Comment by jasonkester
4 hours ago
Ah, mate. I sure wish you'd figured this out and told me about it 10 years ago. I fought with this exact same issue for years.
I live in an old stone farmhouse with my office in a stone garage across a nice poured concrete driveway. There's wires from A to B under all that, but nobody except an unknown electrician from the 80s could tell you even where they come out at either end.
Powerline kinda worked, with crap download speed and just abysmal upload (0.1mbps max), and I limped along with it for years.
When we upgraded to Fibre, that left the old phone line spare, and as luck would have it went straight from the office to the router cabinet in the house. But 80s electrician guy didn't use Cat5, so my genius attempt to use it as ethernet cable ended up slower than the powerline.
My eventual solution was a crazy powerful point-to-point wifi beam blasting straight through the 3 foot thick stone wall to a receiver in the garage below the office. It sets birds on fire from time to time if they fly through it while Helldivers is downloading an update, but it gets the job done.
Still, I might look in to getting one of these things as an upgrade.
Thanks for the writeup!
Another solution: run ethernet cables outdoors on the ground.
You can do ethernet cables outdoors from your router in your house to your router in your office. Either thin cables that go under doors, or outdoor rated ones, both can work fine.
This same approach can work inside a house as an alternative to mesh networking or running cables through walls. The cables don't have to be invisible (underground or in walls) when you have tough constraints, unless you want them to be.
The direct line across would get run over by cars. Indirect routes would still have to cross pavement and look ugly.
And then there are still those six feet of stone that needs drilling through to get the cable outside and back in.
Six feet?
How about using fiber optic cables for this? I saw a few videos on YouTube showing the installation for home internet
To what end? The runs aren't going to be long enough for fiber to provide a benefit, and the transceivers are more expensive for consumer use like this.
"across a nice poured concrete driveway"
I've worked with DB people and running lines under driveways for telco and cableco is BIG business and they will not find your request to bury fiber or cat5 to be even remotely unusual.
The bad news about directional boring is they usually want "like a kilobuck" just to show up. Its a lot of heavy equipment and a lot of dudes to operate it all.
The good news is if they're already down the road they'll come by and bore for like $20/foot because its a small job (usually they only charge $10/foot for long runs)
Permitting depends a lot on where you live, some places treat it as a cash cow and they will brutally milk you, others don't require a permit at all. The equipment takes up a fair amount of space on each side, probably more than you'd expect. Scheduling is like dealing with an arborist. "OMG I need this partially collapsed tree removed immediately its an emergency I have homeowners insurance please arrive in the next hour" well thats multiple kilobucks "Meh please remove this tree sometime and I don't care when" well thats like $250, probably less if cash.
I've seen people spend thousands of dollars on DB or crazy laser/wireless comm gear to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a stone mason. Try not to pay someone to DB under a stone wall, its usually cheaper to hire a stone mason twice and he will leave the wall in better condition than before you started. All masonry is temporary unless its maintained. Similar logic might apply to driveways, most concrete cracks so if you're hiring a guy to fix the crack you may want to bury a conduit before he fixes it. Replacing an entire driveway is expensive, replacing a sidewalk sized path is surprisingly cheap. If you want sidewalk poured (like for a walkway in your garden or around a swimming pool) its about $50/foot and a driveway would have to be thicker and better prepped, but the section could be narrower than a sidewalk. The point being don't accept a DB bid over $50/ft because its cheaper to replace the concrete at $50/ft.
There are simpler ways to get a conduit under a driveway than a huge DB machine. I'm boarding a flight, but look up using water (dig a pit on either side of the road, attach water hose to piece of conduit, and push the conduit under the driveway using the water to erode a hole as you go.)
The there are also smaller hydraulic ram tools designed for pushing a pipe under a driveway.