A few weeks ago our naughty greyhound nommed through the ethernet cable that connected the router in the geek room to the switch in the front room, killing Net access for the PS3 and stopping the Airport Express from seeing the network. I got around it by switching the Airport to act as a wireless client and bridged the switch through it, dropping the connection speed from gigabit down to about 60-megabits. Good enough for my purposes, until Crumpet bought an iPhone.
Now, the current iPhones don’t have 802.11n networking, so I had to rip the network apart and start again. It’s working, but the connection between the two rooms has dropped again, to about 10-20 megabits, which is just painfully slow when you’re trying to copy a 2Gb media file to the PS3 to play.
I figured I’d have to run another ethernet cable under the house – not a problem now that we’d put up wire fencing to stop the dogs getting under there. Problem was I bought Cat6 cable instead of Cat5e, thinking it would be better-shielded against all the electrical wiring under the house. Cat6 is a right bastard to fit into an end connector designed back in the Cat5 days, and that kind of connector is naturally all I have!
I finally got one end (excellently) wired up and tested this evening though, and I’ll do the painful undoing of the wire fencing and crawling under the house tomorrow. I needs me my gigabit ethernet!
