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Comment by HumblyTossed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

So many homes with a coax in every room too.

There's always MoCA.

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