She was less interested in network topology than in the number of faceplates I had removed. I do not have a long record of successful apartment repairs to point to.
The cables had to terminate somewhere. Every office where I had helped install network runs had a central panel. The apartment had one too. I just had to find it.
The laundry room
I checked the front closet and my office closet. Nothing.
Then I remembered that the utilities live in the laundry room.
Behind another panel was the bundle I had been looking for. The laundry room contained Ethernet runs from across the apartment, none of them connected.
I terminated the cables and used the tester to identify the office run. It lit up on the first try. I connected the tester in the living room, returned to the panel, and found that run too.
My habit of planning for several possibilities at once finally paid off. I had ordered RJ45 couplers with the connectors, so I joined the living-room run directly to the office run. The tester lit up at both ends.
I fist-pumped. Destiny asked, "So this means you get to clean this all up now, right?"
Fair.
Speeeeeeeed
I connected the router to the living-room jack, then connected the office jack to my gaming PC. The speed test returned exactly what I had been chasing:
The apartment had been wired for Ethernet the entire time. The useful cables were hidden, unterminated, and connected to nothing.
I got to pretend I was a network engineer for an afternoon, and Destiny got every faceplate back on the wall. More importantly, the wired connection made the next project possible.
