Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
You also have to use appropriate splitters that are rated for the top ends of the spectrum.
To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.
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.
Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.
- 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.
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.
Thank you for these links. This is exactly what I needed to move forward.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...
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.
It's from TP-Link, and supposedly does pair and create a secure connection: https://www.tp-link.com/sg/home-networking/powerline/tl-wpa8...
Personally, I just don't find all the drawbacks worth it.
TLDR: It's still bad.
https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...
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?
Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.
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 basement room? Absolutely.
Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.
Or maybe they want to stream UHD content?
Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.
2. The idea in the comment is streaming at original bluray quality. Not transferring.
Also, I stream actual blu-ray rips over my network all the time, not just transferring them.
On a 120" display?
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.
Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.
(I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mouse poop factor along for the ride after long enough, though)
The reason fiberglass is itchy is because it’s piercing the epidermis. It’s basically a pad of brittle micro hypodermic needles. Add those two together, and it gets extra fun.
Unless you're mobility limited, everything in an attic should be accessible.
The main considerations are:
- Do work when it's cold outside. Do not be up there when it's warm and sunny
- Wear a breathing mask. N95 / painter's mask works fine. Glass insulation particles aren't lethal, but also aren't stuff you want in lungs
- Think twice. Then move. Slowly. And feel you're standing on something stable before fully transferring your weight
- Mind your head. The roof plywood will likely have roofing nails sticking through
- Bring 2 lights, preferably one lantern-type. That way you can leave one en route
They're regularly spaced from the exterior wall to an interior beam, all running the same direction, and the support boards up to the roof will run down to one.
I wired a string of LED lights for a friend (with outlets), but I figured the electronics in them would eventually fry.
I wouldn't be surprised if attics in the southeast get up to 140F in the summer.
Rope lighting would be cheap and semi-insulated.
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.
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.
That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free.
I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge.
A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof.
The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them.
So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.
They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.
> They have expenses, fuel, insurance.
I think you missed important details in their post:
>> tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes
>> tasks that are near them
The idea is, you're someone handy with equipment, and someone down the block wants lights installed. So you walk there with a couple tools on your hand, spend 5 minutes doing it, and earn (say) $20. Instead of just sitting at home and watching TV when you're bored. If you don't feel like it then you just don't take the offer up.
This is not meant to be an alternative to your day job. It's just intended to be something extra you can do when you're home anyway. If transportation and fuel and other costs would factor in then you just wouldn't do it.
It's in no way insulting, it's an opportunity for anyone that wants it. I'm not a handyman but I'd definitely do this from time to time if (say) my neighbors needed computer or coding help for a few minutes.
Coding a web page for a neighbour is different since there are often no ramifications in the physical world if it doesn’t load or look exactly as desired
(Beyond that, even if they’re already in the area, by the time they pull up the truck, load and unload the ladder and actually do the job, the per-minute rate is probably already a fair bit worse than what they would earn from real customers - it may seem to you like you’re offering an easy job at $10/minute, but it’s probably a tenth of that all in from their perspective.)
Although in an ideal scenario that’s a really great idea, as quite many people (I believe) may be in need of such services.
It's probably not worth it for anyone you might actually want to hire and doubly so for anything to which substantial chance of liability attaches. It might make more sense as a list of things your friends/neighbors/family could use help with playing up altruism angle and minimizing emphasise on liability. You know more like neighbor helping neighbor. You could also hopefully integrate positive things like sharing things that may still have value eg you upgraded your washing and dryer but the old set are still workable or things to do that others might want to share in so its not all a distributed version of your grandma's chore list.
Incidentally a have a great domain used for a fairly half-assed implementation of a not entirely different idea.
What ever happened to taskrabbit anyway?
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!)
To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.
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."
And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
Ergo, if they can, tradespeople take commercial jobs.
Which leaves residential tradesperson as something of a lemon market. (And I wouldn't want to put up with one-off job, haggling about payment, if I had commercial options)
Just finding a contractor or business owner able to think clearly is reaching near impossibility.
Like on even the most basic things. It’s quite concerning.
The breakdown of the apprentice model ~20 years ago and now-due generational consequences of that change seems more to blame.
