What makes ReadyLinks technology different? We can operate over any cable infrastructure—don't be limited by 100 meters anymore. ReadyLinks can operate over twisted pair, coax, and traditional Ethernet, allowing you to standarize your network fabric no matter the cable type.
Select a cable type to see the ReadyLinks advantage.
Curious how ReadyLink sends multi-gigabit data over old cable? See how it works below.
The charts below show estimated throughput and power availability for the selected cable type. Twisted pair examples include Cat5e, Cat6, and Cat6a.
*PoX is a ReadyLinks technology that applies power over any (X) cable to remotely power a ReadyLinks client device.
ReadyLink turns ordinary coax and twisted-pair wiring into a multi-gigabit link. It does this with OFDM, short for Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing. The idea is simple: instead of pushing one fast stream down the cable, ReadyLink splits the cable into thousands of small lanes and uses them all at the same time.
Think of the cable as a highway. Older signaling uses a single lane and tries to drive very fast. ReadyLink instead divides the usable frequency range of the cable into up to 4,096 narrow lanes called subcarriers. Each lane carries a small, slow piece of the data, and every lane runs at the same time.
Slow lanes are easy to receive cleanly, even on old wiring. Thousands of them together add up to multi-gigabit speed. The lanes are spaced so precisely that each one sits exactly where its neighbours cancel out. That is the "orthogonal" part, and it lets the lanes sit side by side with no wasted gaps between them.
No two cable runs are alike. Long runs, old splitters and nearby electrical noise hurt some frequencies more than others. Before sending data, the two ends of the link measure the cable lane by lane and decide how many bits each lane can safely carry. A clean lane carries up to 12 bits per symbol. A noisy lane carries fewer, or is switched off.
The link keeps running the whole time. Only the lanes that were hurt slow down, and they speed back up as soon as the noise goes away. This is why the throughput curve above bends gently with distance instead of dropping to zero, and why ReadyLink works on cable that was never designed for data.
On coax, one ReadyLink switch port can serve up to 16 client devices through ordinary passive splitters. To stop them talking over each other, the switch acts as a traffic controller. Every 40 to 160 milliseconds it broadcasts a short schedule that tells each client exactly when it may send and for how long.
Busy clients get bigger time slots. Idle clients keep a tiny check-in slot so they can ask for more the moment they need it. Time-sensitive traffic such as video can be given a reserved slot that nobody else may use. Because the schedule is rebuilt many times a second, bandwidth follows demand automatically.
Each burst of data starts with a short preamble, a known pattern that lets the receiver lock on and re-measure the cable. Every OFDM symbol also carries a guard interval that absorbs echoes bouncing back from splitters and connectors, so a late copy of the signal never lands on top of the next symbol.
Strong forward error correction fixes bit errors on the fly, without waiting for a retransmission. This protection costs a little capacity. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of the raw line rate becomes usable data, and the rest is what keeps the link reliable on imperfect cable.
In the ReadyLinks lab, one coax port was loaded with one to four clients, all running the same speed test at the same instant. The raw line rate was about 1.85 Gbps in each direction. The total delivered throughput stayed close to 1.7 Gbps however many clients shared the port. The switch split it evenly between them only because every client asked for the same amount at exactly the same time.
| Active clients on one port | Download per client | Upload per client | Port total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 847 Mbps | 845 Mbps | 1692 Mbps |
| 2 | ~417 Mbps | ~424 Mbps | 1680 Mbps |
| 3 | ~269 Mbps | ~290 Mbps | 1676 Mbps |
| 4 | ~204 Mbps | ~214 Mbps | 1670 Mbps |
ReadyLinks lab measurement: 512-byte IPv4 packets, traffic in both directions at once, 1:16 passive splitter with 1 to 2 m coax drops, under 20 dB attenuation, SYWV-75-5 coax. Per-client figures are averages across the clients.
That equal split is the test, not the ceiling. Real users rarely hit the link together. A guest streams a movie while the next room is asleep; a camera uploads a clip while an office is on a call. Because the schedule from step 3 is rebuilt every cycle, whoever needs bandwidth gets the time slots nobody else is using.
In the picture, four clients are busy at once: one watching Netflix at 20 Mbps, one checking email at 1 Mbps, one running a speed test at 1,000 Mbps and one streaming live video at 100 Mbps. Together they use about 1,120 Mbps, so the port still has roughly 580 Mbps free. When the speed test ends, that headroom jumps to nearly 1,600 Mbps, and any single client could burst to the full 1.7 Gbps the moment the others go quiet.