Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV.

Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency.

We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.

So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.

We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous

How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.

I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.

The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.

I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.

Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.

Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.

Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?

Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.

20Mb/s is enough? Is this a joke? A single youtube full HD stream can reach 7Mb/s. Literallywatching a youtube movie and doing something else will saturate that link. In fact I think it's so low it will negatively impact basic website loading time. Just going to reddit.com loads 18.2 MB of resources. This will take about 8 seconds on your "useable for everything".

20Mb/s isn't 20mbps.

That’s exactly what it is. 20MB/s isn’t 20mbps, it would be 160mbps.

I always thought Mb/s meant megabytes and mb/S was megabit

20Mb/s is twenty megabit per second. Twenty megabyte per second is 20MB/s notice that the b must be capitalized for byte instead of bit.

My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists?

Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No.

Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely.

Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.

No patience.

Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?

My 4k blu ray rips range between 60 and 100 GB. These would not even be close watchable over 20mb/s.

Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.

Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. I don't transfer 60gb blurays daily so it doesn't matter to me.

This feels exactly like "I don't have ethernet cards capable of 100Mbps so scp can't copy files faster than 10Mbps is not OpenSSH's problem".

Maybe 720P, but I've got 4k Blu ray movies that have peaks of over 200Mb/s when streaming and my device always stutters over those sections.

20mb/s is not sufficient for 4k video unless it has been bitcrushed to death. And even then, you are assuming a given network only has a single user.

Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.

Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video.

On a 120" display?

1. It's not enough when you're on an active connection doing other things at the same time as the video. Live streams at full quality will use a third to half of 20Mbps and demand very little interruption. Loading a single page with a few images can interfere. And even dedicated 20Mbps, with tightly encoded content, can be too little for 4k.

2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.

20 Mb/s is terrible. Sure, it'll work in some sense, but I'd go mad if that's the best I could get. A good wifi setup is way better than a cabled 20 Mb/s unless you absolutely need consist and better latency for some reason.

He said hard to reach places. If an old house has CAT4 in the basement, I'll take the lower pings, reliability, and at worst I'll WebDAV. Unless your home server is in the basement I can't see a normal realistic scenario where the data transfer isn't sufficient.

Doesn't a modern Wi-fi still has worse ping than CAT4 cable?

If you get old equipment to go with your old cabling, ethernet is not necessarily switched. 10 and 100 can be run as a shared medium.

Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.

Worth trying on a shorter run of CAT3, yes. Worth trying on a standard untwisted two pair phone line? Nope. Good luck getting even 5meters.

In that's your usecase, it's better to save yourself the hassle and just set up good WiFi

You can hire someone to run the cable for you, it's not a terribly hard job. The most expensive part is getting out there.

So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable.

Drones is overthinking it.

So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable

That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free.

I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge.

A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof.

The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them.

So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.

Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.

They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.

Considering that you can make > $20/hr flipping burgers in Seattle I'd say you are off by an order of magnitude. No reasonable skilled tradesman (or even unskilled handyman) is doing anything for $20. It's borderline insulting.

They have expenses, fuel, insurance.

I think you missed important details in their post:

> tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes

> tasks that are near them

The idea is, you're someone handy with equipment, and someone down the block wants lights installed. So you walk there with a couple tools on your hand, spend 5 minutes doing it, and earn (say) $20. Instead of just sitting at home and watching TV when you're bored. If you don't feel like it then you just don't take the offer up.

This is not meant to be an alternative to your day job. It's just intended to be something extra you can do when you're home anyway. If transportation and fuel and other costs would factor in then you just wouldn't do it.

It's in no way insulting, it's an opportunity for anyone that wants it. I'm not a handyman but I'd definitely do this from time to time if (say) my neighbors needed computer or coding help for a few minutes.

You shouldn’t do electrical work on someone else’s house. If it burns down and electrical is the cause as an unlicensed uninsured electrician you are going to regret that $20 you made.

Coding a web page for a neighbour is different since there are often no ramifications in the physical world if it doesn’t load or look exactly as desired

I'm not claiming it's a good idea for electrical work. I'm just replying to the points in the comment saying it's an insulting wage.

It’s not a realistic hourly rate given the overheads tradespeople have for things like insurance. Where I live a plumber is $135 for the first half hour and then $135 for every hour after that. Canadian dollars. When the phone rings off the hook at that rate who is going to bother with a $20 job.

For a 10-minute job, $20 is equivalent to $120/hr. If you feel that's too small then pretend they said $40 instead, making it $240/hr. But you're setting up strawmen here. Not every single handyman job needs >$100 insurance for a 10-minute job, and nobody is claiming this is good for plumbing or electrical jobs in particular.

Let's extend the idea to unlicensed dentistry too. For $20 I'll remove your tooth with a pair of pliers. It'll take less than 5 minutes.

Isn't that a felony?

Isn’t this just taskrabbit?

Pretty similar, but seems like you want the pool of people restricted to those with the tools, skills, and experience to not want to bother for that rate.

Haha, I had the very same idea when I needed a similar job to be done. There are many concerns though, as quick $20 could become an evening job (i.e. 3 hours instead of 5 minutes), as some extra info may arise, and you being not qualified enough may think is ‘quick and easy.’

Although in an ideal scenario that’s a really great idea, as quite many people (I believe) may be in need of such services.

(ignoring all the other comments in this thread who are legitimately calling out these are professional services you want and your suggested price is insulting)

What ever happened to taskrabbit anyway?

Gosh, I cannot imagine what would be unappealing about the opportunity for a tradesman to devalue the price of their labor and experience the small-but-inherent risk of catastrophic injury any time a ladder is involved in exchange for the chance to pick up a spare tenner…

(Beyond that, even if they’re already in the area, by the time they pull up the truck, load and unload the ladder and actually do the job, the per-minute rate is probably already a fair bit worse than what they would earn from real customers - it may seem to you like you’re offering an easy job at $10/minute, but it’s probably a tenth of that all in from their perspective.)

The problem is that work involves job acquisition, analysis, communication, travel and of course risk to self and risk to property. It's also not repeatable so its basically impossible to earn a living 20 here and there.

It's probably not worth it for anyone you might actually want to hire and doubly so for anything to which substantial chance of liability attaches. It might make more sense as a list of things your friends/neighbors/family could use help with playing up altruism angle and minimizing emphasise on liability. You know more like neighbor helping neighbor. You could also hopefully integrate positive things like sharing things that may still have value eg you upgraded your washing and dryer but the old set are still workable or things to do that others might want to share in so its not all a distributed version of your grandma's chore list.

Incidentally a have a great domain used for a fairly half-assed implementation of a not entirely different idea.

Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic".

Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

You should not be surprised. A lot of us are DIYers, and see no need to pay someone to do something we can do ourselves. Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs. There is zero reason to pay someone to do it.

I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have different values than I so live and let live...

I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house

I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.

something fun or more interesting

I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.

Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs.

Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.

So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.

I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.

Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!

Worth it, though, and would do it again.

You are not a professional at everything and you don't know what you don't know so things that seem easy might not be and in fact could have significant dangers. A person that does the thing every week is going to be efficient and knowledgeable. It also creates jobs and supports the economy. A lot of strong independent types are frugal and arrogant and self centered to the point of being a miser.

I generally feel the same way having spent a lot of my childhood on a farm, but when I started adding up the cost of all the random tools I would buy (now that I can’t skip out to a barn with 50 years of accumulated tools) to complete a task, and the time for the multiple Home Depot runs/missed steps I’ve started to realize it’s easier and cheaper (in some cases) to have someone else do it. Though there are still some tasks I can’t help doing myself just because I enjoy the challenge, catharsis, or I just want done properly.

Finding a competent electrician these days, for a residential job, can be the difficult part.

I work with several low-voltage guys on different jobs, both new development and retrofit. It is exceedingly difficult to find good cable guys. Running parallel to romex, staples through the middle of the cable, minimum radius as a non-existent concept... Like you say, the competency is the hard part to find.

And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.

Almost all homeowners can't pay more than commercial jobs (for the same amount of billable work).

Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs.

Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)

Believe it or not, many of us don't make huge sums of money.

Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.

Careful with electricians and data cabling. Here's why: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tzh00l/dais...

A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.

Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.

Can't tell if serious or not so bravo.

On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.

Same. I spent a good amount of time in our house the first fall setting up PoE cameras, which involved much time crawling around the attic. Hell of a workout and can be unpleasant but extremely doable.

Agreed. It's not rocket science.

Unless you're mobility limited, everything in an attic should be accessible.

The main considerations are:

   - Do work when it's cold outside. Do not be up there when it's warm and sunny
   - Wear a breathing mask. N95 / painter's mask works fine. Glass insulation particles aren't lethal, but also aren't stuff you want in lungs
   - Think twice. Then move. Slowly. And feel you're standing on something stable before fully transferring your weight
   - Mind your head. The roof plywood will likely have roofing nails sticking through
   - Bring 2 lights, preferably one lantern-type. That way you can leave one en route

If it's blown insulation, you can sweep it over and expose joists to stand on.

They're regularly spaced from the exterior wall to an interior beam, all running the same direction, and the support boards up to the roof will run down to one.

I actually brought up an old LED rope that I wasn't doing anything with and just left it there unplugged for future needs. Probably will be dead by the time I need to work up there again, haha.

That's a damn good idea.

I wired a string of LED lights for a friend (with outlets), but I figured the electronics in them would eventually fry.

I wouldn't be surprised if attics in the southeast get up to 140F in the summer.

Rope lighting would be cheap and semi-insulated.

Mask, Gloves and a Long Sleeved shirt and it's all good.

Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.

I've always wondered if that's the old glass insulation itself, or the accumulated mouse-poop-dust embedding itself in the microscratches and freaking out your immune system.

That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.

I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential.

Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e

With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).

If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.

That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:

https://superuser.com/a/1281656

I thought gigabit required all four pairs, or am I missing part of what you said?

For typical Ethernet sure. Although there are newer standards that can use a single pair (1000Base-T1). They are very range-limited though and not what you would normally install in your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet#1000BASE-T1

They said exactly that.

Your details are crazy, especially the drone, but the overall concept is feasible. I did this professionally for years.

Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)

Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.

Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.

In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.

(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)

RC vehicles, balls with an eye bolt & string w/ a sling shot, and fish tape/poles were key things for the miles and miles of network cable I ran in a previous life.

To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.

flopped along the ceiling grid wasn’t professional

In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.

Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.

And on the plywood, go buy a 4x8 foot sheet and cut it into 4 4x2 foot sheets. These are easy to carry into your attic one or two at a time and you can lay them down as “tiles” that span 4 16in joists. Easy to just lay them down (screwed to the joists) to where you need to get and also continue extending your tiles later if you want to either get further or complete your “floor” for storage purposes. And you can still take up one tile at a time if you need to get access to something like the top side of a ceiling light fixture.

If you ask nicely and go at a not-busy time, larger home improvement stores will generally cut them for you there.

IMO sounds crazy. Can't you just step on the wooden frame instead of the space between them?

Lots of people just lay some planks down over the joists.

Reading you both...

I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.

Definitely a great move and idea. One thing people frequently overlook when buying higher end CAT x copper cable is the thicker the cable the more difficult (some cases impossible) to attach an RJ45 head/plug or Keystone type connector. Additionally, it can become much more difficult to flex/bend, especially if considering it in an electrical gang box for a face plate. This is why frequently you’ll see “cat 8” bulk cable for not much more than cat 6E bulk cable.

the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.

This splice is the only issue, really.

If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.)

Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.

Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.

Seems easier to just go into the attic and not step on the drywall.

Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.

Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.

Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.

it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.

Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world.

The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.

I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.

One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls...

But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)

Fish tape and a cheap endoscope are the tools you want.

My most interesting ethernet run:

My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.

SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.

It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.

Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole

I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to.

I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms.

Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.

Another way to get something supposedly more stable than wifi when ethernet cabling is not feasible is to use your house's electric wiring and run data through that. There are kits which offer data rates in gigabits (although based on a few reviews I read the actual speed vary greatly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...

The few times I have run into these, the actual performance is terrible. Wifi is almost always better.

Mine is, in theory, 2Gb/s. In practise, nearer 50Mb/s.

It also causes interference on my amplifier, although it's a cheap amplifier.

About once a year one of the adaptors loses its connection to the other adaptor, and instead connects to someone else's setup in this apartment building.

That shouldn't be happening, and is a massive security/privacy issue. Your power line devices should be configured to use an encryption key unique to them.

Yep, GP should do a factory reset on both, and pair them. If it stil happens after that, replace them with models that don't have this problem!

I was pretty horrified when I worked out what had happened.

It's from TP-Link, and supposedly does pair and create a secure connection: https://www.tp-link.com/sg/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa8...

How does interference caused by the radio waves have anything to do with using encryption?

it's been 10 years but I had great success running internet into the basement this way. Wifi was terrible down there (router was in the upper floor) and there wasn't an existing ethernet cable going down. Of course it wasn't perfect but it was trivial to set up and worked.

Same for me, my parents house had no WiFi signal downstairs or Ethernet in the walls. A powerline wifi extender kit worked out of the box and is fast enough for their needs.

I had a similar issue until I limited the amount of wire between the connections. For example I put one right by an outlet under my breaker box, then another in my garage right where the subpanel is and it improved dramatically.

Same. It was great 10 years ago, but wifi speeds at this point make the wired through electric lines painfully slow. Even with the occasional wifi hiccup, wifi is almost always better.

Aside from the terrible and inconsistent performance, the bigger problem is the sheer amount of electrical noise introduced into the line which can adversely affect electrical appliances and devices.

Personally, I just don't find all the drawbacks worth it.

If your neighbors use it too, you could end up on each other's network

I never had good luck with that. Even on the same circuit, as instructed. The performance and reliability is really quite bad.

I tried this. It kinda worked. It also apparently leaks a lot of ... data? Interference? Something. Wifi seems to work just as well for us.

When I was a uni student in an old house with thick walls these were worth it. My bedroom had terrible WiFi - power line networking got me a few hundred mbps but the latency suffered.

ServeTheHome just published an article about powerline networking

TLDR: It's still bad.

https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...

I thought ethernet was more of the wire protocol than the cable. I could have sworn that the "ethernet" cables when I first started working were coax, and the article talks about the first ethernet being on coax. Seems like ethernet in modern usage is synonymous with CAT5.

The first Ethernet was on coax yes. It was also a shared physical bus so the 10 megabit was often shared among a room full of computers. Despite this it felt speedy!!

But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.

Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.

Despite this it felt speedy!!

When the most common data transfer technology is a POTS modem that can do 56kb/second...

Think more like 2400 or 9600 bps actually :)

True--I was talking more towards the end of the use of coax for Ethernet, which was also the peak of the dialup days.

Oh yeah but then it wasn't really speedy anymore.

At college we used to have rooms with 24 X-terminals with 1280x1024 screens - huge for the day. All on one single shared 10mbit!

And wow it was speedy. Because all we did was locally rendered motif window managers, locally rendered fonts and widgets etc. Windows weren't moved animated but just the border was shown while moving.

Fast forward to the 56k days and everyone was running mosaic and netscape scrolling to pages loaded with bitmap images, scrolling marquee text (server rendered usually) and animated under construction images. It was anything but speedy at that point - lol.

From that point onwards things moved on really fast.

Ah yes, "Thick Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and "Thin Ethernet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.

And if a single vampire tap comes loose, the entire network segment goes down. Don't miss that.

And 10BaseT! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair)

Anybody else remember "vampire connections"?

[Ah, a minute late. FFP999 remembers them.]

You remember correctly. This was the most common form of Ethernet cable when I was first starting out roughly 3,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

I do this too and it is terrific, literally indistinguishable from ethernet. What’s amazing is you can run cable and MoCa on the same wire at the same time!

How does this work with both? Is there a defined band plan standard that cable operators know to avoid? Do you need to install a notch filter on the line coming into the house?

MOCA modems looks for unused bandwidth

I think it just sits in the mutli-ghz bands. It shouldn’t conflict with cable, which uses lower frequency bands. You just gotta make sure to install a low pass filter at your demarcation point so you aren’t broadcasting your MoCA stuff beyond your home.

You also have to use appropriate splitters that are rated for the top ends of the spectrum.

It's more the other way around. There's a defined band plan, because historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio, so it inherited the broadcast TV band plan. Then digital TV inherited the analogue cable band plan and added higher-frequency channels.

To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.

historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio

Well, to be pedantic, that is still how it works. And it's how cable Internet works. And it's also how a lot of techniques over twisted pair work, too.

The conductor is used as a waveguide and a very-much-analogue signal encoding a digital signal is what is sent over the line. DOCSIS 3 uses up to QAM-4096, which can encode 12 bits in a single symbol on the line, by using multiple steps of amplitude shift and phase shift, to encode bits. Quite similar to how FM radio works, just digital steps, rather than an analogue continuum between 0 and 100 amplitude and 0 and 100 phase, at the decoder.

This has even started showing up for links within a single computer, now. The latest revision of PCIe uses modulated RF (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) rather than simple binary voltage levels.

MoCa was designed specifically to work over existing coax used for TV and behave with existing signals. The board of the consortium that designed it includes Comcast, Cox, and Verizon. It was basically a solution for "we're gonna need internet in our customer's homes but we already ran coax in them"

We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room

Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables?

If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.

OP could almost be describing my house. New construction, coax to every room, no ethernet. And the builder specifically warned me not to try to use the existing coax to pull a new drop because it's all filled with fireproof foam/insulation stuff.

It’s always possible to run new Ethernet cable. Just think like a cable TV installation technician. Run it on the surface, drill through walls and fish as needed. Run it along the exterior if needed.

It’s always possible. Not always pretty, but possible.

I develop software for a living, my capabilities at layer 1 are quite limited.

Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right.

I have managed to get Ethernet everywhere I want for the most part though, thanks to a luckily positioned unfinished half of the basement and garage, where visible cables are fine and I can just pop through walls here and there.

Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right.

Obviously this is always a cost issue (ie it’s subjective exactly how nice it has to look and what is acceptable to pay), but it’s far from impossible to run ethernet or fiber without breaking down walls.

The cheap version of this is having new covered cable channels running on top of existing baseboards and door trims. The more expensive version would be to either replace or carve out space in the boards to fit the cable, in that case you would never see it except when it exits the board to an outlet.

In American homes, cables are typically stapled to the wood frame construction, not run in conduit. You have to cut open the finished wall surface to change them.

Right, that makes sense. I’m realizing now I just assumed conduits were the norm.

MoCA really doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everybody always thinks if WiFi repeaters, or Ethernet over power line but MoCA is much faster and more reliable than either of them!

It’s perfect for apartments that have cabletv jacks in every room. Just make sure you are using the appropriate wideband splitters and have a filter at the cable demarcation in your dwelling.

MoCA is really expensive. You're better off just hiring someone to wire the house up. Id

How cheap are electricians where you live? MoCA adapters are around $50/each where electricians are around $200 just to visit + hourly and materials (US, west coast). That's a lot of MoCA devices.

Yes, but you need 2 to start ($100), that's the cheaper version of the MOCA adapters (the high use cost $80/each) that's just one room. It's an extra $50/$80 per room. If you're only looking for one connection, MOCA seems alright, but if it's going to be multiple rooms, it's better (and cleaner) to just do the in-wall wiring.

These prices are also recently reduced. Without them you're looking at $150/170 a pair depending on the version you buy.

https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethern...

The problem I’ve found with moca is that every time I’ve tried it (3x now), there’s always something going on behind the walls that ends up completely ruining it. Someone put filters or splitters in, or something to that extent, and it turns out there’s insane packet loss or sub MB speed or it just doesn’t work for some reason.

I've been happily using the laughably cheap Direct-TV Deca adapters for years now to get 100Mbps ethernet to my detached garage (where of course the previous owners needed coax TV :P), for my smart garage door, wyze cam, and streaming music while mowing. Works like a charm for $20!

If there's already a coax cable run what's stopping you from running an ethernet cable alongside it or replacing it?

Coax runs in residential houses tend not to go through conduits, and often squeeze through holes in joists just barely big enough for the cable. Not to mention that, in my experience, they also tend to involve splitters in the absolute most random of locations.

Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.

I haven't run Ethernet, but if I do the drops will be very near the coaxial cables because they're an easy reference.

If the endpoints have a hidden fork in between, then what you are shovelling in on one end might not be what comes out the other.

Laziness. I’d much rather spend $100 on gizmos than spend hours on a home improvement project. And these projects are never as simple as they at first promise to be.

Because he uses MoCa instead.

Oh, so you can connect several devices to the same "shared" coax cable around the house?

How is it? Is it really 2.5gbps or is it like Powerline adaptors that are an order of magnitude slower than their advertised speed? :P

I can pull down a gig/sec no problem. Dunno how well it handles congestion or anything but it is way more than adequate for home use.

I was able to hit >2gbps in speed tests using goCoax MoCA adapters when I used them, but it isn't "full duplex", so you won't see 2.5 down and up at the same time, for example.

I'm using MoCA to connect two parts of my house that I have not been able to pull CAT5 too.

There is a latency hit when using MoCA compared to Ethernet:

MoCA: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 3.24/4.02/4.64

Ethernet: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 0.365/0.461/0.515

Yes. My setup is like this:

Fiber ONT/Modem -> Access Point -> MoCA adapter 1 -> Coax Splitter

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 2 -> Switch -> bunch of devices

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices

Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point

the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck.

There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.

If you're willing to put the work in you can use the coax drops and runs as pulling line for cat, new coax (if you want to keep it) and real pulling line (to leave tied at the top and bottom of each drop if you ever need to run something else). Same idea if you have POTS copper run throughout. Most of the time even the ancient drops and runs have enough space cut out for a number of cables since doing runs is generally easier when the holes are larger.

Maybe for plasterboard and timber construction. My house is mostly brick with the coax chased into the wall.

Ah, yeah my advice is definitely for sheet rock/dry wall based dwellings. I think you could manage to replace the coax run through brick with a single cat run though. I would buy and generously use wire pulling lubricant though.

The cables don't go through the brick; they're under plaster. No way are you removing that without destroying the plaster.

This has the nasty side effect of rendering WiFi pretty much unusable too.

I just replaced the coax cables. It's actually really easy to rewire: attach old and new cable together, and pull.

That only works when the coax was a retrofit itself, and the house is small. If it was installed when the house was built, it'll be stapled in various places.

I just had a house built. I am 99% sure looking at all the pics I took it is not stapled in. The tricky ones are the ones where they decided to drill a hole thru the 2x4s in the wall about every 4 ft... Now I am not saying they do not do that (different areas have different ideas of what is 'right').

My cables are all stapled to the studs, so pulling doesn't work that well :(

MoCA is great but the downside is that requires two active components. And leveraging PoE becomes impossible.

Also, why not replace the coax cable with UTP? Tape some fish tape to your coax cable, and gently pull the coax cable on the other end. Then ape some UTP to the other end of the fish tape and pull again slowly. Pretty easy actually.

Cable that was installed when the house was built is usually stapled to the studs, making it close to impossible to simply pull out unfortunately.

I'm not familiar with this type of construction. Where I live any wiring is run through pipes.

True but if you don’t care about another power brick on both ends… it’s a quick, dirty, fast and effective way to bring wired Ethernet to every room with a cable jack.

Also, check the phone lines. If it's recent enough build, it will use Cat5 (or higher, but probably not) for the phone lines.

Even MUCH older phone lines can push gigabit with G.fast, I have gigabit fiber internet in early 1980s construction that way.

One issue with that is that electricians can sometimes be brutal on Cat5 used as a phone line. I’ve had drops that were basically unusable as ethernet because some of the pairs were damaged, even though the phone pair in use was fine.

Even if not... I've managed to link at Gigabit over category 3 cable of a short distance.

Cool! I have the same issue with unused coax cables between every room, and was planning on replacing them with ethernet cables. In my case it's feasible without breaking down any walls. Does this work even with splitters?

Make sure your splitter is rated for like 1.8ghz so you don’t dramatically attenuate your signal. Cheap splitters will probably cause trouble.

Yes, it works with splitters. Just be careful because you'll lose signal strength on each split, your splitter should have a number on it for how much is lost.

I have the exact situation. Like 8 coax lines in the home but no Ethernet. Can someone point me in a consumer-ready direction? I imagine I can do this:

- put cable modem in basement where line comes in.

- do something that goes from router to into 2-3 coax lines heading into the home.

- have some little box in those rooms that expose an Ethernet port.

I’ve used this model for a few networks and had a good time. Minimal setup and supports a WPS-like security.

https://a.co/d/4aC81NS

See the diagram in this guide: https://www.motorolacable.com/documents/MM1025-QuickStart-re...

Note both the usage of the PoE (point of entry, not power) filter, as well as the MoCA network encapsulating both DOCSIS and Ethernet traffic.

Some set-top boxes and modems are MoCA compatible, but I prefer using a discrete unit.

Oh wow I don’t even need to isolate my incoming cable Internet from it.

Thank you for these links. This is exactly what I needed to move forward.

What hardware adapters are you using?

I use goCoax adapters and recommend them. I haven't tried any other manufacturers.

https://www.gocoax.com

Am I missing something? Given most residential equipment tops out at 1G isn't coax better than if ethernet had been ran?

I have 10Gbps between my home server and desktop. Is it overkill? Sure, but I do use my home server for networked storage in Lightroom etc so having it be even slightly faster is nice.

I actually couldn’t get ethernet at fast enough speeds compared to wifi over the last couple years

with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable

what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?

MoCA can be useful but doesn't it still encapsulate Ethernet at its lowest layer?

MoCa is just a standard to run the Ethernet network over Coax cables

Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.

I agree with this. I finally bit the bullet and bought a bunch of MoCA adapters for my house. In practice I don't get the full 2.5 gigabit speed, but I do get about 1.7. Good 'nuf for my needs, for sure.

You can get ethernet to coax baluns and get 100Mbps and PoE. They're extremely reliable, passive (so little to break) and cheap. There might be gig versions now. They're used to retrofit older surveillance camera wiring plants to ethernet without ripping out all the cables, but don't really care what type of ethernet device is on each end.

If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.

Can confirm.

Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.

So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.

I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.

I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.

When I built my house I ran both coax and ethernet to all my TVs.

It was worth it. Even though I have an HD Homerun, the fact that my TV's menu's and remote work as-designed for live TV helps make things run much more smoothly.

I'm still using the coax for my OTA antenna

I should've done that instead of try and replace the coax with network cables; they all run through cable guides (yellow tubes), but they're probably bent, nicked and collapsed after installation so you can't just replace the cables through it.