Community expertise evaporated with retirement of folks who have been doing it 30+ years.
And without anyone receiving it... many of the folks out there are "let me look up plans at Home Depot before doing the job" types.
This fall is part of a steady escalation.
It appears to be heavily correlated with the insane propaganda floating around too.
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 different values than I so live and let live...
Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.
So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.
I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.
Worth it, though, and would do it again.
I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.
I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.
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.
You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.
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:
If you’re up there a lot or doing a lot of things, it’s also exhausting paying that much attention. And inevitably, you’ll screw up.
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.
That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down.
Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!
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.
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.
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.
(We just tape the string to the balls with a few loops of duct tape, though.)
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)
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.
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.
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?
Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.
Anybody else remember "vampire connections"?
[Ah, a minute late. FFP999 remembers them.]
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.
When the most common data transfer technology is a POTS modem that can do 56kb/second...
At college we used to have rooms with 24 X-terminals with 1280x1024 screens - huge for the day. All on one single shared 10mbit!
And wow it was speedy. Because all we did was locally rendered motif window managers, locally rendered fonts and widgets etc. Windows weren't moved animated but just the border was shown while moving.
Fast forward to the 56k days and everyone was running mosaic and netscape scrolling to pages loaded with bitmap images, scrolling marquee text (server rendered usually) and animated under construction images. It was anything but speedy at that point - lol.
From that point onwards things moved on really fast.
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.
It’s always possible. Not always pretty, but possible.
Also my wife would not go for visible Ethernet run like that. I'd have to hire a contractor to do drywall work to have it done right.
I have managed to get Ethernet everywhere I want for the most part though, thanks to a luckily positioned unfinished half of the basement and garage, where visible cables are fine and I can just pop through walls here and there.
Obviously this is always a cost issue (ie it’s subjective exactly how nice it has to look and what is acceptable to pay), but it’s far from impossible to run ethernet or fiber without breaking down walls.
The cheap version of this is having new covered cable channels running on top of existing baseboards and door trims. The more expensive version would be to either replace or carve out space in the boards to fit the cable, in that case you would never see it except when it exits the board to an outlet.
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.
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.
These prices are also recently reduced. Without them you're looking at $150/170 a pair depending on the version you buy.
https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethern...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why the toiled though?
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?
Yeah, we can compensate for that with hardware, but it's ridiculous to do 100G or even 10G in 1500 byte chunks.
There's fragmentation, but that's separate from NAT and often broken.
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 have layer 3 switches doing eBGP.
The chips that do this (if they've got the features, anyhow) do L2, L3, L4, L5, etc all at the same time. So it's not an L2 switch and L3 router -- it's both at the same time, looking at the whole packet at once.
But -- there is no such thing as an ethernet "router" -- it's just a bridge with a forwarding table populated (usually) by listening for MAC addresses and updating forwarding tables. "flood and learn" There are even less ethernetty things out there that use the ethernet signaling but mechanically populate the forwarding tables of switches.
But a "thing that forwards between vlans" usually means "a thing that forwards packets from one L3 subnet to another."
You could probably make some insane custom switch that has routing rules for forwarding mac address packets from one vlan to another based on a bunch of zany rules, but such a cursed object would be hated universally by all who come after you.
Maybe not that ironically since Ethernet derives from ALOHANet, the wireless network connecting Hawaiian schools. Early Ethernet was basically ALOHANet piped over a wire instead of radio waves just like cable tv for a while was just broadcast TV over wires instead of radio waves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
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.
Devil's advocate: why not? We're in the middle of a long-term push for IPv6, and we have interim solutions to help the migration like Teredo tunneling. It's slow going, but we'll get there eventually.
Why don't we start a similar global migration to jumbo frames?
I understand that, but it was (is) able to do that in a mostly backwards compatible manner.
My question is: how is that possible with different MTU sizes? Have ISPs support 9000 byte frames and fragment to 1500 bytes for compatibility with the wider internet? Then something like PMTUD can be used to bypass this fragmentation when supported?
