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Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

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Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#32
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 tha…

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#33
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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#34

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#35
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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#37
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.

> 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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#38

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#40
post #33

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 r…

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!
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