I remember wiring up cat5 gigabit about 20 years ago in an industrial workplace. My house of that age also has cat5 everywhere and it’s aged very well. 1gig is still the standard for wired with few but expensive 2.5g and very expensive 10g home and small business options.

1gig is still the standard for wired

A lot of people already get more than that from their ISP. I had at least 2.5g on every consumer product from the past 5 years. Small businesses use at least SFP on the floor level. Yada yada yada. Point is it's probably a regional thing.

A lot of people?

2.5G is rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity, and the advantage of higher total bandwidth is to support multiple people doing high bandwidth tasks.

In this scenario a 2.5G (or 10G) router is all that's really required to get the benefit, while using the existing 20 year old wiring.

rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity

Now where have I heard that before...

Now where have I heard that before...

Ok, sorry, in another 30 years time people might want more than 1G to do brain dumps to their robo-shrink.

In 2023, there are very few uses for home users that will exceed what a 1G connection can provide.

But please enlighten me about where you think you've "heard this before"?

Not the commenter but I’ve heard people make statements like that time and time again, only for those limits to be obliterated a few years later.

The thing is, the moment a new upper bound becomes available, developers find a way to use it. It’s like the freeway problem that adding more roads ironically adds to congestion.

Take storage, the greater the storage capacity of media increased, the larger game assets became. The faster CPUs and system memory became, the heavier our operating systems and desktop software became.

Likewise, the faster our internet becomes, the more dependent we will become on streaming high fidelity content. 4k on a lot of streaming services is compressed to hell and back to work with people on slower internet connections. And much as Google Stadia was shutdown, video game streaming services aren’t a failed experiment. Plus even with more traditional services, how many of us roll our eyes at multi-hour download times for new games?

Once gigabit internet becomes the norm (it’s common place in a lot of countries already, but it’s not quite the norm yet) then you’ll see more and more services upscale to support it, and thus others on the cutting edge of the tech curve finding that gigabit internet isn’t quite fast enough any more. And that will happen sooner than you think.

4k on a lot of streaming services is compressed to hell and back to work with people on slower internet connections.

A 4K UltraHD Bluray (that's 100GB for one movie) has a maximum bitrate of "just" 144Mbps. If you're suggesting online streaming services have some swathe of content that's (checks notes) in excess of 7x the bitrate used for 4K Bluray discs, I'd love to hear about it.

video game streaming services aren’t a failed experiment

I'd have thought latency was a far bigger concern here, but even if not: it's still just sending you a 4K video stream.. it just happens to be a stream that's reacting to your input.

A 4K UltraHD Bluray (that's 100GB for one movie) has a maximum bitrate of "just" 144Mbps. If you're suggesting online streaming services have some swathe of content that's (checks notes) in excess of 7x the bitrate used for 4K Bluray discs, I'd love to hear about it.

We are still a long way off the parity with what our eyes can process so there's plenty of room for bitrates to grow.

Plus the average internet connection isn't just streaming a video. It's kids watching online videos while adults are video conferencing and music is being streamed in the background. Probably with games being downloaded and software getting updated too.

A few hundred Mbps here, another few there. Quickly you exceed 1 gigabit.

I'd have thought latency was a far bigger concern here, but even if not: it's still just sending you a 4K video stream.. it just happens to be a stream that's reacting to your input.

Latency and jitter matter too. But they're not mutually exclusive properties.

Plus if you're streaming VR content then that is multiple 4k streams per device. And that's on top of all the other concurrent network operations (as mentioned above).

You're also still thinking purely about current tech. My point was that developers create new tech to take advantage of higher specs. Its easy to scoff at comments like this but I've seen this happen many times in my lifetime -- the history of tech speaks for itself.

Plus the average internet connection isn't just streaming a video. It's kids watching online videos while adults are video conferencing and music is being streamed in the background. Probably with games being downloaded and software getting updated too.

That's exactly the scenario I gave where 2.5G WAN would be useful, but a 1G LAN to each machine is likely enough for most tasks, for most people - multiple users simultaneous use.

That's exactly the scenario I gave where 2.5G WAN would be useful, but a 1G LAN to each machine...

You're moving goal posts now because your original comment, the one that sparked this discussion, neither mentioned 2.5G WAN nor that your 1G comment was specific to each machine rather than internet connectivity as a whole.

but a 1G LAN to each machine is likely enough for most tasks, for most people - multiple users simultaneous use.

For today, yes. But you're demonstrating a massive failure of imagination by assuming those needs are going to be the same in a few years time. For example, the 4k figures you're quoting are fine and dandy if you don't take into account that TV manufacturers are going to want to sell newer screens. Which means more emphasis on content with high colour colour depths, refresh rates and resolutions. This isn't even a theoretical point, there are already 8k @ 120FPS videos on YouTube.

Heck, I've already hit the 1GbE limit for a few specific bits of hardware in my home set up. Mainly my home server and some "backbone" wiring between two core switches which join two separated buildings on my property. But if I'm hitting that limit today then it's not going to be many more years before other people start hitting it for far less esoteric reasons than mine.

You're also overlooking that fact that if you have router providing GbE to desktops and WiFi 6 to other devices, it's very unlikely to be powerful enough to switch all of those devices at gigabit speeds, let alone routing at 2.5G to the WAN. And that's with regular IPv4 packages, never mind the additional overhead that IPv6 adds. Underpowered consumer networking equipment is already impacting home users right now. So again, we are seeing limits being hit already.

---

Lets also not forget all the other noise being introduced into homes. Smart speakers uploading voice recordings for speech-to-text analysis. Smart doorbells and over security devices uploading video. Smart lights, fridges, plugs, plant pots and whatever else phoning home. Set top TV boxes, and other multimedia devices phoning home, downloading software updates and streaming adverts. In fact have you ever run wireshark on your average home network recently? There is a lot of noise these days and that's only set to grow exponentially.

Not moving goal posts at all mate.

My original comment, in reply to someone saying "a lot of people already get more than 1G from their ISP" and implying that it's therefore worthwhile to have 2.5GEth on all local devices ends with:

In this scenario a 2.5G (or 10G) router is all that's really required to get the benefit, while using the existing 20 year old wiring.

I'm sorry if the correlation between having a 2.5G router and having greater than 1G WAN wasn't obvious to you.

Complaining that a quasi backbone link saturates gig eth when my entire point was that single computers are unlikely to need more kind of misses the whole point I was making for an excuse to complain.

I never said no one needs more than gig for anything.

AFAIK we're still very far below the dynamic range human eyes are capable of seeing, so there's plenty of room to need to up the bit depth (and rate) for video if displays can improve. Our color gamuts also do not cover human vision.

So I had to use a calculator to help me here, and I used https://toolstud.io/video/bitrate.php, but apparently the raw bitrate for 4K@25fps/24bit is 4.98Gbps, which then obviously gets compressed by various codecs.

Taking the above 4K@25fps/24bit and pumping it up to 60fps and 36bit colour (i.e. 12 bits per channel, or 68 billion colours, 4096x as many colours as 24bit, and 64x as many colours as 30bit) the resulting raw video bitrate is 17.92Gbps... so it's an increase of <checks notes> about 3.6x.

It seems quite unlikely that we'll have every other aspect of 36bit/60fps video sorted out, but somehow the codecs available have worse performance than is already available today.

My understanding is that today's HDR sensors and displays can do ~13 stops of dynamic range, while humans can see at least ~20, though I'm not sure how to translate that into how much additional bit depth ought to be needed (naively, I might guess at 48 bits being enough).

I don't see why we'd stop at 60fps when 120 or even 240 Hz displays are already available. Also 8k displays already exist. The codecs also have tunable quality, and obviously no one is sending lossless video. So we can always increase the quality level when encoding.

So it's true in 2023 (especially since no one will stream that high of quality to you), but one can easily imagine boring incremental technology improvements that would demand more. There's plenty of room for video quality to increase before we reach the limitations of human eyes.

I believe they are referring to the quote from Bill Gates '640K ought to be enough for anyone' in reference to ram.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone who believes the debunked Gates quote is real, also can't comprehend the difference between "for anyone" and "for a lot of people".

In 2023, there are very few uses for home users that will exceed what a 1G connection can provide

Video games are getting bigger all the time. The latest Call of Duty apparently is 200GB. On 1gbit you are limited to 125MB/s downloads (assuming zero overhead) that's almost a half an hour to download. PCIe4 SSD's are capable of write speeds of about 7GB/s and PCIe5 SSD's are just hitting the market with even faster speeds. At 10Gbit you can download that game in less than 3 minutes. In neither case are you even approaching the speed at which your PC can store that data.

When PCIe5 SSD's go mainstream a home PC user would even be able to saturate a 100Gbit connection.

Please, I implore you, to read the line you quoted again, and then perhaps pull out the old Oxford English, and look up what "very few" means.

I'll be generous and give you a hint: it doesn't mean none.

But your example also has great relevance to the "familiar" sentence in my original comment which was:

2.5G is rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity, and the advantage of higher total bandwidth is to support multiple people doing high bandwidth tasks.

I italicised the part that I knew people would somehow ignore in my original comment and I've done it again, because obviously once wasn't enough.

Here, let me pull out the important words yet again just to make it really clear:

for a lot of people

Back in college we had 100Mbit internet connections in our dorm rooms when most people had 10Mbit cable or DSL at most. At the time it was considered ridiculously fast and certainly not something an average consumer would ever need.

Nah, you're in a very small minority. Most households have few hundred megs at most

You’re probably in US. Meanwhile in Switzerland people are enjoying 25gbps internet: https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/

I'm in the UK. What I stated applies to most countries. Switzerland is a niche.

You also need to have 2.5GB capable hardware in all of your home devices though.

No, you don’t. You do need it only if you want to pull 2.5gigs on one device.

"One device" could be your router, and if your router can't do 2.5gb then nothing will be doing 2.5

Yeah, no. You live in a bubble. Most consumers are not above 1g even on fiber. It's probably not even regional, it's very location specific.

Where I live (the Netherlands) gigabit is available pretty much country-wide. Not everyone may subscribe to a gigabit plan but it's available to them if they wanted it.

ISPs are now just starting to roll out multi-gig, a few are already offering 2.5 or 4gbit plans. Even the ones that do not offer multi-gbit plans yet are already installing 10gbit capable CPEs. I suspect 10gbit service will become available nationwide within a few years.

I just got 5gbps symmetrical FTTH installed. I'm in Michigan, so hardly some connectivity utopia. I'm going through a round of upgrading my network devices to be able to actually handle it.

You never visited Germany, aren't you?

very expensive 10g

For me it's just 2€ more expensive than the standard 1g plan. It's really unfortunate to see how bad internet prices are, especially in the US and other countries with ISP monopolies. The only reason my internet is so relatively cheap is because early on there was a lot of competition in my country.

That isn't what is expensive.

If you get 10 GB, the question is, then what? I have bidirectional 1 GB plugged into a $200 EdgeSwitch, which then feeds Cat 6 throughout the home ($100/500 feet). This then filters down to $20-30 unmanaged 1 GB switches elsewhere. The whole thing is under $500.

If I wanted to go up to 10 GB I don't just need to change to a $2K~ EdgeSwitch, I also need to run fiber/6E to be able to deliver more than 2.5 GB to any endpoint, then invest in expensive switching infrastructure elsewhere in the home to turn the incoming 10 GB signal into something more devices can accept (e.g. 1 GB or 2.5 GB).

Safe estimate, is to go from 1 GB bidirectional to 10 GB bidirectional, it would be $5K in equipment and pulling new cable.

For $100/month I can do 10 GB, but I won't because of the equipment cost/diminishing returns rather than the ISP cost difference. If network equipment comes a LONG way, and I can do it for under $1K, I'd consider it.

Correction: you can usually run 10Gbit/s over CAT5e if the cables are not too long, so you probably won't need to replace your cables. But the hardware is indeed expensive.

That isn't a correction, that is pedantry. Nobody is going to spend $100/month and thousands on equipment and then run their 10 Gbit/s network on 5e. The lengths to remain stable won't even bridge floors of a home let alone from end-to-end.

If it was free in terms of equipment, you might have a point. Since then 10 GB is just a "bonus" but it isn't, or even close. So you'd be cheaping out on the final 10% of the cost.

I'm not sure what you mean, good quality CAT5e cables should easily give you 10Gbit/s under 30m. If it works, why replace it?

The lengths to remain stable won't even bridge floors of a home let alone from end-to-end.

This isn't true. I've run 10gbit over cat5e many times in 10-30m lengths. That might not be enough for end to end on your house (although it is for many peoples), but it's certainly fine between floors.

10gbit switches are becoming significantly more common. Vendors like fs.com and even Netgear offer some reasonably priced options. Mikrotik and other vendors offer better (pricier) options, but assumedly if you want 10gbit (or even 1gbit) you're an enthusiast or business anyway.

There's much cheaper equipment than $2K. Try something from Mikrotik. They have offerings for 100G for less than half of that.

Can you say what country?

With Digi in Spain 10G is €5 more than 1G - https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/

I just got on Digi 10G and I measure 8 Gbit/s symmetric, for… €25. Who can complain about that?

Anyway, I hadn’t paid attention and yes turns out consumer hardware support is a bottleneck, not the actual ISP which is nuts. Seems like someone fell asleep at the wheel – I suspect people are gonna have a wake up once >1G becomes widespread – not even their new fancy motherboard will support it. It feels like for ages, it’s been the opposite - you buy hardware that is prepared for the future or at least the present. At least that’s how it’s been with SATA etc..

For instance, the cheapest NIC is like $75 and the router can only do 10G on one port. Wifi6 does not get near those speeds either and even so laptops have to be very new (even my M1 does not have full support for the 802.11ax thingy - partner’s M2 was at least able to pull ~1.6 Gbit/s). Switches and routers are premium priced.

However, I was very impressed with the silent progression of cat cables, they’re just better and better ever iteration, backwards compatible and dirt cheap. Got a cat8 which is way, way more than I need for like €1/meter. And they’re flat and easy to pull long distances. Beautiful tech!

Even now 1gbps is plenty for virtually every end user and I suspect it will be good enough for a long time (maybe VR changes things??).

Neural compression is an emerging field and already shows some striking compression abilities, especially if the compressor/decompressor includes a large model which amounts to something like a huge pre-existing dictionary on both sides.

Stable Diffusion XL is only about 8 gigabytes and can render a shocking array of different images from very short prompts with very high fidelity.

1gbps might be enough for more than we think.

Deterministicly?

Sure. The only reason image generators aren't deterministic is that you inject randomness. Set the same random seed, get the same image. Download Stable Diffusion XL and run it locally and try it.

There are models that can be run in both directions. Take a source image and generate a token stream prompt for it. That's your compressed image. Now run it forward to decompress.

CPU intensive but massive compression ratios can be achieved... like orders of magnitude better than jpeg.

It's lossy compression, so we're not violating fundamental mathematical limits. Those bounds apply to lossless compression.

Well, the value proposition of image formats are 1. transmission, which requires both sender and receiver to have the exact same model, which requires us to standardize on some model and ship it with everything until the end of time, and 2. archival, which would require storing the model alongside the file (which might more than counteract any data saved from improved compression) and would be highly fraught because, unlike existing decompression algorithms, it cannot be described in simple text (and therefore reimplemented at will), which risks making the file inaccessible and defeating the point of archival.

It's a cool idea, especially for high-bandwidth, low-value contexts like streaming video calls, but I don't think it's going to wholesale replace ordinary lossy formats for images or prerecorded video delivery (and this is without considering the coding/decoding performance implications).

Most people using using streaming video don't require archival support. The source and the internet archive etc can manage the archival part.

From my puttering, image->tokens->image yields something that may or not vaguely resemble the original, but is never anywhere near identical.

My personal experience with VR is 1gbps is plenty, the issues with VR more boil down to things like latency (for instance, streaming a quest wirelessly with VR desktop basically requires Ethernet, with regular wifi the experience is just awful).

Do you have WiFi 6? I found that to be adequate for me and my Quest needs.

Only so much data the human brain can pay attention too. And for big data you are running in data centres anyway while you are sending control data back and forth from home.

I live in a house nearing 20 years old, and was incredibly pleased when I moved in and realized that all the phone jacks in this house were backed by CAT5, and if I was willing to invest the time (which I am), I could have at least one Ethernet jack in each room, and a pair channeled up to the attic as well. My only regret was they stripped way more than needed and didn't leave a lot of wire available, but enough that I could terminate and add a keystone jack that will last past my needs. Or so I thought until I learned that my ISP offers 2.5GBps to the house.

Implicit QoS - each device has a max 1GBps share of the 2.5GBps connection. Most hardware can't handle more anyways.

Implicit QoS

Hahaha. Love it.

That's exactly how >1Gbit/s connections get sold. Hardware with multiple high-speed ports is very expensive, so typically you have 1 2.5G/10G port LAN port and all the other ports are 1G. So they say you can have multiple concurrent 1Gbit/s streams.

My home was redone at some point in the late 1990s and I also lucked out in this regard with Cat 5 used for telephony, but easily converted to proper Ethernet.

I ended up purchasing a “lifetime” spool of Cat 6 to fill in some blanks, but it’s the optimal networking setup for me.

It's not so gloomy, 2.5G ports are becoming standard on consumer desktop chipsets, and switches are not that expensive. For 10G, you can get copper cables easily, but SPFE is more common, I guess once chipsets get faster, do not consume as much/run as hot, copper might return there as well.

hah. Drilling holes to run Ethernet through centuries-old castle walls was my favorite.

Most cat5e structured cabling is completely fine for home-length runs at 2.5 or 10 gigabit/s - I am using existing cables for the 10G run from my fiber drop to my router, and for the 2.5G runs from my router to my wireless access points.

