on the surface this is the most sensible thing in the world if I have one
Ethernet Jack but two devices to plug in why not use a splitter Splitters are
great they work for everything from headphones to coax video to power except
that's not how Ethernet Works meaning that all of these devices on Amazon are
big fat scams or are they while these
ones don't work and I'm going to explain why in a moment we actually managed to
make our own Splitters that do work it's
just a little bit more complicated than a traditional y cable we're going to
talk about that in a moment first a closer look at the world G oh boy I'm
not even going to try uh they mostly call it Ethernet splitter in their
marketing so let's go with that looking at this thing you could easily assume
that you just plug this end into anywhere you want and it turns one
Ethernet port into two but if we look at the product page all of the different
ways that you can use them pretty much boil down to the same thing splitting a
single Ethernet cable say one that runs from your garage to your living room
into two separate physical connections on both ends which doesn't really sound
like a scam at all in fact that sounds great come over here let's pretend that
this side of the table is my garage this basic switch is going to represent our
home internet router then this side is the living room where I sit on bean bag
chairs and also want to plug in my Nintendo switch and my Xbox
unfortunately Ely whoever built my house only ran a single Ethernet cable between
these two spaces no matter we'll simply put a splitter in each of the rooms then
plug in our devices a voila more
likeah neither of them has a connection meaning that all we've managed to
accomplish is turning our Jack here into
Jack all but hold on a second what if we
disconnect one of these from either end
and there it is huh what the heck is
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help you've probably encountered a headphone splitter before these are made
by simply wiring a single plug up to multiple Jacks allowing you and your
friend to enjoy the same mixtape on the school bus and this works because it's
an analog signal it's kind of like a river with the water being your music
splitting that River into two or even more might reduce the amount of water or
the volume but it's still the same Water
by contrast a network connection is
digital which okay is still just electrical pulses on a wire but it's
different because the ones and the zeros are flowing bidirectionally as the
connected devices communicate with each other so back to our garage here if my
router sends out a data packet it expects to receive confirmation that it
arrived safely so if I had two devices
hooked up to that Port it wouldn't know what to do with it with that said the
diagram on the product page for this isn't entirely unreasonable there are
enough conductors inside a modern Ethernet cable to support more than one
physical connection so how would that work okay we really are going to get to
it but first you might have heard these network cables referred to as Cat 5
maybe cat six cables the exact label doesn't matter much for what we're
talking about what you need to know is that these cat or category cables have
eight individual wires inside them that are twisted together into four pairs and
here's the thing older standards like 100 Bas TX which runs at 100 megabit per
second only used two of those pairs so
if we don't need to run at gigabit or higher speeds we've actually got enough
pairs for two of those slower connections which well wait a second
then this splitter should have worked okay what's going on
here I must look ridiculous I just
completely covered in SHO like is my face shoo covered yep great yes there we
go look at that I even managed to mostly
non-destructively do this oh am I not done yet
oh
crap wait for it yes yes I got it holy
crap every contact goes to both sides
it's wired just like a headphone splitter would be now we could have
confirmed this with a multimeter and in fact we did but this was way more fun so
what you're looking at here is all the pin ones are wired together as are all
the pin twos threes and so on all the way to pin 8 so you could try to use
these things exactly like they show on the product page and they're not going
to work now some of the brands marketing these things are more honest this one
we're looking at clarifies that it only works if one of your devices is powered
on at a time but that's pretty useless
especially considering that you can get a fullon Ethernet switch for $9 or a
gigabit capable one for $16 those will
allow you to share that single Jack with up to four devices all at the same time
without bandwidth restrictions to each one we're going to have those linked down below however that doesn't mean
that we're done with our janky Splitters yet I mean if a real one could be made
then obviously a real one should be made to hell with your ethics Dr Malcolm 100
Bas T uses pins one and two to transmit
and pins three and six to receive so we
wired up our a ends using just the
orange and green pairs I should note that we use the t568 B color coating so
orange for transmit green for receive then for the B end we decided to use the
blue pair as our transmit on pins 1 and two and the brown pair as our receive on
pins 3 and six then on the combined end we just followed the t568b cating as
long as you're not mixing a transmit and a receive pin onto the same twisted pair
you should be okay with that said you do want to pay special attention to the
labeling on whatever keystones you use you cannot assume that the connectors
will be in numerical order now let's try it all we got to do is unplug this
worthless adapter see just like before I got to
say this is the kind of thing that in a hundred years never would have occurred to me now give it a
second I am now the proud owner of two Rock Solid 100 Bas te connections
between my garage and my living room Theus 100 megabit is so slow you might
say and well yeah but also no I mean if you
want to transfer big files back and forth between machines on a network then
maybe this isn't a good solution you should definitely go buy a switch I mean
$9 guys but if you're just trying to get a couple of machines online with a
reliable wired connection so you could watch exclusive behindth scenes content
on Floatplane.com ours at least does what it says on the
tin and with the average internet speed in the US being barely over 100 megabit
statistically speaking you're probably not actually giving anything up but but
before you run out and try this there's a couple of other things to consider and
I mean aside from the fact that a switch costs $9 um like PoE or power over
Ethernet while this method should allow for mode a PoE to work as normal mode b
or four pair PoE will definitely not work and could cause some serious damage
to your equipment if you try it of course if you've got PoE equipment
you're probably not resorting to hacks like this whether we're talking the
potentially scammy commercial ones or our functional DIY versions functional
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the link down below if you liked this video you might want to watch the one I
did upgrading my home network to 10 gig cuz I guess you're into networking or
something