Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum
Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum
spectrum.ieee.org
Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
43 comments
-
-
Ethernet is awesome. Super fast, doesn't matter how many people are using it, it functions as a hardware dead-switch and you can decorate your house with lovely blue cables everywhere.
-
Not to forget: The cables are so sturdy you can strangle attackers with them. Comes in handy sometimes.
-
I personally like ethernet because it's so reliable & I've never had any problems. In my house WiFi can be so unreliable, whereas ethernet has been nothing but awesome....
-
Yeah for sure. I have both in my house and you just can't beat ethernet. Wifi is great for taking the laptop to the couch though or for phones and such too
-
Same, with my house being a faraday cage from the aluminum siding and insulation WiFi is not happy in my home. I just switched from WiFi doorbells to PoE because they would disconnect every few minutes.
-
-
Ethernet is awesome. Super fast, doesn't matter how many people are using it,
You wanted to say "Switched Ethernet is awesome". The big problem of Etherpad before that was the large collision domain, which made things miserable with high load. What Ethernet had going for it before that was the low price - which is why you've seen 10base2 setups commonly in homes, while companies often preferred something like Token Ring.
-
-
-
It wasn't really a replacement - Ethernet was never tied to specific media, and various cabling standards coexisted for a long time. For about a decade you had 10baseT, 10base2, 10base5 and 10baseF deployments in parallel.
I guess when you mention coax you're thinking about 10base2 - the thin black cables with T-pieces end terminator plugs common in home setups - which only arrived shortly before 10baseT. The first commercially available cabling was 10base5 - those thick yellow cables you'd attach a system to with AUI transceivers. Which still were around as backbone cables in some places until the early 00s.
The really big change in network infrastructure was the introduction of switches instead of hubs - before that you had a collision domain spanning the complete network, now the collision domain was reduced to two devices. Which improved responsiveness of loaded networks to the point where many started switching over from token ring - which in later years also commonly was run over twisted pair, so in many cases switching was possible without touching the cables.
-
Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol, what does the layer 1 medium have to do with it?
-
Ah, the good old days of network troubleshooting. Wiggle the cable at the BNC connector until the whole segment comes back to life. Those huge repeater boxes with like 8 ports. Somehow 10Mbit to a Netware server being faster than a local hard drive. Smartdrv fixed most of that though.
-
Not to forget the war cry of every LAN Party:
"Who did not terminate?"
-
-
I never even realised that. Thanks for mentioning it....
-
-
I run fiber because fiber SFPs are cheaper than copper lol.
But if it doesn't move in my house, it's wired.
-
I think they might also use Ethernet? Usually "Ethernet" refers to the copper Ethernet cable, but I am 99% sure Fiber uses Ethernet too.
Just sharing since I'm deploying my Fiber setup at home in a bit...
-
Ethernet is a layer 1/2 standard, so it is technically it's anything covered under IEEE 802.3.
But for most folks Ethernet is a copper patch cable and a copper port.
My comment was more directed at the unholy costs of copper SFPs and their heat when dealing with multigig setups.
-
-
-
I FUCKING LOVE ETHERNET
-
When I had my house reinsulated last year I took the opportunity to run cables from every room to a small closet, and then a run from that closet to the router. Had some... experience, learning how to wire in the sockets, and right now only my office is connected with a bit of patch instead of the switch I'll eventually need to get the other rooms live, but it's so much more reliable than it was with WiFi or poweline. Not to mention that those technologies only just kept up with the 36Mb VDSL I've been stuck on for the last 10 years. Having ethernet means I'll actually be able to get the most out of the 500Mb FttP I'm getting next month.
-
When we renovated we put Ethernet everywhere - according to my sparky we might have more ports than some medium businesses he did.
...And I still find areas where I would need one or two more. ...And I am still mad at myself for not putting a run into the kitchen and the bathroom.
-
-
And here I am, still running wi-fi at home like a pleb.
My city is installing fiber over the next couple years, so I'll finally run the cables when that happens, but it's such a chore. I've put it off so long that running fiber is probably the way to go at this point. New Internet should support 10gbit, so maybe it's worth it.
-
You should totally go ahead and do it. It will be totally worth it....
-
43 comments
“Hey dad, the WiFi in my dorm room keeps cutting out”
“Have you gotten your Ethernet hooked up yet?”
“Hey dad, when I try to stream TV, it keeps buffering”
“Have you gotten your Ethernet hooked up yet?”
Someday they’ll get it.
To be fair, a decent WiFi setup shouldn't do that either.
There are no decent WiFi setups in college dorms.
Key word, shouldn't