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 ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.
So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.
> 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 before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
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 use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)
Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.
Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.
In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.
(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)
> 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 that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e
With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).
If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.
That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:
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."
On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.
My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.
SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.
It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.
Lay some sheets of plywood down in the attic. Then you'll be able to move around easily. Up there you have direct access to the walls of your rooms so you can drill a hole and drop ethernet cable down behind the wall.
Crawlspace is better. You just make your access and then you can drill down with a flexible bit. Pass the cable down, some twine on the other side, then you only have one quick crawl to pull the cable and maybe put up some cable staples to keep it out of the way. In the attic you have to fish the cable all the way down, makes it harder.
If you're ever in the situation where you have your walls open and you want to install data cables, do yourself a favor and go nuts with some Smurf tubes. (ENT boxes and tubes.)
Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.
Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.
>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.
Just bite the bullet and crawl under the house or in the attic. I have done it many times it's not the end of the world.
The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.
I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.
Are the two rooms on the same breaker/fuse (by some chance)? Another solution is ethernet-over-powerline where the data rides on your AC powerlines and is decoded at each end by an adapter. Supposedly they can get to the mid-hundreds of mbps, but only if they're on the same breaker. I used one in a rube-goldberg (Neighbor's WiFi)->(My Raspberry Pi, NAT Router)->(Ethernet-over-powerline)->(My WiFi Router) about 8 years ago, but the EoP was only good for a couple mbps because the signal had to go through the breaker. It was fine for poor-man's internet though.
One day of dirty, sweaty work in the crawlspace, compared to possibly years of not staring at ugly cables nailed to the walls...
But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)
I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.
Maybe you can have a friend stick his head into the attic at the destination, while you stick your head up at the origin, then you just tie the cable end to a basketball and throw it through the attic for your friend to catch.
the amount of effort that your will to put into this to not enter your attic is absolutely astounding. by the time you finished formulating even a basic plane to fly a drone to run a cable and displace all of your blown in insulation you could have simply run the cable.
it's not that hard to only step on the joists in the attic, if it was built to code. if you don't want to crawl in the crawlspace, pay someone else to do it for you.
Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.
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.
The problem I’ve found with moca is that every time I’ve tried it (3x now), there’s always something going on behind the walls that ends up completely ruining it. Someone put filters or splitters in, or something to that extent, and it turns out there’s insane packet loss or sub MB speed or it just doesn’t work for some reason.
I've been happily using the laughably cheap Direct-TV Deca adapters for years now to get 100Mbps ethernet to my detached garage (where of course the previous owners needed coax TV :P), for my smart garage door, wyze cam, and streaming music while mowing. Works like a charm for $20!
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).
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.
I thought ethernet was more of the wire protocol than the cable. I could have sworn that the "ethernet" cables when I first started working were coax, and the article talks about the first ethernet being on coax. Seems like ethernet in modern usage is synonymous with CAT5.
The first Ethernet was on coax yes. It was also a shared physical bus so the 10 megabit was often shared among a room full of computers. Despite this it felt speedy!!
But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.
Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.
You remember correctly. This was the most common form of Ethernet cable when I was first starting out roughly 3,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2
I do this too and it is terrific, literally indistinguishable from ethernet. What’s amazing is you can run cable and MoCa on the same wire at the same time!
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?
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.
MoCa is just a standard to run the Ethernet network over Coax cables
Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.
You can get ethernet to coax baluns and get 100Mbps and PoE. They're extremely reliable, passive (so little to break) and cheap. There might be gig versions now. They're used to retrofit older surveillance camera wiring plants to ethernet without ripping out all the cables, but don't really care what type of ethernet device is on each end.
If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.
> 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
Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables?
If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.
In American homes, cables are typically stapled to the wood frame construction, not run in conduit. You have to cut open the finished wall surface to change them.
OP could almost be describing my house. New construction, coax to every room, no ethernet. And the builder specifically warned me not to try to use the existing coax to pull a new drop because it's all filled with fireproof foam/insulation stuff.
