Projects
ADSL on a narrowboat
I have spent the last 10 years re-routing telephone cables around people's houses so they can enjoy their ADSL connection without trailing wires over floors or trying to rely on those horrific RFI generating devices known as PLT. When one of my narrowboat dwelling London clients had finally had enough of Orange's flaky 3G signal, they decided they wanted ADSL (for when they are moored in London) and they asked me how to bring it on the boat. I normally run cables around houses, so it presented a new challenge to the usual methods: How to get the telephone and ADSL signal from the hook-up point to the boat and keep everything as water proof as possible and as strong as possible.
BT master socket on moorings hook-up.
We identified two suitable ingress points for the cable as they need to connect the boat regardless of whether the bow or stern is facing the moorings. I left my client with a reel of CW1308 telephone cable to run inside the boat at their leisure. For those who have not seen inside a narrowboat, there are lots of screwed on panels, and several needed to be removed in order to run the telephone cable from the bow and stern to the area with the computer set-up.
Once the cable had been installed I returned with suitable terminations. At either end of the boat I fitted Cat6 surface boxes, and in the middle, a standard (mini) master telephone surface box.
Bow (living area) hookup point. | 
Master socket (and micro-filter) near computer. | 
Stern (Engine room) hookup (waiting for cover panel). |
I settled on Cat6 terminations as I chose a Cat5E patch cable for the exterior connection. Cat5E cable is a little stronger than the usual telephone cables; and this one needs to withstand heat, cold, wind and rain. The connection to the BT socket was provided by modifying the patch cable: I removed one end of the cable and fitted a BT431A plug using the Blue wire-pair to connect pins 2 & 5 of the BT plug; thus making a 7 metre long RJ-45 to BT431A patch lead.
Cat5 patch cable entering boat. | 
Cat5 patch cable running to hook-up. |
The result: An ADSL2+ connection on the boat with a download speed of 15Mbps and an upload speed of 1Mbps. That is quicker than most domestic properties receive! Now my client can finally read their emails and view the attachments without the connection falling over!
