(We do have one internet-connected device which permanently lives about an inch away from one of the ethernet sockets, but it is, ironically, a wifi-only device with no RJ45 port.)

You can get skinny Ethernet cables that bend easily. If you get some that match your paint, and route them in straight lines, those can be unobtrusive. Use tricks like running the cables along baseboards and other trim pieces. If you really want to minimize the visual impact you can use cable runners and paint over them. The cables are not attention-grabbing compared to furniture or art on the wall.

If you’re willing to drill holes (if you terminate the cable yourself, the hole can be narrow), you can pass the cables through walls. If you don’t want to drill, you can go under a door.

If you’ve got fourteen outlets, it seems like there ought to be some solution to get cables everywhere you need.

I think I've done only one house where the owner wanted to be able to put speakers in every corner of every room on every floor with multiple possible locations for his stereo.

Then he wanted multiple cable tv connections per room, multiple sockets for landlines, Ethernet everywhere.

The speaker tube was left empty and a few short distance sockets didn't have wires in them.

It seemed excessive even to me but it isn't actually a lot of work to run 5 tubes in stead of 1. You might add 1-2% to the renovation bill. Even less for a new house.

The end result was wonderful. He could do his chores with music all over the house. Move his TV sofa bed or desk where ever he wanted.

Doing this after the house is finished is more expensive, it takes a lot more work and the result is inferior.

I think nowadays we should have an USB socket next to each power outlet that provides both internet and extra fast charging. In reality I've never even seen such socket.

With a few small updates Android could switch off wifi and mobile networking and seamlessly switch to calling over <s>wifi</s> wired internet when you plug in the charging cable.

Who knows, maybe the mobile phone could even be a first class citizen in the landline network.

I've seen power outlets with embedded USB power adapters. I think I've seen usb ethernet adaptets with embedded USB power for like chromecasts and similar. But not both smooshed into the same outlet. It might be problematic because nobody wants to mix low voltage and high voltage together in the wall. But it's technically feasible.

> With a few small updates Android could switch off wifi and mobile networking and seamlessly switch to calling over <s>wifi</s> wired internet when you plug in the charging cable.

I'm not sure you need updates. I think if the adapter exposes as usb cdc-ethernet that would likely work out of the box, and there may be drivers for specific usb nics available as well; I haven't checked, but this is a thing that is used by ChromeCast devices and AndroidTV devices, so it should also work on Android. Seamlessness is maybe in the air, but if it's seamless from wifi to cellular, it should be better going from wired to something else, because wired has an unambigious and timely disconnect signal.

> Who knows, maybe the mobile phone could even be a first class citizen in the landline network.

IMHO there's less value here; the landline network has degraded and there's not really any first class citizens anymore. Few people retain landlines, and those that remain tend to be ATAs in the home; if you care to use that with an android, there's likely better options than interfacing with the analog side.

Power with network is less common since nobody wants to mix high and low voltage runs.

https://www.amazon.ca/TOPGREENER-Ultra-High-Speed-Receptacle...

Another benefit is that I can cram 4 of them inside a single cable runner at the one spot I have to (no space for a switch). Where it's just one cable you run them bare and they look very clean.

The old ones I have are still CAT5e, the newer ones they sell are CAT6 at the same thinness. All unshielded (UTP).

10/10 would buy again.

Horizontal cabling, from the panel to the jack, is up to I think 350’ of solid core twisted pair.

5e gets you gigabit if it’s done right end to end.

Here is a link for others who want to know how thin:

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-cables-dacs/...

