What is an Ethernet cable? Here's how to connect to the internet without Wi-Fi (2022)
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
(I still see it in new construction, though if I was having a build done I'd say run multiple Ethernet instead of any coax)
Cable TV became common in the 1980s (around here). So distribution is just a question about point of entry.
Are the aussies and UKensians that different?
Source: I worked at a TV/electronics shop in the early 90s.
Digital, broadcast TV in the UK is mostly received by radio broadcast or satellite broadcast, so the house would only have the appropriate cables from certain rooms up to the roof. Thinking of the houses I lived in, it wouldn't have been practical to put a router of any kind up there.
From recent UK statistics:
- 95% of households have at least one television
- 30% receive TV over satellite
- 13% by cable
- 80% by IPTV
- 48% by terrestrial radio broadcast
- 96% have broadband internet
That's 13% of houses using their cables for a TV subscription, so more than that number have the cables available, but some big chunk probably had it installed to a single room in the 1980s and have never expanded it — the kitchen and the kids' room use terrestrial broadcast.
Exactly that. When we redid the floors i our apartment we renewed the electrical wiring and added ethernet and coax. The coax was intended for radio/tv.
There is however an overlap of people who have the foresight to add coax cabling also add ethernet a well.
If I was was re-doing today I would add more empty pipes and fiber.
Cabling ahead has a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) when adding new gear :-)
Currently there is MOCA hardware which supports speeds up to 2.5Gbs. The standard for 10Gbs has been released but no hardware for it is currently available. At least not to consumers. MOCA runs over the coax that is often already installed in homes to support cable, satellite or over the air antenna TV. It uses different frequencies and thus can coexist with these on the same cable. MOCA is not Ethernet. It is a half duplex shared medium protocol using time division multiplexing. It was originally developed to distribute IP TV without the need to run additional wiring in a house. Today it is mostly used to bring broadband internet connections into a home or to bridge Ethernet connections through a home. Different frequencies are set aside for each purpose and so both can be done at the same time. It is very reliable. I use it to extend my network to several out buildings on my property which had coax run to them many many years ago.
Now, Cat 5 cable is a perfectly good telephone cable, but it's also Gigabit Ethernet (over reasonable distances, you don't live in a mansion). The tree shape won't work for networking, but the individual cables buried in walls or elsewhere are basically just right there already. You just hook the existing cables to new Ethernet shaped faceplates. I am literally writing this from a wired connection in a bedroom, nobody built this to have Ethernet, they built it to put a phone in the main bedroom, but it's 2025, nobody owns a wired phone, everybody needs Internet.
† Also the network cards can't tell, they will try to achieve 1000 Mbit/s and chances are they succeed even if the cable isn't actually rated Category 5. I have retro-fitted modern switches to an ancient building (the old Mountbatten chip fab at the University of Southampton, before it burned down) and in 90+% of cases this "upgrades" the connection to Gigabit because the Cat 3 cable pulled a decade or more earlier was good enough.
They mean a modern (ish) device which uses existing TV cabling, to avoid rewiring in houses.
That is a different situation than installing a fixed, point to point connection.
My kids: Dad, the internet's down.
Me: The internet's fine. You're just not connected to it.
Now get off my lawn ;-)
Ethernet might be one of the longest-lived backwards-compatible standards in the computer industry; you can plug one end of a cable into a PC from 2025 and the other into one from 1990, and they will communicate perfectly.
edit: I phrased this poorly, all Macs didn't have it as standard but what I meant to say is they started releasing Macs that had it as standard, starting from the mid-range (Centris) and up, the point is just Ethernet had stopped being a niche technology
From what I can tell, iMacs have consistently come with Ethernet after around 1998 and Powebooks starting in 1999.
The PowerMac 6100 very much did have Ethernet built-in, in the form of an AAUI port (you needed a transceiver to convert to either BNC or 10Base-T since at the time it wasn't obvious which people wanted)
I remember even back then you could get an Ethernet card for a PC cheaper than that.
The principle of the AUI port was that the three Ethernet connections (10Base5, 10Base2, 10BaseT) could all be used with a 'cheap' change of "MAU" adapter. For 10Base5, it would have been impractical to have the thick cable brought right up to the computer.
The 10Base5 MAU was relatively expensive, I see a card sold with it costing £50 more than the same card with a 10Base2 interface in a price list from 1993 [1].
I don't see a price for a 10BaseT interface alone, but it should be much cheaper — it's just a couple of low-pass filters and some isolation. Even back then I think these main components were sold as a single package ("chip"), so the 10BaseT MAU is two plugs, one "chip" and a couple of capacitors.
Anyway, Acorn¹ computers were sold from around 1991 with an optional Ethernet card. Basic TCP/IP was included in ROM on the card, and it works fine between my Linux and Acorn computers.
[1] https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/IntInt/II_P...
¹ Acorn as in "Acorn RISC Machine" → "Advanced RISC Machine" → the ARM chip in your phone.
Though that counts as a "PC" only if you were rather rich.
The point is that the first 10 base T still works if used with modern equipment. That standard is from 1990 and grew extremely fast.
Around 1993-1995 coax was considered totally outdated. Fixing termination problems where never fun. A nail in the coffin was 100 Base T which was standardized in 1995.
Tokenring and ATM was contenders around that time but lost to ethernet.
That kind of backwards compatibility is really amazing.
If any of those are reading this: Your WiFi makes you sound bad in conference calls and video meetings, and people think you're a low status worker that can't afford a good laptop or internet. Hurry up and get a Ethernet thingy.