[SOLVED] Using phone cable as ethernet works only with my laptop

[waloche]

Hi,

We decided to wire our home with Cat5 ethernet cables.
It worked for every room except for one which proved difficult to wire (no way to get the cable there).
So we decided to use the phone cable that was already in place instead.
It didn't really work as most devices don't even see the cable being connected except for my laptop for which it works flawlessly.

Does anyone know why my laptop gets a connection and how I can get the other devices to work ?

Thanks !

 

[anotherdrew]

@waloche
If it's a real phoneline, then it is probably Cat 3 cable. Cat 3 (that is in good shape) can handle speeds upto 10Mbps. I would try to manually turn down the connection speed to 10 Mbps in your Ethernet properties and see if it will work. The biggest issue I have seen is that phone cable installers all less then gentle with the lines. The staple them to the studs so hard that it smashes the cable. If the cable kinks, they just pull. And they sometimes do frankenstein splices. If that is the case, you might be out of luck.

If they happened to have used a 3 or 4 pair cable, I would then try using different pairs. 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps Ethernet only required 2 pairs to work.

https://i0.wp.com/planetechusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ethernet-cable-pairs.png