To be clear, I would love to have larger MTU sizes. I just don't see a straightforward way to transition everything over. I'm not a network engineer though, maybe there just isn't enough a strong enough impetus for anyone to dedicate the resources to this.
And since it's a big change anyway, why stop at 9000? Why not 65000? Packets don't have to fill the entire MTU after all. If 65000 is supported, you can choose to send 1500, 9000, or 65000 based on your desired latency/throughput tradeoff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame
Also, while we are being picky, datagram is one word not two.
It being a thing on "the internet" would require it being a thing on a sizable majority of the internet. You'd need to get large network operators, peering points, user-facing ISPs, and even users themselves on board to change their setups.
And Path MTU discovery is still sufficiently unreliable as to make it incredibly painful to have partial large-MTU networks.
And if you do any of this with standard home customers, a hellscape torrent of user complaints is going to rain down on your support contacts. Which costs money. More money than is lost by the higher cost of routing smaller packets.
So, no, jumbo frames could not be a thing on the internet. There's a reason it's called fossilization. There is no technical reason precluding changing this, it's just frozen into way too many places to be changed.
the internet has a whole bunch of non ethernet stuff, a lot of which has different frame sizes. Its totally possible that backhaul is running jumbo frames, or something like it, but you'd never really know that.
Conversely ADSL has odd frame sizes(inherited from ATM; 48 bytes if I remember correctly), but you don't see that because its hidden from you. Cable has a frame sizes ranging from ~500 up to 2000 bytes. Again, hidden from you.
One of the joys of TCP/IP is that different frame sizes are handled for you. Sure it might be beneficial to have a frame size that marries up with packet size, it might not. you don't really know, because the internets.
If that's the case it's a shame we didn't take the chance with IPv6 to push to higher default MTUs since IPv6 already relies to a much higher degree on PMTUD since it lacks fragmentation.
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).
If your switch is configured on defaults and not running a for purpose config, you probably don't need jumbo frames.
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.
There are models that can be run in both directions. Take a source image and generate a token stream prompt for it. That's your compressed image. Now run it forward to decompress.
CPU intensive but massive compression ratios can be achieved... like orders of magnitude better than jpeg.
It's lossy compression, so we're not violating fundamental mathematical limits. Those bounds apply to lossless compression.
It's a cool idea, especially for high-bandwidth, low-value contexts like streaming video calls, but I don't think it's going to wholesale replace ordinary lossy formats for images or prerecorded video delivery (and this is without considering the coding/decoding performance implications).
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.
ISPs are now just starting to roll out multi-gig, a few are already offering 2.5 or 4gbit plans. Even the ones that do not offer multi-gbit plans yet are already installing 10gbit capable CPEs. I suspect 10gbit service will become available nationwide within a few years.
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.
Now where have I heard that before...
Ok, sorry, in another 30 years time people might want more than 1G to do brain dumps to their robo-shrink.
In 2023, there are very few uses for home users that will exceed what a 1G connection can provide.
But please enlighten me about where you think you've "heard this before"?
Video games are getting bigger all the time. The latest Call of Duty apparently is 200GB. On 1gbit you are limited to 125MB/s downloads (assuming zero overhead) that's almost a half an hour to download. PCIe4 SSD's are capable of write speeds of about 7GB/s and PCIe5 SSD's are just hitting the market with even faster speeds. At 10Gbit you can download that game in less than 3 minutes. In neither case are you even approaching the speed at which your PC can store that data.
When PCIe5 SSD's go mainstream a home PC user would even be able to saturate a 100Gbit connection.
I'll be generous and give you a hint: it doesn't mean none.
But your example also has great relevance to the "familiar" sentence in my original comment which was:
> 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.
I italicised the part that I knew people would somehow ignore in my original comment and I've done it again, because obviously once wasn't enough.
Here, let me pull out the important words yet again just to make it really clear:
> for a lot of people
The thing is, the moment a new upper bound becomes available, developers find a way to use it. It’s like the freeway problem that adding more roads ironically adds to congestion.
Take storage, the greater the storage capacity of media increased, the larger game assets became. The faster CPUs and system memory became, the heavier our operating systems and desktop software became.
