Is 100m ethernet max from box or last router?

jnorris235

jnorris235

jnorris235

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Fibre comes in at the end of the house. Fibre socket connects to BT hub which connects immediately to Apple Extreme which daisychains down our 30m solid stone house using 3 Apple routers. Daughter decided to live in field in mobile home 100m from last router, but 130m therefor from fibre socket.
As ethernet cable max is 100m is it ok to just connect it the last router or is the 'max' measured from the fibre socket? There is a power point half way between (not on same circuit so homeplugs no use) and somebody mentioned using a 'switch' (?) and 2 x 50m ethernet cables.
Please advise if you would?
 
100 m is the maximum theoretical distance between points. However, that assumes 90 m of solid core cable and only 10 m of standard stranded patch cable.
 
Your point being?

No idea if the cable in the house is stranded or solid, it was just 'ethernet' to me then! But to link to my daughter i will use solid. But "between points" do you just mean between her and my last router? Still not sure if the point is that or the master socket? Which is your "point"?!
 
jnorris235 said:
No idea if the cable in the house is stranded or solid, it was just 'ethernet' to me then! But to link to my daughter i will use solid. But "between points" do you just mean between her and my last router? Still not sure if the point is that or the master socket? Which is your "point"?!
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A router, a switch, a repeater, a NIC, any of these is an end point. In short, if it's 100 m from the nearest switch to wherever you need it to go, you should be OK. In your case you can put a switch at the 50 m mark just in case, so you have two 50 m runs instead of one 100 m run.
 
you can daisy chain 5x 100m lengths of you have a switch (or router) at each connection. (5 is just a number I plucked out of the air).

Basically the limit is for each length of cable.
 
If there are different circuits/supply between the buildings then a pair of media converters and a fibre (optical) link or a point-to-point wireless link would probably be a better solution.
Also, daisy chaining with routers seems a bit messy to me, unless you're just using the switch side of them :confused:

As others have said though, the limit is the point-to-point link length between devices rather than the total length in the chain.
 
90m structured cabling + 10m for patching is the usual limits.

You really don't want to go over 100m combined, other things to note is that if it's outside you will want external grade cable, and if the buildings are run from different electrical supplies then you really want fibre due to ground potential issues.

You could also look at pre-terminated fibre options and two small SFP capable switches, compatible gbics are cheap these days.
 
The 100m is not entirely a hard limit, YMMV.

Depending on the environment, and equipment used you may be able to sustain runs past 100m. Personally I'd be tempted to pick up a reel of decent shielded cable and run it between the buildings and test how it fairs - given this is a home environment. Fibre, however is most likely your best bet but carries a price premium.
 
I've achieved 1Gbps over 128m cat5e before, no issues in terms of performance or bandwidth, it was very good Brandrex stuff mind - wouldn't like to push it any further though
 
You'll be fine with 100m of quality cable and it's always the best solution, but if its any hassle and you have line of sight then something like a Ubiquiti Nanostation M5 kit can bridge that gap (and lots more) for a couple of hundred quid. There's a thread on here I think about a guy who used it to get Virgin from his neighbour 500m+ away.
 
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