April 26, 2021

Afternoon project: DIY Passive 24V PoE injector

Recently, I discovered that in spite of my attempts to ensure my Internet connection would remain reliable throughout adverse conditions, I discovered a simple power outage basically left the ohh-so-wonderful HFC NBN NTD blinking and boot-looping helplessly.

In the last major storm event, the PSTN land-line was the only way we got a phone service. Sadly I was not geared up to test whether ADSL worked at that time, but the PSTN did, which was good because Telstra’s mobile network didn’t!

Armed with this knowledge, I decided to protect myself. My choices for an Internet link here are 4G and NBN. That does not give me much hope in a major calamity, but you know, do the best you can. At least in simple black-outs, 4G should stay up. 4G exclusively is too expensive, especially for a connection comparable to the NBN link I have, so the next best thing is to set up a back-up link using 4G. Since local towers may be down-and-out, best hope I have is to put the 4G antennas up as high as I possibly can. I looked at possible options, and one locally-produced option I stumbled on is the Telco Electronics T1. This is an outdoor rated 4G router, powered using PoE. The PoE scheme i simple: 24V DC nominal voltage, with the blue pair (pins 4 & 5) carrying the positive leg, and the brown pair (7 & 8) carrying the negative.

Talking with the vendor, I discovered that while these things can run down to 12V, they don’t recommend it. I guess I²R losses are a big factor there: CAT5e isn’t known for its power carrying capability. My thinking since my system is all 12V, is to simply run a 12V cable using 15A-rated DC cable alongside the Ethernet cable up to my bedroom, then from there I can split off a few 12V feeds: one for my 8-port switch, one for my access point, and one going to the 4G router.

Since the router expects 24V, I’ll use a boost converter so that the “PoE” run is as short as practical. I found an inexpensive 24V boost converter which could tolerate input voltages as low as 3.3V and input currents up to 5A. Mount this into a little wall-plate box with a couple of RJ-45 jacks and a barrel jack for the DC input, and we’d have a quick and easy boost converter.

I won’t put the wiring diagram up because honestly, it’s pretty straightforward! I haven’t tried running an Ethernet signal through this, but I’m confident it’ll work just fine. It does however power the T1 beautifully… the T1 drawing about 150mA when running at 14.4V (which is what my bench supply was set to). Some things I should possibly add would be fuses on the input and output: 1A on the input, 500mA on the output. For now I’ll just wing it. I’ll probably put the fuse at the socket in my room. There’s plenty of room to add this to the enclosure as it is now.

The business end of the PoE injector
Wiring job inside the enclosure.