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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

#311
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 4k blu ray rips range between 60 and 100 GB. These would not even be close watchable over 20mb/s. Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.

Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video. I don't transfer 60gb blurays daily so it doesn't matter to me.

> Streaming 20mb/s is more than sufficient for video.

On a 120" display?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#312
post #67
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...

I never had good luck with that. Even on the same circuit, as instructed. The performance and reliability is really quite bad.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#313
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 agree with this. I finally bit the bullet and bought a bunch of MoCA adapters for my house. In practice I don't get the full 2.5 gigabit speed, but I do get about 1.7. Good 'nuf for my needs, for sure.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I be surprised that the reactions posted here range from "I stretched a cable across the ceiling like two tin cans and a string" to "I will fly a drone into my attic". Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."

You should not be surprised. A lot of us are DIYers, and see no need to pay someone to do something we can do ourselves. Running low-voltage ethernet through an attic or crawlspace is within the skills of anyone with functioning limbs. There is zero reason to pay someone to do it. I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have differen…

Well... I retrofitted a whole UK house with Cat6A, about 20 runs, longest run about 25m. The walls were dot and dab construction so quite a bit harder than drywall, but a lot easier than solid. I had my electrician brother to help for a weekend to do the cable runs. It was an entire two solid days of work just to do the runs, and this is with someone with the right tools and experience plus me having already planned it carefully. It would have taken me a week to do it alone. After that it was a full week of evenings terminating everything at both ends and another couple of weekends filling a repairing the walls. Definitely not for the faint hearted!

Worth it, though, and would do it again.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for plasterboard and timber construction. My house is mostly brick with the coax chased into the wall.

Ah, yeah my advice is definitely for sheet rock/dry wall based dwellings. I think you could manage to replace the coax run through brick with a single cat run though. I would buy and generously use wire pulling lubricant though.

The cables don't go through the brick; they're under plaster. No way are you removing that without destroying the plaster.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#317
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work with both? Is there a defined band plan standard that cable operators know to avoid? Do you need to install a notch filter on the line coming into the house?

It's more the other way around. There's a defined band plan, because historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio, so it inherited the broadcast TV band plan. Then digital TV inherited the analogue cable band plan and added higher-frequency channels. To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for…

> historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio

Well, to be pedantic, that is still how it works. And it's how cable Internet works. And it's also how a lot of techniques over twisted pair work, too.

The conductor is used as a waveguide and a very-much-analogue signal encoding a digital signal is what is sent over the line. DOCSIS 3 uses up to QAM-4096, which can encode 12 bits in a single symbol on the line, by using multiple steps of amplitude shift and phase shift, to encode bits. Quite similar to how FM radio works, just digital steps, rather than an analogue continuum between 0 and 100 amplitude and 0 and 100 phase, at the decoder.

This has even started showing up for links within a single computer, now. The latest revision of PCIe uses modulated RF (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) rather than simple binary voltage levels.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#318
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s. I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential. Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is th…

I thought gigabit required all four pairs, or am I missing part of what you said?

They said exactly that.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#319
I have a true story, narrated in The Big Bucks where I briefly (2 or 3 seconds) took down the entire company (3Com), when it was running on ThinNet, which was the smaller coax used before twisted pair. The coax was in the baseboard, not in the air space overhead.

No one noticed.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#320
post #80
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…

>Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole

I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to.

I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms.

Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.

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