I have a cable modem in the living room. I have ethernet running out of the cable modem to an Apple Airplay, then back out of the Airplay to a 4 port switch so that I can hardwire all my consoles.
I want to move my airplay to a more central location in the house, but ideally I'd only have to run a single wire instead of two (this will be outside of the walls, so I want to keep clutter down).
Is there something like a single cable that encapsulates two ethernet cables?
2 Answers
Yes, perform an internet search for Multi-pair Cat 6 cable.
You can get splitters that split one CAT 5 cable carrying two streams into two seperate streams or vice versa. You wont lose noticable home network speed or bandwidth from running a single cable to do the job of two cables as long as you make sure of a few things. First make sure that the devices at the ends of the cables each is rated to send and receive more than twice as much data as you might ever expect to move on your network wires. For most recent Lan Cards and routers and switches and etc that is easy. Most are rated at 10/100/1000 MB/Sec these days and the odds are you are not going to move more than 500 MB per second at home all the time. A second thing that you need to check is the actual cable you are using. That cable will be expected to pass more as much indformation as two cables while only allowing or worse causing any more interference than a cable carrying half the load. Make sure it is real CAT5 cable and is marked as such. a lot of cable that is not CAT 5 or equivalent has been sold and used by people who should know better. Dont cheat yourself and dont use crud thats sort of meant to work. Also buy the splitters from an nanme brand Commdevice supplier you like and trust. THEN still check the 5 inches of wire on the splitter to make sure it's CAT 5. If it isnt try to learn to trust a better name brand supplier. One last thing that probably doesnt apply to anybody anymore. way back in the dark ages of home networking Ethernet adaptors were not as friendly. The cables had to be wired differently on each end in order to make sure that each of the wired pairs ended up connecting the same way to the Ethernet port on bpth ends. Now both ends of the cable are almost always wired "wrong" so the same the same colored pairs of wires end in the same two positions on the cable terminal which puts the wires in different pin positions on the Ethernet adaptors. Now tjhe LAN cards handshake and internally switch to correct the cables. BUT if you still somehow use an old ethernet card you also need to use a very rare cable that has been wired correctly/
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