5 ms·

The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in

The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls. I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience

ericd 1y ago
Eh flat Ethernet cables can easily be snaked all over with adhesive clips, and if you color match cable/clips/walls, it doesn’t look bad.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Visiting museum ships also showed me you can sometimes route cables over living and working spaces.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  This is what I did. Takes minimal effort and then you never have to worry about it again.
- dpark 1y ago
  Cables routed on visible walls look absolutely terrible. I wish they didn’t, but they do. Yes, it’s better if your cable and clips and wall all match, but it still looks bad.
  - Citizen8396 1y ago
    when done right, raceway along (or even behind the) baseboards works nicely
  - ericd 1y ago
    Why? Run them along baseboards in the corners, you'll never notice them (or at least we didn't at our last house, white on white).
  - jandrese 1y ago
    What if you ran the cable on the top of the wall and covered it with crown molding?
wlesieutre 1y ago
MoCA adapters are an option if you’re already wired for coax
- ellisv 1y ago
  MoCA is how I get Ethernet upstairs. Works great.
eikenberry 1y ago
Ethernet cables can be as long as 100meters, long enough to snake around most any apartment. Add on a few rugs to cover over where they'd be tripping hazards and you're all set.
- passivegains 1y ago
  I got good results from running cables around the entire perimeter of a room to avoid crossing doorways. Doesn't work so well on bathrooms though.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    I’m pretty tech-addicted, but I’ve never felt the need for a hard-wired drop in the bathroom.
    - xethos 1y ago
      I assumed to get from one side of a doorframe to the other, instead of crossing underneath the door, go around the perimeter of the room the door is for. Which seems like a lot to remove a trip hazard, but I suspect the Wife Approval Factor plays a role
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    Oh, bathrooms are [sometimes] easy. In an apartment I once had, I ran some cat5-ish cable through the back wall of one closet and into another. In between those closets was a bathroom, with a bathtub. I fished the cable through the void of the bathtub's internals. Spanning a space like this is not too hard to do with a tape measure, some cheap fiberglass rods, a metal coat hanger, and an apt helper. Or these days, a person can replace the helper by plugging a $20 endoscope camera into their pocket supercomputer. They usually come with a hook that can be attached, or different hooks can be fashioned and taped on. It takes patience, but it can go pretty quickly. In my experience, most of the time is spent just trying to wrap one's brain around working in 3 dimensions while seeing through a 2-dimensional endoscope camera that doesn't know which way is up, which is a bit of a mindfuck at first. Anyway, just use the camera to grab the rod or the ball of string pushed in with the rod or whatever. Worst-case: If a single tiny thread can make it from A to B, then that thread can pull in a somewhat-larger string, and that string can finally pull in a cable. (Situations vary, but I never heard a word about these little holes in the closets that I left behind when I moved out, just as I also didn't hear anything about any of the other little holes I'd left from things like hanging up artwork or office garb.)
GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago
Mu-MIMO would help. The real problem is that energy between a unit and an AP is not in a pencil-thin RF laser-beam --- it is spread out. Other nodes hear that energy, and back off. If we had better control of point-to-point links, then you could have plenty of bandwidth. It's not as if the photon field cannot hold them all. When we broadcast in all directions, we waste energy, and we cause unnecessary interference to other receivers.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  it was quite a while back but I read some press release about a manufacturer that would make an access point that had mechanically steered directional antennas. Unfortunately I don't think it ever made it to market.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    That can help in one direction, but networks are bi-directional. No matter how fancy and directive the antenna arrangement may be at the access point end, the other devices that use this access point will be using whatever they have for antennas. The access point may be able to produce and/or receive one or many signals with arbitrarily-aimed, laser-like precision, but the client devices will still tend to radiate mostly-omnidirectionally -- to the access point, to eachother, and to the rest of the world around them. The client devices will still hear eachother just fine and will back off when another one nearby is transmitting. The access point cannot help with this, no matter how fanciful it may be. (Waiting for a clear-enough channel before transmitting is part of the 802.11 specification. That's the Carrier Sense part of CSMA/CA.)
jdeibele 1y ago
We downsized from a house built in 1914 with phone jacks everywhere to a house built in 2007 with coax and ethernet ports in every room, some rooms with two. At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls. I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax. My son has ethernet in his dorm with an ethernet switch so he can connect his video game consoles and TV. I think that's pretty common.
- runjake 1y ago
  > I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax. Speaking from a US standpoint, it still not common in new construction for ethernet to be deployed in a house. I'm not sure why. It seems like a no-brainer. Coax is still usually reserved to a couple jacks -- usually in the living room and master bedrooms.
  - sidewndr46 1y ago
    Adding cat5e or cat6 to each room is just a cost. Builders generally compete on cost.
    - Retric 1y ago
      It’s a cost that doesn’t show up on listings. There’s a surprising number of ways new US construction sucks that just comes down to how it can be advertised.
      - sidewndr46 1y ago
        Unless I'm mistaken there are no requirements for what has to appear at all in real estate listings. Maybe some local regulations exist. I know where I exist the seller is required to provide an "energy audit", but I'm not sure there is any mechanism to enforce that.
ipython 1y ago
Well, unless you’re multihomed, you’ll always only have one cable coming in. It’s what you do with that cable that matters :) Even the telco provided router/ap combo units usually have a built in switch, so you don’t even need another device in most cases.
stacktraceyo 1y ago
I wish I could have multiple modems coming into the house using the same provided cable. Why’s that not possible? When I was younger I went and bought a new modem so I could play halo on my Xbox in another room than where my parents had the original modem. Found out then I’d need to pay for each modem.
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  If you're not sure what a router is, you should probably look that up, because it sounds like you want another router.
  - jgeralnik 1y ago
    It actually sounds like they just want a switch
  - stacktraceyo 1y ago
    I know what a router is lol. I just was wondering what are the available options to use all the coax connections already in the house so I could connect everything via Ethernet , if you wanted to avoid running Ethernet through the walls or don’t want Ethernet cables visible When I was younger and before WiFi was a thing I naively thought I’d just plug in a new modem.
    - arcanemachiner 1y ago
      Makes sense when you put it that way.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  If you have coax, look into MoCA. I have one attic device on a MoCA connection and it runs very well.
  - stacktraceyo 1y ago
    How does the age of the copper affect performance. Will look into it thanks.
StillBored 1y ago
A lot has changed in the 25 years since gbit wired ethernet was rolled out. While wired ethernet stagnated due to greed. Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house. Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA. Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and getting a quote will tell you if its true. The vast majority of houses arent that hard, even old ones. Attic drops through the walls, cables below in the crawlspace, behind the baseboards. Hell just about every house in the USA had cable/dish at one point, and all they did was nail it to the soffit and punch it right through the walls. Most people don't need a drop every 6 feet, one near the TV, one in a study, maybe a couple in a closet/ceiling/etc. Then those drops get used to put a little POE 8 port switch in place and drive an AP, TV, whatever.
- toast0 1y ago
  > Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. Depending on the age of the house, there's a chance that phone lines are 4-pair, and you can probably run 1G on 4-pair wire, it's probably at least cat3 if it's 4-pair and quality cat3 that's not a max length run in dense conduit is likely to do gigE just fine. If it's only two-pair, you can still run 100, but you'll want to either run a managed switch that you can force to 100M or find an unmanaged switch that can't do 1G ... Otherwise you're likely to negotiate to 1G which will fail because of missing pairs.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    Gigabit ethernet "requires" 4 pairs of no-less-than cat5. The 100mbps standard that won the race -- 100BASE-TX -- also "requires" no-less-than cat5, but only 2 pairs of it. Either may "work" with cat3, but that's by no means a certainty. The twists are simply not very twisty with cat3 compared to any of its successors...and this does make a difference. But at least: If gigabit is flaky over a given span of whatever wire, then the connection can be forced to be not-gigabit by eliminating the brown and blue pairs. Neither end will get stuck trying to make a 1000BASE-T connection with only the orange and green pairs being contiguous. I think I even still have a couple of factory-made cat5-ish patch cords kicking around that feature only 2 pairs; the grey patch cord that came with the OG Xbox is one such contrivance. Putting one of these in at either end brings the link down to no more than 100BASE-TX without any additional work. (Scare quotes intentional, but it may be worth trying if the wire is already there. Disclaimers: I've made many thousands of terminations of cat3 -- it's nice and fast to work with using things like 66 blocks. I've also spent waaaaay too much time trying to troubleshoot Ethernet networks that had been made with in-situ wiring that wasn't quite cutting the mustard.)
numpad0 1y ago
Everyone gets one cord coming into the house and into the "master" router. You then branch it out to things you own through switches. The suggestion isn't to pay for multiple internets for each of your equipments.

ericd 1y ago

Eh flat Ethernet cables can easily be snaked all over with adhesive clips, and if you color match cable/clips/walls, it doesn’t look bad.

PaulHoule 1y ago
Visiting museum ships also showed me you can sometimes route cables over living and working spaces.
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
This is what I did. Takes minimal effort and then you never have to worry about it again.
dpark 1y ago
Cables routed on visible walls look absolutely terrible. I wish they didn’t, but they do. Yes, it’s better if your cable and clips and wall all match, but it still looks bad.
- Citizen8396 1y ago
  when done right, raceway along (or even behind the) baseboards works nicely
- ericd 1y ago
  Why? Run them along baseboards in the corners, you'll never notice them (or at least we didn't at our last house, white on white).
- jandrese 1y ago
  What if you ran the cable on the top of the wall and covered it with crown molding?

wlesieutre 1y ago

MoCA adapters are an option if you’re already wired for coax

ellisv 1y ago
MoCA is how I get Ethernet upstairs. Works great.

eikenberry 1y ago

Ethernet cables can be as long as 100meters, long enough to snake around most any apartment. Add on a few rugs to cover over where they'd be tripping hazards and you're all set.

passivegains 1y ago
I got good results from running cables around the entire perimeter of a room to avoid crossing doorways. Doesn't work so well on bathrooms though.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  I’m pretty tech-addicted, but I’ve never felt the need for a hard-wired drop in the bathroom.
  - xethos 1y ago
    I assumed to get from one side of a doorframe to the other, instead of crossing underneath the door, go around the perimeter of the room the door is for. Which seems like a lot to remove a trip hazard, but I suspect the Wife Approval Factor plays a role
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Oh, bathrooms are [sometimes] easy. In an apartment I once had, I ran some cat5-ish cable through the back wall of one closet and into another. In between those closets was a bathroom, with a bathtub. I fished the cable through the void of the bathtub's internals. Spanning a space like this is not too hard to do with a tape measure, some cheap fiberglass rods, a metal coat hanger, and an apt helper. Or these days, a person can replace the helper by plugging a $20 endoscope camera into their pocket supercomputer. They usually come with a hook that can be attached, or different hooks can be fashioned and taped on. It takes patience, but it can go pretty quickly. In my experience, most of the time is spent just trying to wrap one's brain around working in 3 dimensions while seeing through a 2-dimensional endoscope camera that doesn't know which way is up, which is a bit of a mindfuck at first. Anyway, just use the camera to grab the rod or the ball of string pushed in with the rod or whatever. Worst-case: If a single tiny thread can make it from A to B, then that thread can pull in a somewhat-larger string, and that string can finally pull in a cable. (Situations vary, but I never heard a word about these little holes in the closets that I left behind when I moved out, just as I also didn't hear anything about any of the other little holes I'd left from things like hanging up artwork or office garb.)

GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago

Mu-MIMO would help. The real problem is that energy between a unit and an AP is not in a pencil-thin RF laser-beam --- it is spread out. Other nodes hear that energy, and back off. If we had better control of point-to-point links, then you could have plenty of bandwidth. It's not as if the photon field cannot hold them all. When we broadcast in all directions, we waste energy, and we cause unnecessary interference to other receivers.

sidewndr46 1y ago
it was quite a while back but I read some press release about a manufacturer that would make an access point that had mechanically steered directional antennas. Unfortunately I don't think it ever made it to market.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  That can help in one direction, but networks are bi-directional. No matter how fancy and directive the antenna arrangement may be at the access point end, the other devices that use this access point will be using whatever they have for antennas. The access point may be able to produce and/or receive one or many signals with arbitrarily-aimed, laser-like precision, but the client devices will still tend to radiate mostly-omnidirectionally -- to the access point, to eachother, and to the rest of the world around them. The client devices will still hear eachother just fine and will back off when another one nearby is transmitting. The access point cannot help with this, no matter how fanciful it may be. (Waiting for a clear-enough channel before transmitting is part of the 802.11 specification. That's the Carrier Sense part of CSMA/CA.)

jdeibele 1y ago

We downsized from a house built in 1914 with phone jacks everywhere to a house built in 2007 with coax and ethernet ports in every room, some rooms with two. At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls. I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax. My son has ethernet in his dorm with an ethernet switch so he can connect his video game consoles and TV. I think that's pretty common.

runjake 1y ago
> I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax. Speaking from a US standpoint, it still not common in new construction for ethernet to be deployed in a house. I'm not sure why. It seems like a no-brainer. Coax is still usually reserved to a couple jacks -- usually in the living room and master bedrooms.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  Adding cat5e or cat6 to each room is just a cost. Builders generally compete on cost.
  - Retric 1y ago
    It’s a cost that doesn’t show up on listings. There’s a surprising number of ways new US construction sucks that just comes down to how it can be advertised.
    - sidewndr46 1y ago
      Unless I'm mistaken there are no requirements for what has to appear at all in real estate listings. Maybe some local regulations exist. I know where I exist the seller is required to provide an "energy audit", but I'm not sure there is any mechanism to enforce that.

ipython 1y ago

Well, unless you’re multihomed, you’ll always only have one cable coming in. It’s what you do with that cable that matters :) Even the telco provided router/ap combo units usually have a built in switch, so you don’t even need another device in most cases.

stacktraceyo 1y ago

I wish I could have multiple modems coming into the house using the same provided cable. Why’s that not possible? When I was younger I went and bought a new modem so I could play halo on my Xbox in another room than where my parents had the original modem. Found out then I’d need to pay for each modem.

arcanemachiner 1y ago
If you're not sure what a router is, you should probably look that up, because it sounds like you want another router.
- jgeralnik 1y ago
  It actually sounds like they just want a switch
- stacktraceyo 1y ago
  I know what a router is lol. I just was wondering what are the available options to use all the coax connections already in the house so I could connect everything via Ethernet , if you wanted to avoid running Ethernet through the walls or don’t want Ethernet cables visible When I was younger and before WiFi was a thing I naively thought I’d just plug in a new modem.
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    Makes sense when you put it that way.
sokoloff 1y ago
If you have coax, look into MoCA. I have one attic device on a MoCA connection and it runs very well.
- stacktraceyo 1y ago
  How does the age of the copper affect performance. Will look into it thanks.

StillBored 1y ago

A lot has changed in the 25 years since gbit wired ethernet was rolled out. While wired ethernet stagnated due to greed. Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house. Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA. Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and getting a quote will tell you if its true. The vast majority of houses arent that hard, even old ones. Attic drops through the walls, cables below in the crawlspace, behind the baseboards. Hell just about every house in the USA had cable/dish at one point, and all they did was nail it to the soffit and punch it right through the walls. Most people don't need a drop every 6 feet, one near the TV, one in a study, maybe a couple in a closet/ceiling/etc. Then those drops get used to put a little POE 8 port switch in place and drive an AP, TV, whatever.

toast0 1y ago
> Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. Depending on the age of the house, there's a chance that phone lines are 4-pair, and you can probably run 1G on 4-pair wire, it's probably at least cat3 if it's 4-pair and quality cat3 that's not a max length run in dense conduit is likely to do gigE just fine. If it's only two-pair, you can still run 100, but you'll want to either run a managed switch that you can force to 100M or find an unmanaged switch that can't do 1G ... Otherwise you're likely to negotiate to 1G which will fail because of missing pairs.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Gigabit ethernet "requires" 4 pairs of no-less-than cat5. The 100mbps standard that won the race -- 100BASE-TX -- also "requires" no-less-than cat5, but only 2 pairs of it. Either may "work" with cat3, but that's by no means a certainty. The twists are simply not very twisty with cat3 compared to any of its successors...and this does make a difference. But at least: If gigabit is flaky over a given span of whatever wire, then the connection can be forced to be not-gigabit by eliminating the brown and blue pairs. Neither end will get stuck trying to make a 1000BASE-T connection with only the orange and green pairs being contiguous. I think I even still have a couple of factory-made cat5-ish patch cords kicking around that feature only 2 pairs; the grey patch cord that came with the OG Xbox is one such contrivance. Putting one of these in at either end brings the link down to no more than 100BASE-TX without any additional work. (Scare quotes intentional, but it may be worth trying if the wire is already there. Disclaimers: I've made many thousands of terminations of cat3 -- it's nice and fast to work with using things like 66 blocks. I've also spent waaaaay too much time trying to troubleshoot Ethernet networks that had been made with in-situ wiring that wasn't quite cutting the mustard.)

numpad0 1y ago

Everyone gets one cord coming into the house and into the "master" router. You then branch it out to things you own through switches. The suggestion isn't to pay for multiple internets for each of your equipments.