Likewise, the faster our internet becomes, the more dependent we will become on streaming high fidelity content. 4k on a lot of streaming services is compressed to hell and back to work with people on slower internet connections. And much as Google Stadia was shutdown, video game streaming services aren’t a failed experiment. Plus even with more traditional services, how many of us roll our eyes at multi-hour download times for new games?
Once gigabit internet becomes the norm (it’s common place in a lot of countries already, but it’s not quite the norm yet) then you’ll see more and more services upscale to support it, and thus others on the cutting edge of the tech curve finding that gigabit internet isn’t quite fast enough any more. And that will happen sooner than you think.
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 aren’t a failed experiment
I'd have thought latency was a far bigger concern here, but even if not: it's still just sending you a 4K video stream.. it just happens to be a stream that's reacting to your input.
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 <checks notes> 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.
I don't see why we'd stop at 60fps when 120 or even 240 Hz displays are already available. Also 8k displays already exist. The codecs also have tunable quality, and obviously no one is sending lossless video. So we can always increase the quality level when encoding.
So it's true in 2023 (especially since no one will stream that high of quality to you), but one can easily imagine boring incremental technology improvements that would demand more. There's plenty of room for video quality to increase before we reach the limitations of human eyes.
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 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.
A few hundred Mbps here, another few there. Quickly you exceed 1 gigabit.
> I'd have thought latency was a far bigger concern here, but even if not: it's still just sending you a 4K video stream.. it just happens to be a stream that's reacting to your input.
Latency and jitter matter too. But they're not mutually exclusive properties.
Plus if you're streaming VR content then that is multiple 4k streams per device. And that's on top of all the other concurrent network operations (as mentioned above).
You're also still thinking purely about current tech. My point was that developers create new tech to take advantage of higher specs. Its easy to scoff at comments like this but I've seen this happen many times in my lifetime -- the history of tech speaks for itself.
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.
You're moving goal posts now because your original comment, the one that sparked this discussion, neither mentioned 2.5G WAN nor that your 1G comment was specific to each machine rather than internet connectivity as a whole.
> but a 1G LAN to each machine is likely enough for most tasks, for most people - multiple users simultaneous use.
For today, yes. But you're demonstrating a massive failure of imagination by assuming those needs are going to be the same in a few years time. For example, the 4k figures you're quoting are fine and dandy if you don't take into account that TV manufacturers are going to want to sell newer screens. Which means more emphasis on content with high colour colour depths, refresh rates and resolutions. This isn't even a theoretical point, there are already 8k @ 120FPS videos on YouTube.
Heck, I've already hit the 1GbE limit for a few specific bits of hardware in my home set up. Mainly my home server and some "backbone" wiring between two core switches which join two separated buildings on my property. But if I'm hitting that limit today then it's not going to be many more years before other people start hitting it for far less esoteric reasons than mine.
You're also overlooking that fact that if you have router providing GbE to desktops and WiFi 6 to other devices, it's very unlikely to be powerful enough to switch all of those devices at gigabit speeds, let alone routing at 2.5G to the WAN. And that's with regular IPv4 packages, never mind the additional overhead that IPv6 adds. Underpowered consumer networking equipment is already impacting home users right now. So again, we are seeing limits being hit already.
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Lets also not forget all the other noise being introduced into homes. Smart speakers uploading voice recordings for speech-to-text analysis. Smart doorbells and over security devices uploading video. Smart lights, fridges, plugs, plant pots and whatever else phoning home. Set top TV boxes, and other multimedia devices phoning home, downloading software updates and streaming adverts. In fact have you ever run wireshark on your average home network recently? There is a lot of noise these days and that's only set to grow exponentially.
My original comment, in reply to someone saying "a lot of people already get more than 1G from their ISP" and implying that it's therefore worthwhile to have 2.5GEth on all local devices ends with:
> 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'm sorry if the correlation between having a 2.5G router and having greater than 1G WAN wasn't obvious to you.
Complaining that a quasi backbone link saturates gig eth when my entire point was that single computers are unlikely to need more kind of misses the whole point I was making for an excuse to complain.