It's only a pity that things fossilized on 1500 byte packets.

Yeah, we can compensate for that with hardware, but it's ridiculous to do 100G or even 10G in 1500 byte chunks.

Jumbo frames are a thing.

Jumbo frames are not a thing on the internet. The internet has fossilized at 1500 byte MTU.

Jumbo frames could be a thing on the internet if there was a meaningful value proposition. Jumbo frames get plenty of adoption in LAN environments.

Jumbo frames could be a thing on the internet

It being a thing on "the internet" would require it being a thing on a sizable majority of the internet. You'd need to get large network operators, peering points, user-facing ISPs, and even users themselves on board to change their setups.

And Path MTU discovery is still sufficiently unreliable as to make it incredibly painful to have partial large-MTU networks.

And if you do any of this with standard home customers, a hellscape torrent of user complaints is going to rain down on your support contacts. Which costs money. More money than is lost by the higher cost of routing smaller packets.

So, no, jumbo frames could not be a thing on the internet. There's a reason it's called fossilization. There is no technical reason precluding changing this, it's just frozen into way too many places to be changed.

This the same argument why IPv6 can't be a thing on the internet; I agree that the book isn't closed entirely on that yet, but very significant progress has been made.

They seemed to have made it work side by side. I smiled when I pinged a cloud resource and got an IPv6 the other day.

Except disruptions (i.e. worse service than IPv4 only) from rolling out IPv6 are the exception while disruptions from rolling out jumbo frames are absolutely the norm.

The internet has fossilized at 1500 byte MTU.

the internet has a whole bunch of non ethernet stuff, a lot of which has different frame sizes. Its totally possible that backhaul is running jumbo frames, or something like it, but you'd never really know that.

Conversely ADSL has odd frame sizes(inherited from ATM; 48 bytes if I remember correctly), but you don't see that because its hidden from you. Cable has a frame sizes ranging from ~500 up to 2000 bytes. Again, hidden from you.

One of the joys of TCP/IP is that different frame sizes are handled for you. Sure it might be beneficial to have a frame size that marries up with packet size, it might not. you don't really know, because the internets.

The bottom line is that if you ever send an IP frame larger than 1500 bytes outside of your own network, it's most likely that it will never reach its destination. Especially for IPv6.

I wouldn't call them "frame sizes" for ATM or DSL. It's a bit of a transparent fragmentation into "cells" onto the "transport" layer. It could carry arbitrary "frame" sizes on that

ATM used 53-byte "cells".

I've been terrified to enable jumbo frames because every guide I've read has always had "you have to make sure that every single machine you ever communicate with has to also have jumbo frames on or you will cause a black hole that sucks the whole earth into it!!" kind of disclaimers when I just want to lower the overhead in copying files from my NAS that has some pathetic Atom CPU in it.

If you're not blocking ICMP, then PMTUD will take care of any issues where other hosts don't support jumbo frames

I'll try it.

If that's the case it's a shame we didn't take the chance with IPv6 to push to higher default MTUs since IPv6 already relies to a much higher degree on PMTUD since it lacks fragmentation.

Well, the minimum MTU increased at least - it's 1280 bytes in IPv6 vs something ridiculous like 68 bytes in IPv4.

Never seen used in the practice though. One of problems AFAIK - most switch default to dropping jumbo frames. You can enable but if you'll left one unconfigured for some reason you will get hard to diagnose problem. The same with end hosts - they (inside a given L2 domain) should have the same MTU and if you'll left a box with the default MTU you got a problem.

To make jumbo frames easier to use switches should forward them by default and hosts should accept frames large than MTA (but send MTU sized ones).

Jumbo frames are used constantly in practice, just not often on the internet. They're common in all sorts of networks, especially enterprise and storage.

If your switch is configured on defaults and not running a for purpose config, you probably don't need jumbo frames.

Ill defined, but yes, definitely a thing.

I thought frame size negotiation was an optional part of LLDP now. I suspect it fits into the broad category of things that could be well-defined if there was broad adoption of a poorly adopted standard.

Just to be picky the correct term is data gram, which describes layer 2 segmentation. Packets describe segmentation between switches, which is layer 3.

If you want to be picky, you need to get it right first. The actual term is frame. datagram is generally used to refer to layer 4 operation, and the term is not used anywhere in IEEE 802.3.

Also the GP is correct to say we fossilized on 1500 byte packets, since the layer 3 MTU is the relevant thing when talking about fossilization in the internet at large. This number was driven by 802.3's standard frame size being 1514 bytes, but that one is not even fossilized as much. It takes work, but you can control your own network and roll out jumbo frames. You can't roll out larger packets on the internet.

You can't roll out larger packets on the internet.

Devil's advocate: why not? We're in the middle of a long-term push for IPv6, and we have interim solutions to help the migration like Teredo tunneling. It's slow going, but we'll get there eventually.

Why don't we start a similar global migration to jumbo frames?

What's the backwards compatibility story here? Send out dual 1500/9000 packets? I don't see how that would work for the billions of devices in the wild without replacing everything but maybe there's a better solution that doesn't take 30 years.

IPv6 also required hardware in the wild to be replaced, but that's not a reason to give up and let things ossify. Over the next 30 years most hardware will be landfilled and replaced anyway. Let's get these improvements into the software stack of new devices now, and then let nature take its course.

IPv6 also required hardware in the wild to be replaced

I understand that, but it was (is) able to do that in a mostly backwards compatible manner.

My question is: how is that possible with different MTU sizes? Have ISPs support 9000 byte frames and fragment to 1500 bytes for compatibility with the wider internet? Then something like PMTUD can be used to bypass this fragmentation when supported?

To be clear, I would love to have larger MTU sizes. I just don't see a straightforward way to transition everything over. I'm not a network engineer though, maybe there just isn't enough a strong enough impetus for anyone to dedicate the resources to this.

Also not a network engineer. But I'd imagine first the Tier 1 ISPs (Level 3 etc) could enable jumbo frames and make sure they work smoothly amongst each other. After a few years of waiting, new consumer devices/OSs can start trying to send jumbo frames, while setting the Don't Fragment flag. If some router in the path doesn't support 9000, it will signal back ICMP Fragmentation Needed, and the device can transparently resend with 1500. Then add some local caching to avoid the roundtrip for subsequent connections to the same noncompliant network/endpoint.

And since it's a big change anyway, why stop at 9000? Why not 65000? Packets don't have to fill the entire MTU after all. If 65000 is supported, you can choose to send 1500, 9000, or 65000 based on your desired latency/throughput tradeoff.

IPv6 has more pain (lack of IPv4 addresses) motivating it.

pmtu

I'm pretty sure a switch is just an L2 bridge but still uses the ethernet address management mechanism (mac addresses) not the L3 IP (or whatever) address / routing mechanisms.

Modern ethernet, on wires anyhow, is very different from the original one with a shared broadcast domain. Ironically, wireless networks are still very much like the original "you've got a piece of wire and everyone yells into it after listening for a short period of time" mechanism.

L3 switches are absolutely a thing, they allow communication between different VLANs on the same hardware without needing to go through a router.

A layer 3 switch is just a switch and a router in the same chassis.

I have layer 3 switches doing eBGP.

We used to joke that Cisco would sell you either a switch that could route or a router that switches also.

Well, the "OSI" model where there's a little disassembly and assembly line in your box, where each layer gets taken off by one robot and the payload of that inside package gets handed off to another concern -- all lies.

The chips that do this (if they've got the features, anyhow) do L2, L3, L4, L5, etc all at the same time. So it's not an L2 switch and L3 router -- it's both at the same time, looking at the whole packet at once.

But -- there is no such thing as an ethernet "router" -- it's just a bridge with a forwarding table populated (usually) by listening for MAC addresses and updating forwarding tables. "flood and learn" There are even less ethernetty things out there that use the ethernet signaling but mechanically populate the forwarding tables of switches.

But a "thing that forwards between vlans" usually means "a thing that forwards packets from one L3 subnet to another."

You could probably make some insane custom switch that has routing rules for forwarding mac address packets from one vlan to another based on a bunch of zany rules, but such a cursed object would be hated universally by all who come after you.

Ironically, wireless networks are still very much like the original "you've got a piece of wire and everyone yells into it after listening for a short period of time" mechanism.

Maybe not that ironically since Ethernet derives from ALOHANet, the wireless network connecting Hawaiian schools. Early Ethernet was basically ALOHANet piped over a wire instead of radio waves just like cable tv for a while was just broadcast TV over wires instead of radio waves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

If you want to be picky then it’s actually Ethernet frame, which is neither a datagram nor a packet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame

Also, while we are being picky, datagram is one word not two.

Yeah, what's with that? I looked into enabling jumbo frames on my home network (just for fun, I don't really need it) and it seemed horrendous as those packets could end up on the internet and probably wouldn't work.

Your local router, if correctly configured should do fragmentation. But in 95% of use cases, jumbo frames aren’t worth the hassle.

