Since moving into our apartment my office has been as far away from our router as it can possibly get. For day to day use this didn't matter much, but when gaming the latency was becoming unbearable. So of course, something needed to be done and I wasn't going to settle for this unstable wifi connection any longer.
Living with lag
When originally moving into our apartment, I noticed that my office had a coax and phone line port in the wall. This meant, in theory, that I would be able to set the router up directly in my office and have blazing fast speeds. Unfortunately, when it came time to plug my shiny new comcast router into the wall, there was no connection. This was strange, I thought, especially considering our building was built in the last 5 years and I didn't think they would spend the time wiring each room for cable TV let alone a home phone. But, I moved on and set this up in the living room where there was an incoming connection. Fast forward a few months, latency was getting insanely bad when trying to multitask high load activities on our network. As a try hard PC gamer, this wasn't going to fly, there had to be a better way.
I stumbled across a video titled 10 Gigabit Network Retrofit for Renters. No Drilling Required! and immediately purchased 2 MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) adapters. With this solution, I would be able to utilize the coax cables running through my walls to share the internet connection throughout our unit. They came same day shipping and I was absolutely PUMPED, I was finally going to get the wired connection I was craving. I hooked them up and it was time to test... nothing happened. Only 1 of the lights on the adapter was lighting up, this meant that there was no connection between the living room and my office. This made no sense and made even less sense to my fiancé as I tried to explain why there were wires running all throughout our apartment as I tried to validate that it wasn't the devices themselves.
The hidden revelation
There was a moment of confusion, then a moment of being bummed out, then the ingenious engineer in me took over and thought there has to be something wrong here. I broke out my flat head screwdriver and started unscrewing the face plates of the coax connection. Upon further inspection of the face plate in the living room, I noticed that what I originally thought was a phone line connection was actually an RJ45 ethernet port. I sprinted to my office to check the phone line port in there. Nope, that one was actually a phone line port. Back to unscrewing.
I got the face plates off and validated that in the living room, there were ethernet leads running from the RJ45 jack. This was strange, why would this be here... noted. I unscrewed the face plate from the office's connection and there wasn't actually a coax cord hooked into the jack. That answers that question, but why was this jack here in the first place? Looking deeper into the wall there was a bundle of cables that terminated right behind the open face plate. I slowly pulled them out hoping I wasn't about to get electrocuted and what I saw was the most breathtaking sight I could have ever imagined. This 3 cable bundle contained 3 unterminated ethernet cables! What!!! I immediately ordered some RJ45 jack heads, a crimper, and a connection tester for next day delivery.
Crimp, snip, pray
The next day, my phone lit up, it was here! I sprinted downstairs to retrieve my package and sprinted back up the stairs. Gasping for air I fumbled the package open. Flash back about 15 years ago, my first "job" was working at a computer repair store. While there I learned what would now be the valuable lesson of how to properly cut, crimp, and terminate ethernet cables. I was trying to recall the order the wires would go in, brown-white brown, blue-white blue... I don't remember. I quickly googled the correct order. I smacked 3 jack ends onto those cables as fast as I could, hooked an ethernet cable to the jack in the living room and connected the tester. I checked the first cable, nothing. Second one, nothing. Well that was terrible luck I thought to myself, but this last one should work... nothing. What the heck?! I was stumped.
I sat there, then tried to explain to my fiancé what was going on. She was more concerned now that there were face plates coming off of our wall and I was touching things I probably shouldn't have been. Unfortunately, I don't have the track record of being super handy around her. I thought back to the computer shop days, any place we went to install new network line runs always had a place that all of the cables terminated at, surely that had to exist here... but where???
The laundry room miracle
I started at the front of the apartment, maybe it was in the front closet? I'll let you guess if it was there or not. I checked the closet in my office, nothing again. Wait, the laundry room, all of our utilities are in there, duh. Behold, the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. 
Grabbing my screwdriver and dodging the eye roll as yet another thing was unscrewed from our wall. I cranked the screwdriver as fast as I could. What I saw was EXACTLY what I was looking for: TONS of ethernet leads. I sprinted to my office to grab my shiny new tool, time to crimp. Back to the laundry room, snip snip snip, no sweat, it was done in a jiffy. I hooked a tester up to the line in my office, the other end to one of the leads in the box, they lit up first try! Okay, so I knew at least I had a connection from this box to the office, now we need a connection from the box to the living room. I sprinted to the living room with what I can only imagine was a crazed look in my eye, I plugged in the tester. Back to the laundry room and I banged that tester onto another lead... lights! We're in business!!
Luckily, my natural ADHD ability of running through a million possibilities in my head at once thought this exact situation could be a possibility and I bought some RJ45 couplers along with the jacks the night before. I clicked those two jacks together, hooked up the tester again... LIGHTS! We had a connection directly from the router to my office. I fist pumped the air and jumped with joy. "So this means you get to clean this all up now right?" Destiny said with zero hesitation as I ran out to the living room to tell her the great news. I was beaming with excitement as I cleaned up my mess as fast as I could.
Speeeeeeeed
It was time for the big test. I connected an ethernet cable from the router to the jack in the wall, then snaked out a small lead from the cable from the wall in the office. I attached a coupler and ran a cable directly into my gaming PC. Quickly, I navigated to a speed test and to my absolute delight I got this result:
So, what did we learn? Mostly that my absolute hyper obsession and my raw ingenuity (stubbornness) to get these sweet sweet speeds came through big time. It was a ton of fun LARP-ing as a network engineer for a brief moment again. Unfortunately for Destiny, this was just the start of what was yet to come now that I was fully wired in. Now, I can really LARP as a network engineer. Here's a sneak peek of what transpires next in this story.
