802.11a/b/g signaling over copper

[lexxmac]

Does anyone know any reasons why running wireless equipment (802.11b/g, or even 'a') over copper coaxial cable would not work? I know that you can buy 2.4GHz rated coax for use in wiring houses for satellite tv (if it is any better than the plain old cable tv coax). Am I missing something simple here?

I have two reasons for asking. First, what I was thinking is that if you can get a wireless signal to go ten miles over air, counldn't you get even further distances with simple coax cable? I know that's a lot of cable, but humor me. Also, Most houses have a cable tv wiring already installed in them. Normal cable tv, cable modems and digital cable all run at frequencies well below 2.4GHz, so routing a wi-fi signal over cable tv wiring shouldn't cause any interferance with your TVs or net connection. Most people that I know use wireless becuase they simply don't want to install CAT5 wiring in their home themself for one reason or another. I know that's why I use it. It seems to me that running a wireless network over existing coax would provide added security (since the grounding braid in coax acts as tubular faraday cage) by shielding the signal from anyone who couldn't plug directly in.

Again, have I lost my mind? Would any of these ideas work?

 

[alienal99]

i believe that your idea could possibly work, assuming that you can find a way to take the (six i believe?) wires from your normal cat 5 cable and somehow seperate the signals (either amplify them to different bandwidths or time correct to get them to run together) to run all on one cable. Yes, the signal should be high enough of a frequency to not interfere with your cable, but you need the signal from each wire to not interfere with itself. It seems as though this has already been done in the form of cable modems, but i am not so sure that you can put a cable modem @ each computer and somehow create a router that uses coax instead of cat 5

good luck....also, you may want to look into how internet can be used over electrical wiring....this is already in use, and is in many ways faster and easier than cable or dsl

alex

 

[Woodchuck2000]

There's no reason, in theory, why you couldn't do it - there's just no real practical application of doing so. Cable modems are the closest we have at the moment. You'd run into interference problems too quickly if you tried to use the cable network to transmit 802.11 packets.

The reason Cat5 has become the defacto standard above the coax that used to be the standard in 10-Base-T networking is that a point-to-point connection (or star-topology) is orders of magnitude more efficient than a ring topology which is what you'll invariably have with coaxial networking.