If you're willing to put the work in you can use the coax drops and runs as pulling line for cat, new coax (if you want to keep it) and real pulling line (to leave tied at the top and bottom of each drop if you ever need to run something else). Same idea if you have POTS copper run throughout. Most of the time even the ancient drops and runs have enough space cut out for a number of cables since doing runs is generally easier when the holes are larger.
One issue with that is that electricians can sometimes be brutal on Cat5 used as a phone line. I’ve had drops that were basically unusable as ethernet because some of the pairs were damaged, even though the phone pair in use was fine.
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.
True but if you don’t care about another power brick on both ends… it’s a quick, dirty, fast and effective way to bring wired Ethernet to every room with a cable jack.
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.
Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.
So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.
I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.
I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point
the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck.
There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.
I was able to hit >2gbps in speed tests using goCoax MoCA adapters when I used them, but it isn't "full duplex", so you won't see 2.5 down and up at the same time, for example.
Coax runs in residential houses tend not to go through conduits, and often squeeze through holes in joists just barely big enough for the cable. Not to mention that, in my experience, they also tend to involve splitters in the absolute most random of locations.
Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.
Laziness. I’d much rather spend $100 on gizmos than spend hours on a home improvement project. And these projects are never as simple as they at first promise to be.
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.
I should've done that instead of try and replace the coax with network cables; they all run through cable guides (yellow tubes), but they're probably bent, nicked and collapsed after installation so you can't just replace the cables through it.
Cool! I have the same issue with unused coax cables between every room, and was planning on replacing them with ethernet cables. In my case it's feasible without breaking down any walls. Does this work even with splitters?
Yes, it works with splitters. Just be careful because you'll lose signal strength on each split, your splitter should have a number on it for how much is lost.
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.
I have 10Gbps between my home server and desktop. Is it overkill? Sure, but I do use my home server for networked storage in Lightroom etc so having it be even slightly faster is nice.
I actually couldn’t get ethernet at fast enough speeds compared to wifi over the last couple years
with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable
what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?
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%...
I'm curious why the audience would not accept him eating the paper pulp in large cake form? Perhaps because he couldn't reasonably eat the whole cake in front of them (and thus his words)?
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 you don't have that option. On fiber, my cost to uplink is 1000/500 for 35 euros / month and I want to use it on clients too.
I have 2.4 and 5GHz turned on, but the LTE is better alternative so no one uses them. I have Mikrotics everywhere and Wave 2 is an option, but really, why bother if the ethernet cable works so much better? Not to even mention PoE (+ injectors).
Physics cant be broken by whatever the current fashion is.
So at the end, if you cant (for whatever reason) use ethernet in apartment and your mobile sucks? Go for the latest trend in wireless. This is not an issue? Use cable, nothing comes close to it.
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.
The built in port has DMA. USB to Ethernet adapters don’t and have to go through the CPU first. You’re stressing the CPU for bandwidth you aren’t actually using.
I'm glad wifi exists. It's very useful. It isn't always 100% reliable, but I don't really expect it to be. I have 7 wifi routers around my property for different uses. 5 of them are for IoT devices so they can live on their own network. 2 of the wifi routers are for my family's personal devices.
But every computer I use other than my laptops are wired with cat6 or better. I even run an ethernet line all the way out to the separated garage because I have a backup computer out there.
Ethernet is great, but wifi is also pretty great, they each have their use cases.
> where you would be more than 2m away of nearest (including toilet)
When I visit you and poop, do you have a way for me to connect my phone to your wired network?
I'm going to be honest with you: Modern WIFI is really awesome. I don't have problems with reception now that I bought a powerful router. (And "just run a wire" isn't a solution; the devices that had reception problems don't support wired ethernet.)
Non-sarcastically, yes. The USB-C hub I use to connect my laptop works perfect charging my iPhone and Android my phone while providing gigabit speeds to the android and USB 2 speeds to my iPhone!
