Aerial extender cable or ethernet cable?

Hi,

I have just taken the plunge into 4G for home broadband, due to fixed line so bad and too far from exchange for high-speed connections, etc. On a bad day I can more than double the speed via 4g and on good days getting 10X faster!

Doing this with the aid of a Poynting XPOL Omni directional Antenna going into a D-Link DWR-921 Router.

Trouble is that due to length of cable on the Antenna, the router is now at one end of house (Stone walls, etc) so signal not getting everywhere.

Question: which would be better? Extending the aerial cables to give better location of router (15m or so) or using long Ethernet cables (25m or so) to get signal to fixed devices, such as TV, Sky, Blue-ray box, etc?

Thanks in advance.

In reply to a post by TCH2021:

Question: which would be better? Extending the aerial cables to give better location of router (15m or so) or using long Ethernet cables (25m or so) to get signal to fixed devices, such as TV, Sky, Blue-ray box, etc?

Long Ethernet cables, or WiFi repeater or mesh systems are better than extending the radio signal from your external antenna.

Thanks for prompt response

The reason is that many people find even the included cables with external antenna can lose a lot of signal / performance. Whereas Ethernet is designed to be run fairly long distances, more than majority of homes.

Just don't do anything silly like using Cat7 or Cat8 ethernet cables. There are no circumstances in which they should ever be used in a domestic environment. You should get at least 100m from ethernet at 1Gbps using Cat5e. Personally I recommend at least Cat6 as that will get you 5Gbps at 100m, but for a drop from a 4G router Cat5e is going to be fine.

In reply to a post by TCH2021:

Question: which would be better? Extending the aerial cables to give better location of router (15m or so) or using long Ethernet cables (25m or so) to get signal to fixed devices, such as TV, Sky, Blue-ray box, etc?

No definitely don't extend the twin coaxial cables, as the RF signal loss would be too great, especially with the dodge city small diameter coax supplied with most antennas - yep even the hallowed Poynting and Panorama antennas come with [censored] coax. The only realistic option is to jump up to a larger size (lower loss) coax - but that is a lot of mucking around and expense.

Better as the other folks have said to extend your twisted-pair structured cabling (Cat5e or Cat6/6a) as they will happily designed to run 100m between active devices - basically from ethernet port to ethernet port. In practice you can actually run longer than that, but there are no guarantees beyond 100m.

There are many ways of getting even longer distances internally and externally too, for not much money relatively speaking.

Thanks for the replies.

I can confirm that I have installed Ethernet to all the fixed 'appliances' with great results and even improved the Wifi with the aid of an Wifi Access Point, running straight out of one line in an Ethernet Switch.

Having moved from 3mbps to now 20Mbps+ everywhere around the house, is amazing.

I appreciate that is not fast to some people, but considering what we have had to put up with for so long and still had to pay through the nose for it as well, I am a really happy bunny right now!

In reply to a post by TCH2021:

Thanks for the replies.

I can confirm that I have installed Ethernet to all the fixed 'appliances' with great results and even improved the Wifi with the aid of an Wifi Access Point, running straight out of one line in an Ethernet Switch.

Having moved from 3mbps to now 20Mbps+ everywhere around the house, is amazing.

I appreciate that is not fast to some people, but considering what we have had to put up with for so long and still had to pay through the nose for it as well, I am a really happy bunny right now!