Longest USB extension cable

SlyReaper

SlyReaper

SlyReaper

Soldato
Joined
26 Apr 2008
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Bristol, Old Blighty
I'm moving house soon, and my new place is a basement apartment. This means I'm going to get naff-all signal on my mobile broadband USB stick. So I need a really long USB extension cable which I can run up through my window to the garden outside. The longer the cable, the higher I can get it, the better my signal.

It'll be my temporary internet access until I get a proper landline.
 
I think I have a 5m usb cable but thats an active one that has a usb hoast controller embedded, I don't think you can daisy chain unpowered cables as there is a cable length in the usb specification, I may be wryng though
 
Currently a "5M Extra Long USB Data Extension Cable Male to Female" on eBay for £4 delivered.


ShaolinDreams said:
no probs here with 15m ethernet cable, must be usb
Click to expand...

15m is NOTHING.
The longest Cat5 cable can be (I believe) is 100m before it needs to be plugged into a switch to boost the signal again.
 
The maximum length of a standard USB cable is 5.0 meters (16.4 ft). The primary reason for this limit is the maximum allowed round-trip delay of about 1500 ns. If a USB device does not answer to host commands within the allowed time, the host considers the command to be lost. When adding up the USB device response time, delays from using the maximum number of hubs, and delays from the connecting cables, the maximum acceptable delay per cable turns out to be 26 ns.[14] The USB 2.0 specification requires cable delay to be less than 5.2 ns per meter (which is close to the maximum achievable speed for standard copper cable).[15] This allows for a 5 meter cable.
Click to expand...
Although a single cable is limited to 5 metres, the USB 2.0 specification permits up to five USB hubs in a long chain of cables and hubs. This allows for a maximum distance of 30 metres (98 ft) between host and device, using six cables 5 metres (16 ft) long and five hubs. In actual use, since some USB devices have built-in cables for connecting to the hub, the maximum achievable distance is 25 metres (82 ft) + the length of the device's cable. For longer lengths, USB extenders that use CAT5 cable, such as those by Lindy Electronics can increase the distance between USB devices up to 50 metres (160 ft).
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
 
Last edited:
You may be sol mate. How about a laptop with the usb wireless stick in the loft, with an crossover cable running from that down to the basement?

Can run ipcop on the laptop, so a really really low spec one will do. It'll also do useful security things, ipcop is an operating system designed to turn old hardware into an effective router.
 
Hmm, I do have a laptop I can spare. How does this crossover cable work? Can I just plug it into both the laptop and the main PC and it'll work straight off? The laptop is dual booting XP and Ubuntu.
 
Pretty much, you just use the laptop as a router. It bridges the internet connection to the ethernet, which you just use as normal... are you able to run the cable all the way down though?
 
No idea. I don't actually move in until July. However, I know there's a door to a small courtyard under the garden, and the garden goes quite a way up the hill. If all else fails, I can sit the laptop on one of the higher terraces of the garden and only use it on non-rainy days.
 
Ethernet (cat 5) should not exceed 100m without powered repeaters (ie hubs/switches) and USB should not exceed 5m without powered hubs in a daisy chain to be withing distance/vs power thresholds
 
SlyReaper said:
How does this crossover cable work? Can I just plug it into both the laptop and the main PC and it'll work straight off?
Click to expand...

Possible but unlikely. Pass on windows, on ubuntu you'll have wlan0 as your wireless card, eth0 as your ethernet card, and br0 or similar bridging the two. br0 you'll have to set up yourself. You'll need to apt-get a couple of things too, I think bridge-utils.
There's quite a few guides on it as its something a lot of people want to do. I'll be setting up something very similar on tuesday with any luck, so will get back to you with details then.

The benefit to this is that your laptop can be a very capable router if you want it to be, whereas persuading a router to use a usb wireless stick as its internet source will be difficult.
 
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