Live data from Hacker News

Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

spectrum.ieee.org

11–20 of 407 posts

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#11
post #5
post #2

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#12
post #2

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.

> 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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#14
post #2

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#16
post #10

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#17

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#18
post #5
post #2

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.

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??).

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).

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#19

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.

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#20
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Deterministicly?
Post reply on HN