> "The one who knows how wireless works, uses cable." ;)
Scientifically, of course you are 100% correct. But does it really matter if I can install a 3 satellite mesh and get 200 Mbps over WiFi even at the biggest “dead zone” in my home?
Never seen used in the practice though. One of problems AFAIK - most switch default to dropping jumbo frames. You can enable but if you'll left one unconfigured for some reason you will get hard to diagnose problem. The same with end hosts - they (inside a given L2 domain) should have the same MTU and if you'll left a box with the default MTU you got a problem.
To make jumbo frames easier to use switches should forward them by default and hosts should accept frames large than MTA (but send MTU sized ones).
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.
Just to be picky the correct term is data gram, which describes layer 2 segmentation. Packets describe segmentation between switches, which is layer 3.
If you want to be picky, you need to get it right first. The actual term is frame. datagram is generally used to refer to layer 4 operation, and the term is not used anywhere in IEEE 802.3.
Also the GP is correct to say we fossilized on 1500 byte packets, since the layer 3 MTU is the relevant thing when talking about fossilization in the internet at large. This number was driven by 802.3's standard frame size being 1514 bytes, but that one is not even fossilized as much. It takes work, but you can control your own network and roll out jumbo frames. You can't roll out larger packets on the internet.
I'm pretty sure a switch is just an L2 bridge but still uses the ethernet address management mechanism (mac addresses) not the L3 IP (or whatever) address / routing mechanisms.
Modern ethernet, on wires anyhow, is very different from the original one with a shared broadcast domain. Ironically, wireless networks are still very much like the original "you've got a piece of wire and everyone yells into it after listening for a short period of time" mechanism.
Yeah, what's with that? I looked into enabling jumbo frames on my home network (just for fun, I don't really need it) and it seemed horrendous as those packets could end up on the internet and probably wouldn't work.
It might not have happened if it wasn't for me and avb. I need to write that up but the short story is that FDDI was the path to 100mbit, I wanted 100Mbit ethernet, the sun hardware engineers thought I wanted to signal over copper the same way that 10mbit did.
I didn't care about that, I cared about what someone in this thread said, it's amazing that you can plug a 10Mbit hub in and have it work with 100mbit, Gbit, etc.
In my mind, it was all about the packet format, if they are the same then we get cheap switches. And that is what we have today, I saw this coming around 1990.
And for you guys hating on the 1500 bytes, the SGI memory interconnect taught me that bigger is not better. When you are doing cache misses remotely, big is not good. I'm doing a shit job explaining but there is some value in smaller.
Something that amazes me with Ethernet is how you can mix and match various cables and speeds and things do still work. Just for fun semi-recently I hooked a 10 MBit/s only hub (not even a switch, a hub) to a 10/100 MBit/s switch, to a Gigabit switch (that'd also work at 100 Mbp/s) and everything would just work...
I remember wiring up cat5 gigabit about 20 years ago in an industrial workplace. My house of that age also has cat5 everywhere and it’s aged very well. 1gig is still the standard for wired with few but expensive 2.5g and very expensive 10g home and small business options.
I live in a house nearing 20 years old, and was incredibly pleased when I moved in and realized that all the phone jacks in this house were backed by CAT5, and if I was willing to invest the time (which I am), I could have at least one Ethernet jack in each room, and a pair channeled up to the attic as well. My only regret was they stripped way more than needed and didn't leave a lot of wire available, but enough that I could terminate and add a keystone jack that will last past my needs. Or so I thought until I learned that my ISP offers 2.5GBps to the house.
Neural compression is an emerging field and already shows some striking compression abilities, especially if the compressor/decompressor includes a large model which amounts to something like a huge pre-existing dictionary on both sides.
Stable Diffusion XL is only about 8 gigabytes and can render a shocking array of different images from very short prompts with very high fidelity.
My personal experience with VR is 1gbps is plenty, the issues with VR more boil down to things like latency (for instance, streaming a quest wirelessly with VR desktop basically requires Ethernet, with regular wifi the experience is just awful).
