With a one-time spend of about $300, you can maximize your HD Cable, Standard Cable and Cable connection to the internet. If you use and Dish Networks, this won’t help much. So get ready to buy some goodies online, crimp some Cat 6 cable and give all those cable splitters a break – you’ll improve your signal quality and in most cases, increase your download speed from a cable connection to the Internet.
In the USA, high-speed Internet is a joke. NEVER compete download speeds against someone in the Netherlands. We pay handsomely for 5 and 8 and 12 MB/sec download speeds and typically get about half what we pay for. Somehow, the greatest nation on Earth has some of the worst, most flawed infrastructure wiring on Earth of any developed nation. You’re job here is to boost as much of the signal as possible to make sure your end of the wiring is the best it can be.
Let’s have fun tracking our progress. You can track how things go by testing your broadband speed three times. Surprisingly, my 8 MB/sec connection reads as 12.6 Download and 2.3 Upload before any changes. Speedtest.net is a flashy, fun, but time consuming test website; c|net is horribly basic and unhelpful; SpeakEasy granted us the highest numbers and is done in a jiffy; auditMYpc is known to use SPYWARE; DSLReports.com gives you another flashy test and takes less than 30 seconds to complete.
As I wrote yesterday, our standard Category 5 and 5e cables are capable of 100MHz bandwidth. It effectively chokes anything more and the cheaper the cable, the less likely it is to even be rated at 100 MHz. We’ll be needing the new Category 6 rated for sure at 350 MHz to maximize the signal from the cable company’s little box.
You could get Cat 6 cable rated for 550 MHz as we looked at yesterday, but since we’re dabbling in residential accounts, it is highly unlikely that your cable company is even taking the time to squeeze such a high bandwidth signal to you. Any series of wiring will only be as good as the worst wire. We’re just making sure it’s not our wires that suck. We can’t fix theirs.
All wires carry noise. After replacing the cable company’s Cat 5 with our superior Cat6, you may already track an improvement in downloading and signal quality. Although my results started out really strong, I’ll test again in 2008 and put the results here: ****
That noise can be filtered or turned back into true signal for an affordable price. The Motorola Signal Booster sells for up to $80 but since you’re an Internet Warrior, you can find it for $47 with shipping. 40 reviews put this at about 4+ out of 5 stars. One reviewer noted that the cable that comes with the Signal Booster is crap (we’ll learn in a second that this is untrue). We can handle that. After the Signal booster: ****
So that coaxial cable is our last hurdle. Like any other cables and wires, there’s good and there’s cheap and there’s ridiculously expensive. Good coaxial cable has numbers like OHM and AWG.
Very good. But they refer to important characteristics – OHM is a really tricky number balancing voltage, power and signal loss. The ideal number for Cable TV is 77 though 75 is the industry standard for what we’re talking about. AWG only refers to the guage of the wire or the wire’s thickness and we would be happier with a LOWER number because that’s a bigger wire. Odd, eh?
So dig this. A thousand feet of 75 OHM, 20 AWG coaxial is about $145. You may want to do side by side comparisons of popular coax types which include RG-6 (76 OHM), RG-6a (75 OHM), RG-11, RG-11a and RG-12 and 12a all 75 OHM. RG-59B seems to be the default standard at 75 OHM. RG-108/A is measured at 78 OHM. RG-179A/B is about as far down this list as I’m willing to wander for you.
“1000 RG-59 Coaxial Cable” returned prices ranging from $60 to almost $200. RG-179 seems to be mostly for BNC use and was nearly a dollar a foot in some cases. RG-6a didn’t show up at all until we just typed RG6 and the prices then seemed fixed at $230 per thousand feet. For sale was the QUAD shield coax. DUAL shield showed up for less than a hundred bucks. Since the RG6 is less of a standard and more of a form factor, go for the QUAD and understand that you may not see a better picture in your cable television.
Not seeing a better picture applies to us CATV viewers who have the HD packages. HD is all digital and static isn’t a factor anyway. The picture is all shipped in little packets. What RG6 does over RG-59 is provide less loss for greater giga*hertz signals. RG-59 is good for *megahertz signals. Digital signals will likely look the same regardless, though your communications/Internet will probably gain from improved wiring.
| DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog |
