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if weight is the factor... what about optical fiber?

MOST150 was a previous attempt at this, tunneling 100 Mbit ethernet and a separate realtime channel over a 150 Mbit incredibly-cheap plastic optical fiber. It's pretty well cost-optimized -- designed to use single quantum well LEDs instead of laser diodes, 1 mm POF with pretty lax coupling, etc. Hard to beat super-cheap twisted pair copper, though.

Hmmm, this could be interesting for high-voltage/current isolation applications, eg generator or battery bank control/monitoring.

Would be really cool if there were prefabricated Ethernet-to-<this> boards out there.

A quick check of Amazon finds 100Mbps Ethernet to fiber adapters for around the $20-40 range, but that doesn't cover the cost of the (mainstream) fiber cable they use.

This also carries power over the wire, which optical can't do.

Power over fibre does exist, but it's only used for niche applications (I think some MRI machines use it, for example) due to the low efficiency. I think there are also problems with heat dissipation.

What think it interesting is you get 50W of power. You could run lights and small appliances off that. Since it's low voltage wouldn't require an electrician to install it either.

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