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

281–290 of 407 posts

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#281

Post by ipython »

8zah6q7 wrote: post #263
stiray wrote: post #247

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 y…

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.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#282

Post by mmcnl »

Someone1234 wrote: post #271
mmcnl wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#283

Post by rini17 »

8zah6q7 wrote: post #263
stiray wrote: post #247

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 y…

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?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#284

Post by quickthrower2 »

breadwinner wrote: post #103

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%...

Are printed papers or magazines toxic?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#285

Post by eikenberry »

charlie0 wrote: post #279
spookthesunset wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#286

Post by bluGill »

globular-toast wrote: post #234
bluGill wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#287

Post by quickthrower2 »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #108
eqvinox wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#288

Post by quickthrower2 »

ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #245
ihattendorf wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#289

Post by mmcnl »

xxpor wrote: post #231
mmcnl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#290

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN