There’s NO WAY this works

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 scans 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 I'm going to talk about that in a moment first a closer look at the world GE oh boy I'm not even going to try 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 beanbag chairs and also want to plug in my Nintendo switch and unfortunately 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 like wob 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 going on here we haven't even told you about our sponsor autods want to manage an e-commerce business but worried about the costs of managing inventory don't know how to find the right products to sell stay tuned to the end of this video to find out how autods can 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 bi-directionally 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 CAT5 or maybe Cat6 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 Base TX which runs at 100 megabit per second only used two of those pairs so if we don't need to run 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 [Music] I must look ridiculous I just completely covered in schmoo like is my face shmoo covered yep great here we go look at that I am in 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 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 eight so you could try to use these things exactly like they show on the product page and they are 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 full on ethernet switch for nine dollars or a gigabit capable one for sixteen dollars 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 gonna 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 base tea 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 t568b color coding so orange for transmit green for receive then for the B end we decided to use the blue pair as our transmit on pins one and two and the brown pair as our receive on pins three and six then on the combined end we just followed the t568b coating 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 gotta 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 base T connections between my garage and my living room minus 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 nine dollars guys but if you're just trying to get a couple of machines online with a reliable wired connection so you could watch exclusive behind the scenes content on floatplane.com LTT 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 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 nine dollars like Poe or power over ethernet while this method should allow for mode apoe 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 like this functional segue to our sponsor Auto DS Auto DS is a Drop Shipping platform that's dedicated to equipping you with the necessary tools to kick-start your own e-commerce business the best part you can sell products on various platforms like Shopify Amazon eBay and more you can get access to over five hours of free courses that will guide you through the starting process explore the autods marketplace and choose from millions of trending products the marketplace also allows you to filter and narrow down products so you can recommend items that truly resonate with your audience if you're 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,755,550

Keywords: networking, ethernet, network splitter, ethernet splitter, cat5, cat5 splitter, cat6, cat6 splitter, scam, fake spitter, debunking, rj45, rj45 splitter, network switch, ethernet switch

Id: QgrVVyIzecM

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/humpster77]

Between the 100Mbits proper spliter and using a Gigabit switch the bandwidth will be better with the switch. But what about latency? If the goal is latency (gaming) would the spliter be better?

[u/Phate1989]

Booooooooo -50 dkp