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The Franken-Cat5 cable...?

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  • Components
  • Cable
Last response: in Components
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April 6, 2014 8:12:51 AM

Hello all,

Well, it seems the walls of my newly rented flat are made of depleted uranium as WiFi just refuses to go through them.

I see no easy and invisible way to run a Cat5 from the living room to the bedroom but the owner, an apparent AV-phile, has left a couple of speaker wires conveniently running from where the modem is to near where I need the internet output in said bedroom. That's 2 x 2 wires, about 1mm gauge.

You might be seeing my question profiling itself on the horizon now, with horrified looks on your faces. Still, here goes nothing:

Can I splice those into a Cat5 cable, using these four wires to replace the two pairs of data transmission wires in the Cat5?

Are the much thicker wires going to scramble the signal? Is the braiding very important in a Cat5? Is there another way of using these otherwise useless wires for data transmission?
I know that it would be a disastrously agricultural way of going about it, but if it did work, it might be better than my 1 bar / 0.5 Mps wifi...

Let me know if that's the wrong forum...
Cheers!

More about : franken cat5 cable

April 6, 2014 8:35:58 AM

2 x 2 will only give you four cables and Cat5 is four pairs which is eight cables so it won't work on that basis alone.
April 6, 2014 8:51:40 AM

Thanks.

However, since I'm not looking for Gigabit speeds or PoE, using the 10/100 transmit and receive pairs should be enough.

I just don't know whether splicing 50 feet of thick stranded, untwisted copper wires in between the RJ45s is going to mess up the signal so bad it would make it useless...?
!