Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 407 posts

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#231

Post by xxpor »

mmcnl wrote: post #197
jmathai wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#232

Post by Spivak »

jmathai wrote: 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…

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#233

Post by uberduper »

ihattendorf wrote: post #149
ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

pmtu

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#234

Post by globular-toast »

bluGill wrote: post #225
globular-toast wrote: post #3

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#235

Post by signatureMove »

tzs wrote: post #80
jmathai wrote: 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…

> 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 befor…

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#236

Post by floxy »

good8675309 wrote: post #121

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#237

Post by bpye »

graphe wrote: post #229
rowanG077 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#238

Post by rowanG077 »

graphe wrote: post #229
rowanG077 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#239

Post by bpye »

frankjr wrote: post #67
jmathai wrote: 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…

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...

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#240

Post by chadcatlett »

myself248 wrote: post #184
tzs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 befor…

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…

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.

Post reply on HN