Gadgetory

so we have just a slight internet problem we have gigabit here which means we're getting effectively a thousand megabits down and we also get I believe a thousand megabits up of course that's theoretical limits we actually get in in actuality somewhere around five to six hundred megabits per second which is still really good I mean that's gonna push you around just divide that by eight that's your megabyte download so if you're downloading a game from Steam you're still gonna hit 60 70 megabytes per second which is really good you can download a you know 50 gigabyte game in minutes practically but the issue with this apartment this is not a place that we owned we were just renting here is that we only have one active rj45 port right built into the wall which means we have my my modem is in the office and that modem is in and of itself not a great Wi-Fi router you know the built-in modem router deals are usually pretty bad so I have a Google home Wi-Fi kit we're gonna use not the best for this scenario but we're gonna switch to that anyways I think it's still gonna be better than what we are currently running now this is going to come in handy because this right here is a 12 port patch panel so we have fiber and what that means is a single little cable I'll show you in a second runs into a box and then from there you have a single cat 5e cable should be cat 6 but it's cat 5e in this case runs into a small single port patch panel and then from there it basically makes one of these internet ports hot just one and it's in the office so all these are the Ethernet ports built into the walls don't work at all so we're gonna patch the rest of those cat5e cables in there to this patch panel and then we're gonna move the router excuse me the modem into the panel as well where the fiber runs into the apartment and then we're gonna light up all of these rj45 ports and hopefully give ourselves some decent Wi-Fi as well as you know wired connections throughout the apartment so we're gonna go into that closet right now for some reason they put the the fiber termination in the closet I don't understand did that alright so this is where the fiber terminates in the apartment I doesn't look like much did you see this you know cat5e cables running everywhere this is our single patch panel of sorts so what that means is instead of having to you know cut all these wires down exposing the copper and then wiring those directly to a panel like this all you have to do is run the the insulated wire into the patch panel and then press a little lever down and that effectively creates or completes the circuit between all these wires and the rj45 port now we have the this is the fiber line this single yellow wire right here that is where the fiber comes from and this box just a bunch of magic goes on in here I'm not going to attempt to explain what happens anyway out the other side you get a cat5e should be cat 6 cable into the patch board and this right here is the cat 5e cable that runs into my office you can see it's the only one that's hot and then these other cat5e cables really do nothing so we're gonna strip all of these down and we're gonna take our 12 port patch panel which is overkill but whatever and we're gonna hook up all of these to the patch panel and then we're gonna pull the modem in here and light all of them up instead of just this single one alright so we need to find a way to fit this modem and our 12 port patch panel in this little cutout in the wall and you can see we have our four ports here and in the modem we could use a switch if we needed more ports but the the issue is right we don't want to have to wire four of these connections on to the ends of these cat5e cables and that's really what we need to do to get these hot so the patch panel eliminates the need for that this is definitely overkill we don't have 12 ports but it's got a future-proof it's nice to have something this hardcore and I guess we'll just kind of place it on top and then I have for cat6 cables just for the sake of future proofing that will run from here to the modem and that will heat up all of these okay so what you're looking at here was the original port in the office it's now connected to the patch panel I'll show you how I did this in a second I just want to show you how it were and kind of in principle so in between each of these little grooves are pieces of metal and the further you push down these wires they kind of cut into the insulation of each wire and then of course complete that circuit and we went ahead and tested this one so you can see we have the cat6 cable running into the modem and we're getting almost the exact same uploads and downloads wired that we were originally with the modem in the office so that's good that means the connections are all in check and we're gonna keep doing this for the other three cat5 cables and then we will test those and then try to clean this up because wow this is if I can get the focus - so there we go yeah this is pretty messy right now now I don't have the patch tool which means I am doing this in a very suggestive way I do not suggest you guys do it this way by the tool for 20 bucks or so if you were gonna do this more than once this part the only time I'm gonna do it at least in this apartment so I'll use a very thin flathead screwdriver and just jam these cables all the way down so I'll show you what I'm doing so this is the brown solid wire and I'm gonna push this as far down into the tool as I can and then I'll kind of do is for each cable first and then I'll come through again and I'll push it all the way down next step you can see is orange and we have the little key here which is really nice so solid orange on top okay all right and now here's the sketchy part the part that I do not recommend you copy going to take my flat head screwdriver you want as thin as possible because the the gaps through these channels are very thin you don't want a big one because you'll end up spreading the channel distance and then you might not get proper contact this still isn't again good but it's better than nothing I'll push it all the way down you'll hear it click a few times and I know it's kind of hard to get up close but you can see that cable that brown one is all the way down now inside so we can assume that that is making proper contact do it again for the rest of these wires straight in without breaking anything so we'll definitely want to check these connections problem is I don't know where this cable goes so we'll have to kind of poke around the remaining Ethernet ports in the in the apartment and see which one of these is hot so let's go do that real quick okay just take a hundred-foot