Not for IPv6. And for IPv4, I believe few routers actually handle IP fragmentation properly or at all (which is why this was removed from IPv6).

Shouldn‘t the NAT take care of the outgoing frames as it is operating on the tcp/udp level?

No. NAT does Network Address Translation. It just changes addresses in packets. The packets are still whatever size they are.

There's fragmentation, but that's separate from NAT and often broken.

This is what Path MTU Discovery is for, in principle, or what MSS clamping at your router will do.

It still kills me that this name was used for a wired, rather than a wireless setup.

I think about this every single time I read or hear the word ether. "It means an invisible transfer medium. What were they thinking!?"

That's Aether.

...So calling wifi Aethernet would be hilarious, but I think we can maybe agree that would not have been a great idea for the sake of actually being able to talk about them out loud.

Tell that to the person who said "trie" should be pronounced "tree"!

Synonyms

So it is, I didn't know that. In that case the other poster point stands, I'm guessing they used the word to indicate the magic of the network?

They were thinking that they were making a new medium to propagate a signal. Wifi is not a medium but a protocol.

The name actually makes some sense from the low level system programmer's perspective on the original Ethernet where you flung packets blindly into a single coax cable that snaked around to each workstation.

Ethernet is a protocol, it has nothing to do with the cables. WiFi operates using a slight variant of the Ethernet frame

Ethernet is a family of standards which encompass physical wiring, connectors, electrical/optical signaling standards, and logical layer standards. It absolutely has to do with the cables as well as the signaling.

It reflected a comment Thacker had made early on, that “coaxial cable is nothing but captive ether,” PARC researcher Alan Kay recalled.

From the article on the origin of the name.

The thing is that compared to Token Ring etc., Ethernet really is an "ether" where you just send your packets and hope that there is no collision. But yes.

I had my mileage in wifi/routers development and I will say you just a proverb:

"The one who knows how wireless works, uses cable." ;)

When renovating an apartment I have put a shitload of ethernet sockets everywhere, there is no place in 80m2 apartment, where you would be more than 2m away of nearest (including toilet) and as 4 of them were not enough behind TV, I have added a router there.

Wifi is just a patch if you don't have that option. On fiber, my cost to uplink is 1000/500 for 35 euros / month and I want to use it on clients too.

I have 2.4 and 5GHz turned on, but the LTE is better alternative so no one uses them. I have Mikrotics everywhere and Wave 2 is an option, but really, why bother if the ethernet cable works so much better? Not to even mention PoE (+ injectors).

Physics cant be broken by whatever the current fashion is.

So at the end, if you cant (for whatever reason) use ethernet in apartment and your mobile sucks? Go for the latest trend in wireless. This is not an issue? Use cable, nothing comes close to it.

Unfortunately, many smart TVs use 100 Mbps RJ45 ports, so WiFi is usually faster. Some TVs allow you to plug in a USB to RJ45 adapter, but most of the USB ports are only USB 2 speed, so the practical limit is 300 Mbps. Some nice ones have USB 3 ports enabling 1 Gbps through an RJ45 adapter. I wish the manufacturers put at least gigabit (if not 2.5 Gbps) RJ45 ports on TVs.

Excuseme, what kind of content do you have with more than 100mbps bitrate?

This should answer your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIef8iRZhLE

I would never plug a smart TV into any network, but regardless of that - when you have an individual endpoint like the smart TV (or the Apple TV, Android device, etc), what's the practical advantage of a 2.5Gbit port on that device? You aren't able to watch the movie/TV show any faster.. so you're constrained to the data rate of the content you're consuming at ~1 to ~1.5x speed (if you are in to that sort of thing).

Taking a 4k stream as an example, a compressed 4k stream is not going to exceed about 50Mbps, so even a 100Mbps data rate will have a 2x safety factor - and since you're wired, you're going to get full use of that data rate unlike Wi-Fi. You're not streaming uncompressed video as that would require more than 2.5Gbps, and if you want to upgrade to 8k video, you'll need a new TV anyway...

I always wire in my TV and other fixed infrastructure because, since they aren't moving, there's no advantage to using a data layer protocol that, by definition, enables mobile access. In addition, latency and jitter is always better on wire versus wireless, and keeping these devices off the wireless frees up precious airtime that the rest of my devices that do move can use instead. It's a win-win-win all around.

Taking a 4k stream as an example, a compressed 4k stream is not going to exceed about 50Mbps, so even a 100Mbps data rate will have a 2x safety factor

That’s average throughput. Peak can be much higher, especially on high bitrate content and remuxes, and especially with newer HD audio formats. Modern smart TVs have a pitifully short buffer, so you can run into problems. I did on my Sony, and switching to wifi solved it.

Faster, but probably less reliable and more inconsistent. For this reason, I wire my TVs into the network :)

where you would be more than 2m away of nearest (including toilet)

When I visit you and poop, do you have a way for me to connect my phone to your wired network?

I'm going to be honest with you: Modern WIFI is really awesome. I don't have problems with reception now that I bought a powerful router. (And "just run a wire" isn't a solution; the devices that had reception problems don't support wired ethernet.)

Non-sarcastically, yes. The USB-C hub I use to connect my laptop works perfect charging my iPhone and Android my phone while providing gigabit speeds to the android and USB 2 speeds to my iPhone!

Not in my bathroom yet though, I'm still renting.

No? You will use LTE and not bother with local connectivity. As I said, I have Wifi turned on but no one uses it.

where you would be more than 2m away of nearest (including toilet)

Why the toiled though?

I'm glad wifi exists. It's very useful. It isn't always 100% reliable, but I don't really expect it to be. I have 7 wifi routers around my property for different uses. 5 of them are for IoT devices so they can live on their own network. 2 of the wifi routers are for my family's personal devices.

But every computer I use other than my laptops are wired with cat6 or better. I even run an ethernet line all the way out to the separated garage because I have a backup computer out there.

Ethernet is great, but wifi is also pretty great, they each have their use cases.

Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet, predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse the next year, because the underlying tech couldn't possibly scale. He ended up having to literally eat his own words. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#:~:text=24%5D%...

Wow, a truly rare instance of literally eating your words!

McAfee can't hold a candle to this man.

I'm curious why the audience would not accept him eating the paper pulp in large cake form? Perhaps because he couldn't reasonably eat the whole cake in front of them (and thus his words)?

He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake

I guess that would just be eating cake, so not really any form of penance

Are printed papers or magazines toxic?

Literally not a piece of cake. :D

This is one of the rare examples when the word "literally" means what it says.

It's only disappointing that the most common standard nowadays is 1GB/s. I feel like there is a big gap and standards like 2.5GB/s or 5GB/s were somehow ignored and 10GB/s is a big jump up (also price wise)

2.5 Gbps is pretty common.

Then please find me a 2.5G 8-port switch with PoE for $100?

I didn't say it was cheap.

"B" = Byte

"b" = bit

The ubiquitous 1000BASE-T form of Ethernet transmits 1 gigabit per second (1 Gb/s).

yes, you are right

2.5Gbps seems to have become the new reasonably-affordable thing.

Intel needs to stop gouging customers for 10GBe NIC cards because they've got all the patents on the technology. Greed is _so_ ugly.

what is the primary use you would have for them? do you have a 10GB connection? if so, very lucky

I want a network with that much bandwidth but prices are astronomical.

Ethernet != Internet.

I have a few SFP+ 10 GbE connections internally that are useful for large file transfers.

Probably NAS transfers or similar.

Are you sure about those patents? Those would be expiring in a few short years anyway, 10 GbE is more than 20 years old and 10GBASE-T will be soon, too. Though 10GBASE-T just doesn't feel like a super-sensible PHY to me.

Ethernet at 50 and still not slowing down - a testament to the saying 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' It's remarkable how this old-school tech has remained relevant in an age of wireless everything. Makes me think of my tech stack, Java, monolith, sql db, etc. and it keeps serving all of my paying customers reliably, even though I'm not using the latest everything.

I think the only part that hasn't been "fixed" is that it sends frames. 10Base-T is a new topology and cable with the bus virtualized in a hub. Switched Ethernet is like a different, intelligent network larping as Ethernet to naive stations. Signaling changes as you increase data rates and media now stretches from copper to fiber and the standard has retired baseband coax above 10Mbps. It's cool that they've made it work and kept it under the same "roof" of standards, so that we don't have to make so many vendor decisions or have regret building out one vendor's network and watching another one with different cabling or signaling take off with higher speeds and lower prices.

I think the only part that hasn't been "fixed" is that it sends frames.

And this is just terminology: An Ethernet protocol data unit is a frame because it's Ethernet and an IP protocol data unit is a packet because it's IP. You could switch the terms around and nothing would actually change.

It's honestly impressive how few qualms people have with the link layer, considering all the kerfuffle that gets raised for the address layer (IPv6) and the transport layer (QUIC) and the application layer (HTTP2/3). It's nice to have at least one protocol that feels "finished" (in a good sense).