Only so much data the human brain can pay attention too. And for big data you are running in data centres anyway while you are sending control data back and forth from home.
For me it's just 2€ more expensive than the standard 1g plan. It's really unfortunate to see how bad internet prices are, especially in the US and other countries with ISP monopolies. The only reason my internet is so relatively cheap is because early on there was a lot of competition in my country.
If you get 10 GB, the question is, then what? I have bidirectional 1 GB plugged into a $200 EdgeSwitch, which then feeds Cat 6 throughout the home ($100/500 feet). This then filters down to $20-30 unmanaged 1 GB switches elsewhere. The whole thing is under $500.
If I wanted to go up to 10 GB I don't just need to change to a $2K~ EdgeSwitch, I also need to run fiber/6E to be able to deliver more than 2.5 GB to any endpoint, then invest in expensive switching infrastructure elsewhere in the home to turn the incoming 10 GB signal into something more devices can accept (e.g. 1 GB or 2.5 GB).
Safe estimate, is to go from 1 GB bidirectional to 10 GB bidirectional, it would be $5K in equipment and pulling new cable.
For $100/month I can do 10 GB, but I won't because of the equipment cost/diminishing returns rather than the ISP cost difference. If network equipment comes a LONG way, and I can do it for under $1K, I'd consider it.
It's not so gloomy, 2.5G ports are becoming standard on consumer desktop chipsets, and switches are not that expensive. For 10G, you can get copper cables easily, but SPFE is more common, I guess once chipsets get faster, do not consume as much/run as hot, copper might return there as well.
A lot of people already get more than that from their ISP. I had at least 2.5g on every consumer product from the past 5 years. Small businesses use at least SFP on the floor level. Yada yada yada. Point is it's probably a regional thing.
2.5G is rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity, and the advantage of higher total bandwidth is to support multiple people doing high bandwidth tasks.
In this scenario a 2.5G (or 10G) router is all that's really required to get the benefit, while using the existing 20 year old wiring.
I just got 5gbps symmetrical FTTH installed. I'm in Michigan, so hardly some connectivity utopia. I'm going through a round of upgrading my network devices to be able to actually handle it.
My home was redone at some point in the late 1990s and I also lucked out in this regard with Cat 5 used for telephony, but easily converted to proper Ethernet.
I ended up purchasing a “lifetime” spool of Cat 6 to fill in some blanks, but it’s the optimal networking setup for me.
Most cat5e structured cabling is completely fine for home-length runs at 2.5 or 10 gigabit/s - I am using existing cables for the 10G run from my fiber drop to my router, and for the 2.5G runs from my router to my wireless access points.
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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 ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.
So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.
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 before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?
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 use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)
Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.
Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.
In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.
(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)
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 that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e
With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).
If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.
That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:
https://superuser.com/a/1281656
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."
So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable.
Drones is overthinking it.
On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.
My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.
SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.
It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.
Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.
Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.
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.
The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.
I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.
But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)
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I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...
TLDR: It's still bad.
https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...
But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.
Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.
Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.
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.
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Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.
If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.
Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables?
If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.
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.
- 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.
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.
Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.
So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.
I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.
I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.
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
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
Fiber ONT/Modem -> Access Point -> MoCA adapter 1 -> Coax Splitter
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 2 -> Switch -> bunch of devices
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point
the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck.
There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.
Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.
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https://www.gocoax.com
with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable
what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?
I guess that would just be eating cake, so not really any form of penance
"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 you don't have that option. On fiber, my cost to uplink is 1000/500 for 35 euros / month and I want to use it on clients too.
I have 2.4 and 5GHz turned on, but the LTE is better alternative so no one uses them. I have Mikrotics everywhere and Wave 2 is an option, but really, why bother if the ethernet cable works so much better? Not to even mention PoE (+ injectors).
Physics cant be broken by whatever the current fashion is.
So at the end, if you cant (for whatever reason) use ethernet in apartment and your mobile sucks? Go for the latest trend in wireless. This is not an issue? Use cable, nothing comes close to it.