cat 5e cable and we connected it to one random port back there actually the one behind the living room TV and we're gonna see if we get any wired connection here on Lisa's PC we have a one in three shot so would be pretty darn lucky if we figured that out okay so it's not that one so now we need to figure out where it actually goes all right so this is the other port this is the one in our bedroom which we don't really need but just out of curiosity sleep we'll see if that one's hot not connected so by process of elimination it must be in writing in the net port which I don't know I don't know where it is and just for reference each of these speed tests would be different you know we're using ATT speed test here you could use Xfinity zyou could use speed test net it doesn't really matter they're all gonna give you different results they're all tied to different servers but I just want to test consistency here downloads were 746 megabits per second it's about 75% of our cap is pretty good uploads are even higher almost 900 megabits per second which is good for Lisa because if this is her streaming PC they come back and come back and come back how do you feel about having a gigabit connection okay so this one right here this is the connection that you just saw for Lisa's PC as far as I'm aware we only have three Ethernet ports in the apartment so kind of concern where that fourth one's going it could be this blank patch right here I'd have to unscrew that and check but anyway we're gonna patch the fourth one up that should be the one in the bedroom we're not actually gonna use the one in the bedroom but for good measure we'll do it anyway just so you know if we put a TV in there or something with with an Ethernet board on it we can hook that up to it have superfast internet this isn't going to be a clean cut it's not gonna steal the cable like a patch to a wood but it's at least gonna get rid of the phrase so I just take wire cutters I get as close to this as I can and I just cut them down so that's good-looking enough and see we ran all of our cables on the inside here it keeps things clean and then we can put our cover back on just press it down okay cool so there it is all right and all this excess cat5 cable we can just tuck into the wall someone's gonna see it up there plenty of space between the studs roll up these are coax lines these black ones don't need these either so we can actually push these up there I'll leave a bit of it exposed in case anyone in the future needs it all right so we got a patch panel kind of squished here between the magic box and the frame of this little box and remember the second port we don't know where that goes we only have three at the net ports in the apartment so that's why that one's a blank and I'm gonna plug the fourth cat6 cable or the third one rather in this case into the fourth port so now we've got three of these I'm gonna run these into the back of the modem and the modem will fit nicely right here so I'm gonna try my best to make it look pretty I doubt anyone other than you guys online are gonna see this and I doubt any one person will see this so it's not really that big a deal this is like a mini ITX PC build so I reminds me of and we have this plastic shield it's nice they use plastic a 18t was telling me that they used to use metal ones and that really made no sense cuz you're you put your modem in here and it's acting as your router you're kind of sealing off a lot of that potential connection so let's hope this fits all right and there we go good as new all right and this last piece here is the router now I am treating this as a router currently and I have the Netgear router that actually the AT&T modem which also has a built in router in pass-through mode or as close to passing mode as it possibly can so it's still nodding and all that stuff which means we have double netting going on here because this is its own router as well so its own protocols to take care of and that's gonna slow things up just a bit in an ideal situation this could be either an extender or I could put the modem in full pass-through mode but the problem is we have all of our cables for the ethernet ports in the apartment running through the modem so we can't just disable the modem which is kind of a shame so well maybe at some point figure out how to bypass that I know some people figure out how to do it with AT&T but for now I'm okay with this I went ahead and tested Wi-Fi throughout the apartment still getting around 2 to 300 megabits per second on a phone and phone Wi-Fi antennas aren't as good as a lot laptops usually so laptops should score even higher than that but this is good enough you know I'm not looking for a serious like commercial grade solution I just wanted something that was not the the 18 t modem because it just was really spotty sometimes connection would totally drop and it would confuse the phones other devices hooked up to the Wi-Fi so this seems to be a lot more stable tested on TV my cell phone my laptop and I'm satisfied right now with the results all right so that was a fun project I have not done anything like that before the closest ever gotten to like hardcore networking is uh setting up a router and a modem that's yet so it was nice to kind of work with a patch board for once I actually bought that one from Home Depot so I didn't have to order on lines kind of commercial-grade stuff like you expect like contractors and stuff to work with that when they're setting up the internet capabilities of your new home or new apartment I was really good I didn't have to use something like this this would have sucked because there's eight of those small wires inside each cat 5e cable and then having to strip each of those on both ends wire them together add another soldering or you know wrap them with electrical tape whatever it would have been kind of sketch but that patch board came in real handy so in the future wherever I go wherever we move I'll take that with me and we can have a much easier time setting things up on the network side I know I'm kind of a new but this still I'm not acting like I'm a you know full fledged pro at this stuff I do want to thank will for helping me out because will is a pro in this space and maybe the future will be more videos like this for you you know you and I are both kind of learning at the same time assuming you don't know much about the networking stuff which is definitely my case you guys like the video thumbs up know what to do thumbs down for the opposite if you hear it alright like click the red subscribe if you haven't and I'll catch you in the next video this is science studio thanks for watching and thanks for learning with you