Ask HN: Getting HOA to upgrade Ethernet wiring

Hopefully this is just bits/bytes confusion, and you're seeing 100 megabyte/second downloads and all is well? Or are you looking to do better than gigE?

It's pretty unusual to actually have cat5 and not cat5e or at least cable marked as cat5 but substantially exceeding the specs.

Only the most recent 'multigig 2.5/5g/10g' ethernet devices actually do anything approaching measuring the quality of your lines. Standards compliant 1g and 10g equipment will be happy to negotiate to the highest shared standard over a 2-pair cable through the 1mbps link pulse data and then be unable to communicate ethernet frames if pairs are missing or the wiring isn't sufficient quality for the encoding. Although some drivers compensate and reduce the advertised capabilities when there is no data exchanged after negotiation completes.

It usually takes active steps to negotiate down to 100M with gigE equipment.

All that said, 100M/100M is still a pretty solid experience if that's what you can get.

As for getting people on board, you'd need to get an idea of the cost, and then probably propose it to the HOA board and/or at a meeting. Expect most people not to really care though. 100M gets you 5x solid video streams (netflix and/or video conferencing), and in a dense condo building, wifi speeds are going to be less than that due to spectrum congestion anyway.

Cost is the major consideration. If the Cat5 cable was installed during construction, it might be very difficult to pull in replacement cabling. The labor and associated management, administration costs rapidly mount up. Unless a significant proportion of owners want the same, you might be better off seeing if you can simply upgrade your unit's connection. Even that might involve new conduits, etc which you might need to get professionally installed.

You should understand the limits of what you can change in your condo. Some let the owners do anything within the 4 walls, some limit any refurbs, etc. If the condo is going to do it, they probably would need to hire a licensed electrician to do the wiring and that can get expensive, especially if its for the entire complex. Are there fiber runs to each unit? Or is it a shared fiber box for a building and 5 units in the building share it?

DIY ethernet can be fun. You can buy all the tools needed for a simple install at a home improvement store here in the US - crimping tools, outlet boxes, wire, etc. You may also need a wall-fish device to make it easier to get wires through the walls. Usually all wiring inside walls is stapled/fastened to the internal wall structure in some way so removing the CAT5 may not be worth the time/effort.

Is there anything blocking you from upgrading only your unit's connection?

You'd generally need a permission from other owners for any work in the hallways and such, but as long as the disruption is not too bad, and nothing is coming out of their pocket, you probably won't have much issue.

The best way I found to propose projects for my condo was to join the board itself.

You may have better luck with a wireless setup, as it wouldn't require cutting into anyone's walls. It would also be less expensive.

You would need pro-grade equipment, but the high-end stuff won't have trouble approaching Google Fiber speeds.

I would try two things:

(1) Running gigabit ethernet over the cat 5. Maybe it works?

(2) Look at GFast. I run a GFast service in my apartment block. We have Cat 3 (yes, 3!) cable. We can do 500mbit. You would need to buy a DSLAM.

It depends on the length of cables, but you might be able to squeeze gigabit out of Cat5. I’ve had success running 10gbit over Cat5e in my own apartment, where the max length doesn’t exceed 10-15m.

Nit: should read: "100 megaBITS"(/second)

You might get some helpful ideas over at /r/HomeNetworking/

Lots of rewiring questions asked and answered there.

The difference between Cat5e and Cat5 is very little.