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Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

spectrum.ieee.org

301–310 of 407 posts

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#301

Perhaps more true to say the Ethernet brand is going strong. What's marketed as "Ethernet" today is vastly different from the 10base5 "yellow hose" originally called Ethernet. Entirely different wiring, signaling, collision management, topology, interconnection strategies, et cetera . But it's been demonstrably the biggest of wins to promote each next generation, however technically different from and incompatible wi…

It’s conceptually the same thing though, right? I guess it’s like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s average throughput. Peak can be much higher, especially on high bitrate content and remuxes, and especially with newer HD audio formats. Modern smart TVs have a pitifully short buffer, so you can run into problems. I did on my Sony, and switching to wifi solved it.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#303

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".

My internet connection has 15Mb/s down Thank you very much. So while I'm not your parent I can totally see how that 20 is totally fine. So if you are in a corner of the house you can't get Wifi to that's on par why not use that cable if it exists? Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No. Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basemen…

> No patience.

Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That shouldn't be happening, and is a massive security/privacy issue. Your power line devices should be configured to use an encryption key unique to them.

How does interference caused by the radio waves have anything to do with using encryption?

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#305
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.

20mb/s is not sufficient for 4k video unless it has been bitcrushed to death. And even then, you are assuming a given network only has a single user.

Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4k on a lot of streaming services is compressed to hell and back to work with people on slower internet connections. A 4K UltraHD Bluray (that's 100GB for one movie) has a maximum bitrate of "just" 144Mbps. If you're suggesting online streaming services have some swathe of content that's (checks notes) in excess of 7x the bitrate used for 4K Bluray discs, I'd love to hear about it. > video game streaming services a…

> A 4K UltraHD Bluray (that's 100GB for one movie) has a maximum bitrate of "just" 144Mbps. If you're suggesting online streaming services have some swathe of content that's (checks notes) in excess of 7x the bitrate used for 4K Bluray discs, I'd love to hear about it. We are still a long way off the parity with what our eyes can process so there's plenty of room for bitrates to grow. Plus the average internet connec…

> Plus the average internet connection isn't just streaming a video. It's kids watching online videos while adults are video conferencing and music is being streamed in the background. Probably with games being downloaded and software getting updated too.

That's exactly the scenario I gave where 2.5G WAN would be useful, but a 1G LAN to each machine is likely enough for most tasks, for most people - multiple users simultaneous use.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#307
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 just replaced the coax cables. It's actually really easy to rewire: attach old and new cable together, and pull.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4k on a lot of streaming services is compressed to hell and back to work with people on slower internet connections. A 4K UltraHD Bluray (that's 100GB for one movie) has a maximum bitrate of "just" 144Mbps. If you're suggesting online streaming services have some swathe of content that's (checks notes) in excess of 7x the bitrate used for 4K Bluray discs, I'd love to hear about it. > video game streaming services a…

AFAIK we're still very far below the dynamic range human eyes are capable of seeing, so there's plenty of room to need to up the bit depth (and rate) for video if displays can improve. Our color gamuts also do not cover human vision.

So I had to use a calculator to help me here, and I used https://toolstud.io/video/bitrate.php, but apparently the raw bitrate for 4K@25fps/24bit is 4.98Gbps, which then obviously gets compressed by various codecs.

Taking the above 4K@25fps/24bit and pumping it up to 60fps and 36bit colour (i.e. 12 bits per channel, or 68 billion colours, 4096x as many colours as 24bit, and 64x as many colours as 30bit) the resulting raw video bitrate is 17.92Gbps... so it's an increase of about 3.6x.

It seems quite unlikely that we'll have every other aspect of 36bit/60fps video sorted out, but somehow the codecs available have worse performance than is already available today.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#309
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…

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."

Careful with electricians and data cabling. Here's why: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/tzh00l/dais...

A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.

Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.

Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years

#310
post #307
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 just replaced the coax cables. It's actually really easy to rewire: attach old and new cable together, and pull.

That only works when the coax was a retrofit itself, and the house is small. If it was installed when the house was built, it'll be stapled in various places.
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