I never said no one needs more than gig for anything.
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.
Anyway, I hadn’t paid attention and yes turns out consumer hardware support is a bottleneck, not the actual ISP which is nuts. Seems like someone fell asleep at the wheel – I suspect people are gonna have a wake up once >1G becomes widespread – not even their new fancy motherboard will support it. It feels like for ages, it’s been the opposite - you buy hardware that is prepared for the future or at least the present. At least that’s how it’s been with SATA etc..
For instance, the cheapest NIC is like $75 and the router can only do 10G on one port. Wifi6 does not get near those speeds either and even so laptops have to be very new (even my M1 does not have full support for the 802.11ax thingy - partner’s M2 was at least able to pull ~1.6 Gbit/s). Switches and routers are premium priced.
However, I was very impressed with the silent progression of cat cables, they’re just better and better ever iteration, backwards compatible and dirt cheap. Got a cat8 which is way, way more than I need for like €1/meter. And they’re flat and easy to pull long distances. Beautiful tech!
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.
If it was free in terms of equipment, you might have a point. Since then 10 GB is just a "bonus" but it isn't, or even close. So you'd be cheaping out on the final 10% of the cost.
This isn't true. I've run 10gbit over cat5e many times in 10-30m lengths. That might not be enough for end to end on your house (although it is for many peoples), but it's certainly fine between floors.
10gbit switches are becoming significantly more common. Vendors like fs.com and even Netgear offer some reasonably priced options. Mikrotik and other vendors offer better (pricier) options, but assumedly if you want 10gbit (or even 1gbit) you're an enthusiast or business anyway.
Hahaha. Love it.
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...
From the article on the origin of the name.
And this is just terminology: An Ethernet protocol data unit is a frame because it's Ethernet and an IP protocol data unit is a packet because it's IP. You could switch the terms around and nothing would actually change.
He also says the reason Ethernet keeps getting better is because they keep rebranding new, novel signalling and encoding schemes as Certified Ethernet. It sounded like he had a grin on his face when he said it.
https://hanselminutes.com/900/from-ethernet-to-geothermal-en...
^ The '/s' is implied.
It feels like the only thing in this godforsaken industry that is anywhere near "it just works."
What I would like to say, however, is that in an industry as young as IT, it is hard to overestimate when technologies have proven themselves over decades. All the "latest hot sh*t" ideas/technologies/brainwaves/products first have to stand the test of time (no, 2.5 years is not enough) to be taken seriously without any doubt.
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 with the previous generation, under the same brand name!
The framing is compatible across all of these changes: your 802.11 NIC has an Ethernet MAC address and can talk to to a copper-connected GigE interface. Copper and fibre interfaces can also talk to each other.
Part of the reasons for the concept of OSI Layers is that you could change things at lower layers (Thicknet, Thinnet, co-ax, etc) and at higher layers (IP, AppleTalk, etc) and would continue to work.
The OSI Layer 2 is the same for all the "variants" of Ethernet. That makes it 'the same' as the original.
Twisted pair was easier to work with than coax, and star topology avoided a lot of trouble with other topologies so it won out anyway, but it wasn't cheaper at first.
I have a few SFP+ 10 GbE connections internally that are useful for large file transfers.
https://assets.fixr.com/cost_guides/hardwired-computer-netwo...
We have a pitched roof but there are trusses, and I am not built like a hobbit if I need to replace the cable.
On the high end, it is a fragmentation mess of high speed (100Gbit+) technologies and mac/phy's.
There is no midrange at this point.
And the low end is price discriminated such that the Nbase spec couldn't even mandate all of 1/2.5/5/10 as required as part of the spec with the speeds being automatically selected based on cable quality.
And its largely dead because its to expensive and Wifi is more convenient.
Instead of further pushing mesh, we could have educated the market about putting Ethernet links, or we could have wired the house as if they were good old telephone cables.
No one noticed.
Wi-Fi uses the CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detect) that was developed for Ethernet. I view Wi-Fi as wireless Ethernet.
"b" = bit
The ubiquitous 1000BASE-T form of Ethernet transmits 1 gigabit per second (1 Gb/s).