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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

We need to start wiring houses for this stuff. It's absurd that we don't treat data cabling as fundamental as plumbing at this point.

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I'm unsure, but my gut tells me there's regulations/building codes that require landline cabling in (new) residential homes, and of course, not data cabling. Like I said, it's just a hunch, though.

You're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling. I'm not even sure how this would be phrased. Especially given that phone cabling is just Cat5 cable now.

Data cabling is omitted from new builds because it doesn't sell homes and is just a cost.

The only recent comparison I can think of is how some cities actually required lead pipes for drinking water for decades.

> You're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling

I don't think so. I think he's suggesting that without a code that does require it nobody is going to bother including it even though they really should.

Worked for a res-electrician for about 6 years. We would often strongly suggest that people run cat5e (it was years back now) to many locations for future proofing layouts and connections in the house.

Very very few people had interest in the slight added expense of the cable and labor to do as such -- all insisting that they only needed it to / from cable modem area to their aspirational wifi router location.

> all insisting that they only needed it to / from cable modem area to their aspirational wifi router location.

This is like turning down indoor plumbing and instead putting a nice heated, carpeted breezeway out to an outhouse you rent.

No I think they're suggesting that the code doesn't require it so it doesn't get considered or built.

If that is the case then it isn't a suggestion. It's just an extra cost on an invoice at the stage of building a home

Building codes (a long time ago) also didn’t require electrical wiring or plumbing, then we decided they should.

A lot of homes are at least partially wired. The "phone line" cable in homes built in the last decade or so is almost certainly cat 5.

This sounds like a great idea, until you try to re-terminate that cabling and see how much abuse the electrician put the drop through. I’ve seen 6-8” of sheathing removed and all the remaining pairs untwisted wrapped back around (or just snipped entirely).

In my pre-divorce house, it turned out that the flippers who had done the renovations on it did things like put phone and coax jacks in every room that were not connected to anything.¹ Well, there were wires in the wall, but they just went deeper into the wall. In my current apartment, I put in about 50' of Cat6 since the 1920s construction walls kept the wifi signal from reaching from the living room where the fiber drop was to my office off the back of the kitchen. When I buy a house again, one of the first things I’ll do is run ethernet through the whole place.

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1. The other irritating thing was discovering that the light switches were attached only to the faceplate which in turn was attached only to the drywall.

>When I buy a house again, one of the first things I’ll do is run ethernet through the whole place.

Good call. Although, I just had it done recently and I was pleasantly surprised at how noninvasive it was (the electricians worked really hard, so that's part of it). We moved things out of the way for where we wanted the jacks installed and they ran the cables through the wall with a minimal amount of holes. Definitely would have been even easier if we didn't have anything in the house at all, but there was way less ceremony on my part than I was expecting.

I guess I got lucky then.

Sparkies love yanking really hard on data cable. Dunno why.

You can remove the “data” qualifier — they yank hard on any and all cable.

So many homes with a coax in every room too.

There's always MoCA.

The problem is that wiring standards change.

Ideally, you put conduits in the wall then upgrading cables is easier.

> We need to start wiring houses for this stuff.

We already have. Powerline is a thing, and for smart home stuff you don't need high bandwidth.

I don't understand why powered IoT devices (lightbulbs, switches etc) don't use powerline for network access.

Some of the pre-IoT home automation system did use powerline for communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)

Would this be vulnerable to an adversary plugging a device into your exterior electrical outlets?

No. Powerline ethernet was pretty obviously going to have security issues along these lines from the go considering the lack of clear boundaries inherent in sending data over wires connecting to a public grid and included cryptography from the go. I know Homeplug devices have been on AES since the mid-2000s using either passwords or push button config and G.hn had something similar going on.

Do you know if they handle large spikes in noise?

Back in the noughties plugging in a TV was enough to break some powerline ethernet.

To elaborate, the power conditioning circuits in flat screen (often plasma) TVs would interfere with the non-60hz signaling of the powerline ethernet. That's certainly not the same as breaking into the network, but it may have been enough to knock devices offline.

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