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Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

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81–90 of 407 posts

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#81

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.

Ill defined, but yes, definitely a thing.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#83
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 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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#84

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#85

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#86
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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#87
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…

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'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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#88
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#89
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#90
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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