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.
But every computer I use other than my laptops are wired with cat6 or better. I even run an ethernet line all the way out to the separated garage because I have a backup computer out there.
Ethernet is great, but wifi is also pretty great, they each have their use cases.
When I visit you and poop, do you have a way for me to connect my phone to your wired network?
I'm going to be honest with you: Modern WIFI is really awesome. I don't have problems with reception now that I bought a powerful router. (And "just run a wire" isn't a solution; the devices that had reception problems don't support wired ethernet.)
Not in my bathroom yet though, I'm still renting.
Scientifically, of course you are 100% correct. But does it really matter if I can install a 3 satellite mesh and get 200 Mbps over WiFi even at the biggest “dead zone” in my home?
Why the toiled though?
Yeah, we can compensate for that with hardware, but it's ridiculous to do 100G or even 10G in 1500 byte chunks.
To make jumbo frames easier to use switches should forward them by default and hosts should accept frames large than MTA (but send MTU sized ones).
Also the GP is correct to say we fossilized on 1500 byte packets, since the layer 3 MTU is the relevant thing when talking about fossilization in the internet at large. This number was driven by 802.3's standard frame size being 1514 bytes, but that one is not even fossilized as much. It takes work, but you can control your own network and roll out jumbo frames. You can't roll out larger packets on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame
Also, while we are being picky, datagram is one word not two.
Modern ethernet, on wires anyhow, is very different from the original one with a shared broadcast domain. Ironically, wireless networks are still very much like the original "you've got a piece of wire and everyone yells into it after listening for a short period of time" mechanism.
I didn't care about that, I cared about what someone in this thread said, it's amazing that you can plug a 10Mbit hub in and have it work with 100mbit, Gbit, etc.
In my mind, it was all about the packet format, if they are the same then we get cheap switches. And that is what we have today, I saw this coming around 1990.
And for you guys hating on the 1500 bytes, the SGI memory interconnect taught me that bigger is not better. When you are doing cache misses remotely, big is not good. I'm doing a shit job explaining but there is some value in smaller.
If you guys want, I'll try and write it up.
Stable Diffusion XL is only about 8 gigabytes and can render a shocking array of different images from very short prompts with very high fidelity.
1gbps might be enough for more than we think.
For me it's just 2€ more expensive than the standard 1g plan. It's really unfortunate to see how bad internet prices are, especially in the US and other countries with ISP monopolies. The only reason my internet is so relatively cheap is because early on there was a lot of competition in my country.
If you get 10 GB, the question is, then what? I have bidirectional 1 GB plugged into a $200 EdgeSwitch, which then feeds Cat 6 throughout the home ($100/500 feet). This then filters down to $20-30 unmanaged 1 GB switches elsewhere. The whole thing is under $500.
If I wanted to go up to 10 GB I don't just need to change to a $2K~ EdgeSwitch, I also need to run fiber/6E to be able to deliver more than 2.5 GB to any endpoint, then invest in expensive switching infrastructure elsewhere in the home to turn the incoming 10 GB signal into something more devices can accept (e.g. 1 GB or 2.5 GB).
Safe estimate, is to go from 1 GB bidirectional to 10 GB bidirectional, it would be $5K in equipment and pulling new cable.
For $100/month I can do 10 GB, but I won't because of the equipment cost/diminishing returns rather than the ISP cost difference. If network equipment comes a LONG way, and I can do it for under $1K, I'd consider it.
A lot of people already get more than that from their ISP. I had at least 2.5g on every consumer product from the past 5 years. Small businesses use at least SFP on the floor level. Yada yada yada. Point is it's probably a regional thing.
2.5G is rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity, and the advantage of higher total bandwidth is to support multiple people doing high bandwidth tasks.
In this scenario a 2.5G (or 10G) router is all that's really required to get the benefit, while using the existing 20 year old wiring.
I ended up purchasing a “lifetime” spool of Cat 6 to fill in some blanks, but it’s the optimal networking setup for me.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...