RE: [MLUG] Cable verses DSL

[Scott Greathouse <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

To get rid of the problem with houses having different ground planes, you
can ground the cable connecting the two sides using those handy-dandy
ethernet surge protectors that APC makes. The PNET1 has an ethernet "in",
an ethernet "out" and a ground wire. It appears to work in our
office. That's relevant because our office is actually two suites and each
suite is on its own power meter and breaker box -- so the possibility for
a difference in the ground potentials of the two suites is the same as the
possibility for a difference in the ground potentials of two adjacent
houses. (Unless the grounds for the breaker boxes are all tied together.) 
Just like you would do with two houses, we have a wire running
between the two to connect them. So far, the two hubs that that are
connected to this cable have not caught fire. It's been over a year.
But, yeah, if you have money to burn, get fiber.

> By the way, with respect to running CAT5 from house-to-house, I *strongly*
> recommend against that.  It is likely that any two given houses are on
> different ground planes.  This means a potential between the ground points
> of the two devices attached to the Ethernet cable, and *that* means extra
> current running across your Ethernet wire.  Can be very, very bad (blow out
> hub, blow out NIC, start fires, you name it).
> 
> Use fiber.  Power problems disappear.  10Mb multimode transceivers ought to
> be fairly cheap these days (and we can probably find some long multimode
> cables retired from use...)

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