Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Cheapest place for CAT5 (etc) cable

I've never had good WiFi signal on my PC and Xbox and want to use CAT5 cable to the router.
Avoiding places like PC World, I'm looking at about 20+ metres of cabling - does anyone know of a place that sells it?

Or I'll probably just extend the phone cable and use shorter length CAT cable.

You may find shorter lengths on ebay a lot cheaper than pc world.

You may want to also consider powerline adapters ?
These you plug into the wall and make a network connection over the your electrical earth cable.

So you can have one plugged into the location of your router, and one where you have your pc / xbox.

Then it's only two short patch leads of cat5 to connect things up.

Ive been using powerline adapters for years and they are reliable and easy to setup and use.

Argos have the ones ive been using .

Click Me

Have a look as there are wifi ones and others.

Hope that helps.

I'll second TP-link powerline adapters as I also have used them extensively for a number of years, about once a year or two I have to power some of them down and up again because of a very very rare lock up.

For CAT5 I'd probably go to Bigabyte next to Iceland in Grange Road, Birkenhead.

Another vote here for TP Link powerline adapters. The AV600 is brilliant.

I've just made the change from Powerline to ethernet cable. I liked Powerline because it is simple
and avoids wires etc. but I found that it would drop the connection about three times a day. I got
fed up with this in the end and last week I swopped over to ethernet cable. I've run it from the
router downstairs, through a wall, upstairs and into bedroom where computer sits. There is
about 5m spare reeled up along the run.

Worked well with no drop outs since and as a bonus my download speed increased from 45 to 55 Meg
after a few days use. I assume the dropouts were contributing to Sky limiting my speed.

I bought 20metres of white Cat 5e with end plugs from Cable Monkey via their website.

Thus:- Cat5e UTP RJ45 Booted Patch Lead - Colour : White, Length : 20m, Boot Type : PVC with Short Boot
costing £9.12 incl VAT and postage. It arrived in about 4-5 days.

Hope this helps.

Just to add---- The cable is labeled "Copper Cu does not contain Aluminium"

Power line adapters are great for getting a connection around the house, but not for gaming. Latency and ping will go through the roof. Great for printers or TVs etc.

You can’t get any better than an actual Ethernet connection..... BUT, if you are looking to get a better Wi-Fi signal throughout the house and don’t want to run a cable everywhere then this is what I suggest.

1) download Wi-Fi sweet spots app on your phone, better the phone better the results. Using this you will be able to see different speeds throughout your house.. this is not internet speeds but speeds to your router.

2) replace your router with a better one! My virgin super hub does not reach my back room or 2 of the bedrooms. My ASUS ac68u reaches every room.

3) based on the results in step one move your router to a more central location if possible!

Lastly if you decide to do cabling, consider making your own. It’s cheap, easy and you get perfect lengths every time

3ms to 8ms over my powerline adapters

Can you tell me what test you are doing to see that result?

Ping and tracert, goes from my desktop, through a router, into one powerline, out another and into the remote router which is what I pinged.

The powerlines aren't even on the same ring main and both are off spurs..

Powerline and wifi are almost identical (OFDM), the only difference is one is connected by wire and one by RF, generally the wired one should be better.

Ah ok that makes sense. So pinging a device on your LAN. On a wire or Wi-Fi this is usually 1ms so you are seeing latency giving you 3-8ms.

If you join a game server where you are looking at a ping of 20-40ms that’s acceptable. Through a power line this would go up to about double and your total bandwidth would reduce. Basically there is noise on electrical lines.

Op says this is for XBOX. I wouldn’t recommend power lines for these reasons.

There's loads of noise and collisions on wifi as well (especially at 2.4GHz), my powerlines are considerably faster than my wifi so any resends of faulty packets should happen faster.

One annoying feature I have with my powerlines is they will not route (because they don't have an IP address), there are two of them that are at the extremes of range with each other, instead of routing through the intermediate router that both are fast with, they go direct to each other so end up with about 20ms ping instead of around 10ms if they routed intelligently through the intermediate router.

It would probably help if used separate sub-nets and bridge at the most central router, currently I just use IP separation on the same sub-net and a small amount of static IPs. But I'm lazy and basically everything works so its a long way down the to-do list. Sometimes there are as many as 15 devices using the network using two internet gateways, taking it down to sort things out could bring a lot of earache.

I have Virgin Media Router 3; very powerful. But the pc is a lot faster when plugged in with an RJ45 cable from router to pc. I also have a tablet and laptop which use wireless and are also quite fast. My mobile, when at home has zero delay. I appreciate this is an ancient thread, but thought about an update as todays VM routers knock the opposition into touch. I am on 400MBps and over. #Dont believe the opposition, the Govt ruled that any claims to beat VM are lies and companies are not allowed to 'brag' .