"I don't know what language will be used to program high performance computers in 50 years, but we know it will be called Fortran."

Ethernet has been redone from scratch several times. What has remained fairly constant is its frame and address layouts - an example of Kleinrock’s “narrow waist” pattern in protocol design.

I like that it talks about coaxial cable. In case anyone is curious, like I was, twisted-pair cabling is used in practice because it's much cheaper and easier to work with than coax.

Coax is cheaper, or at least was when I used it in 1995. However since coax went from machine to machine it could be more expensive if the machines were not near each other. What killed coax was a problem anywhere took down everyone, and so there were too many problems.

You're talking about a different topology, though. Twisted-pair is cheaper per metre so allows you do to star topologies which work better. Especially so if you consider equivalent cables, so a hypothetical Cat6A equivalent coax vs Cat6A UTP or whatever.

Coax per meter was cheaper than cat-3 twisted pair (Cat5 existed but nobody was using it). That is before the star topology required a lot more meters of cable for twisted pair.

Twisted pair was easier to work with than coax, and star topology avoided a lot of trouble with other topologies so it won out anyway, but it wasn't cheaper at first.

I think it's slightly more complex than that. There's a relationship between the cost and complexity of repeater technologies vs. the cost and complexity of the cabling and its necessary topology that really drove 10BaseT adoption.

I'd love to hear all the disruptive, trendy, innovative and blockchain-focused tech that'll cost me a fortune instead of relying on cheap ethernet.

^ The '/s' is implied.

I get you have beef with blockchain but it feels petty and intentionally detracting from the subject.

I get that you have a beef with an anti-blockchain heretics speaking blasphemy in the public square and are compelled by your religion to chastise them vigorously, but you aren't helping keep things on topic either.

The one thing I would really like for ethernet is a smaller connector. But one that is still able to handle self-made cables. So something like just throwing a Type-C connector at it probably isn't going to work.

USB-C would certainly work, you just need the right (wire) mounting device behind the plug. It's unlikely to be very slim though.

It would be difficult to make a port that works as USB-C with ethernet as an alternate mode. In USB-C there are separate transmit and receive differential pairs, whereas in (gigabit and later) ethernet the pairs are bidirectional.

Perhaps more true to say the Ethernet brand is going strong.

What's marketed as "Ethernet" today is vastly different from the 10base5 "yellow hose" originally called Ethernet. Entirely different wiring, signaling, collision management, topology, interconnection strategies, et cetera. But it's been demonstrably the biggest of wins to promote each next generation, however technically different from and incompatible with the previous generation, under the same brand name!

What's marketed as "Ethernet" today is vastly different from the 10base5 "yellow hose" originally called Ethernet.

The framing is compatible across all of these changes: your 802.11 NIC has an Ethernet MAC address and can talk to to a copper-connected GigE interface. Copper and fibre interfaces can also talk to each other.

Part of the reasons for the concept of OSI Layers is that you could change things at lower layers (Thicknet, Thinnet, co-ax, etc) and at higher layers (IP, AppleTalk, etc) and would continue to work.

The OSI Layer 2 is the same for all the "variants" of Ethernet. That makes it 'the same' as the original.

It’s conceptually the same thing though, right? I guess it’s like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Ethernet forever.

It feels like the only thing in this godforsaken industry that is anywhere near "it just works."

I live in a world where my 1989 Macintosh SE can talk to my 2020 Raspberry Pi. It's not all bad =)

That's nothing - I've talked to people from the 1910s. Let me know when computers get that flexible!

Really wish 5Gbps Ethernet could replace 1Gbps Ethernet. I dont know why the industry went for 2.5Gbps instead ( Ok I do, cost savings ), and WiFI 7 could already make faster real world transfer than 2.5Gbps.

Instead of further pushing mesh, we could have educated the market about putting Ethernet links, or we could have wired the house as if they were good old telephone cables.

Normal people just don't need a home network any faster than their internet connection.

The kiddo complained about low ping for PS5 - tried PoE so eventually got a electrician to run a conduit from the router in my office through the outside the wall all around the house to the outside of her room.

We have a pitched roof but there are trusses, and I am not built like a hobbit if I need to replace the cable.

Didn't Cringley say back in Accidental Empires that no matter what actual tech was involved, you could guarantee that in X years whatever we use for wired networking would be called Ethernet? :)

As much as I admire the performance of ethernet in the hardware/infrastructure sector, it is all the more impressive when software remains stable for such a long time. And there are also good examples with lifetimes of 40 to 50 years. If i were to mention just a few prominent examples that are in my head, I would be doing injustice to all the others that have not been mentioned, so I'll leave it at that.

What I would like to say, however, is that in an industry as young as IT, it is hard to overestimate when technologies have proven themselves over decades. All the "latest hot sh*t" ideas/technologies/brainwaves/products first have to stand the test of time (no, 2.5 years is not enough) to be taken seriously without any doubt.

What would we replace it with? Fiber? Quantum entanglement? Telepathy? Ethernet itself is the common-sense design you would arrive at if you needed to move bits from point A to B. Of course, things like the connector form factor could have evolved radically differently. Maybe in a parallel universe Ethernet uses something more like a unidirectional USB plug.

To paraphrase Bob Metcalf, “I don’t know what will come after Ethernet, but it will be called Ethernet.”

how did Xerox invent so many things, that's crazy

It might not have happened if it wasn't for me and avb. I need to write that up but the short story is that FDDI was the path to 100mbit, I wanted 100Mbit ethernet, the sun hardware engineers thought I wanted to signal over copper the same way that 10mbit did.

I didn't care about that, I cared about what someone in this thread said, it's amazing that you can plug a 10Mbit hub in and have it work with 100mbit, Gbit, etc.

In my mind, it was all about the packet format, if they are the same then we get cheap switches. And that is what we have today, I saw this coming around 1990.

And for you guys hating on the 1500 bytes, the SGI memory interconnect taught me that bigger is not better. When you are doing cache misses remotely, big is not good. I'm doing a shit job explaining but there is some value in smaller.

If you guys want, I'll try and write it up.

Ah brings back memories of Bob Metcalfe. Out of college I worked for him at 3Com. We were making about three million NIC's a month, and it was like a cash machine. One of my first projects to support was trying to develop WIFI. We failed at that. Then Intel integrated the NIC capability into their chipsets. Cisco made better switches and routers. We went from a high flying silicon valley company to nothing.

If only the USB consortium learned a lesson or two from Ethernet.....

If you're interested in the early history of Ethernet, the Bob Metcalfe oral history from the Computer History Museum is a great read:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...

I have recently been having to use ethernet plugged directly into the wall because despite reasonable speed test results, I see a ton of packet loss during video calls when going through my router (either wired or wireless)... So it's definitely going strong in this household -.-

Xerox PARC didn’t move fast and break things. They thought hard and delivered rock solid inventions. Such a huge difference between script kiddies turning into billionaires, and actual engineers.

A lot of this is because it of how much it adapted. Early, shared-medium ethernet like 10BASE2 wasn't viable. It survived because it switched to a star topology that enabled switching, and higher-level protocols like IP enabled routing.

One thing that isn't going strong is the initially standardized framing for Ethernet, ie most traffic uses Ethernet II and not 802.2 LLC/SNAP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame#Types

I really loved the "no bullshit" approach that Ethernet authors took, as described in the "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".

Never underestimate the power of cheap, "good enough" and backward compatibility.

https://assets.fixr.com/cost_guides/hardwired-computer-netwo...

Something that amazes me with Ethernet is how you can mix and match various cables and speeds and things do still work. Just for fun semi-recently I hooked a 10 MBit/s only hub (not even a switch, a hub) to a 10/100 MBit/s switch, to a Gigabit switch (that'd also work at 100 Mbp/s) and everything would just work...

I totally disagree with the idea that ethernet is "going strong".

On the high end, it is a fragmentation mess of high speed (100Gbit+) technologies and mac/phy's.

There is no midrange at this point.

And the low end is price discriminated such that the Nbase spec couldn't even mandate all of 1/2.5/5/10 as required as part of the spec with the speeds being automatically selected based on cable quality.

And its largely dead because its to expensive and Wifi is more convenient.

I'm surprised IEEE ignored Ethernet's child: Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi uses the CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detect) that was developed for Ethernet. I view Wi-Fi as wireless Ethernet.

Recent friendly wholesome interview with Metcalf , where Metcalf says he is getting into the weeds of geothermal energy production.

He also says the reason Ethernet keeps getting better is because they keep rebranding new, novel signalling and encoding schemes as Certified Ethernet. It sounded like he had a grin on his face when he said it.

https://hanselminutes.com/900/from-ethernet-to-geothermal-en...

I was an ArcNet fan.

I have a true story, narrated in The Big Bucks where I briefly (2 or 3 seconds) took down the entire company (3Com), when it was running on ThinNet, which was the smaller coax used before twisted pair. The coax was in the baseboard, not in the air space overhead.

No one noticed.