If you own, you should replace and/or move them. Might sound scary if you've never done this before but it is much easier than you'd think. If you want to make your future life easier I suggest running a PVC pipe (at minimum in the drop down portion). Replacing or adding new cabling will be much easier if you do this so it's totally worth the few extra bucks and few extra minutes of work. They'll also be less likely to be accidentally damaged (stepping on them, rodents, water damage, etc). I seriously cannot understand why this is not more common practice (leave the pull string in). You might save a few bucks but you sacrifice a lot more than you're saving... (chasing pennies with pounds)

If rental, you could put in an extender. If you're less concerned about aesthetics you can pop the wall place off and directly tie into the existing cable OR run a new one in parallel. If you're willing to donate the replacement wire and don't have access to the attic but do to both ends of the existing cable then you can use one to pull the other through. You could coil the excess wire behind the plate when you reinstall it. But that definitely runs the risk of losing the cable since it might be navigating through a hard corner. If you go that route I'd suggest just asking your landlord. They'd probably be chill about it and might even pay for it.

Of course, some thin raceways can be seen somewhere along the baseboard. It does not look terrible, and is barely noticeable.

But the slope is slippery. If you’re doing fibre, you might as well do 10gbe.

Your clearly don’t live in an earthquake prone area.

I do. But given how cheapskate New Zealand is, I’m 100% sure that we would build in stone and brick if it was cheaper.

It's incredible how people do not understand boot theory... which seems to be something most people know but don't employ in practice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

I’m trying to understand how removing an entire sheet of gypsum (or cutting a 6” by 8’ channel) and installing an empty PVC raceway is ‘a few extra minutes of work’. Installing the PVC might be, but you’re looking at hours of work over multiple days to replace the drywall and refinish the wall.

Raceways are unnecessary in stick built houses if you have a fish stick and fish tape. If you’re building a new house, then sure, install 1” EMT as raceway for Cat6A before putting up the drywall.

  > I’m trying to understand how removing an entire sheet of gypsum

  > Raceways are unnecessary in stick built houses
 

The conduit makes all that easier, and provides the additional protection that I discussed. By having a conduit you're far less likely to get snagged on something while fishing the lines. You can stop hard corners that strip your cables while pulling on them. It's also a million times easier to see while you're chasing those cables. Sure, your house is a framing with wood but you still have insulation and who likes icy hands?

Really, think about it. What is the cost now compared to the future?

Is an additional 10 or let's even say a crazy 50% additional work now really that costly when you have to do the whole thing again in the future? And multiple times? It's a no brainier lol. Definition of chasing pennies with pounds. Just be nice to your future self. Be lazy long term, not lazy short term because lazy short term requires more work

I sell and run electrical work for a living (including low-voltage cabling), I have thought about how cables get pulled into existing walls in virtually any scenario you can contrive. Block, steel stud, brick, wood stud, precast tip-up; both drop ceiling and hardlid.

Cutting open walls to install low-voltage raceway is very uncommon because it’s substantially more expensive (or just way more work) than cutting two small holes (or using an attic/basement for access) and using a fish tape.

Non-professionals overestimate how many cables they’ll pull into existing low-voltage raceways in the future. Pull in an extra cable the first time and you’re future proofed.

I’m in an old stone house and currently have flat cables snaked around until I can piggy back on the workers putting in conduit for other things.

I had a similar situation a few years back. It was a rental so I didn't have access to the attic let alone permission to do my own drops. It'll depend a _lot_ on your exact setup, but we had reasonably good results with some ethernet-over-power adapters.

A better solution is repurposing unused 75Ω coaxial cable with MoCA 2.5 adapters, which will actually give you 1+ Gbps symmetrical. The latency is a very consistent 3-4ms, which is negligible. I use Screenbeam (formerly Actiontek) ECB6250 adapters, though they now make a new model, ECB7250, which is identical to the ECB6250 except with 2.5GBASE-T ports instead of 1000BASE-T.

I'll second this. MoCA works. You can get MoCA adapters off Ebay or whatnot for cheap: look for Frontier branded FCA252. ~90 MBps with a 1000BASE-T switch in the loop. I see ~3 ms of added latency. I've made point-to-point links exclusively, as opposed to using splitters and putting >2 MoCA adapters on shared medium, but that is supported as well.

We had an unused coax (which we disconnected from the outside world) and used MoCA adapters (actiontek) and it's been consistently great/stable. No issues ever... for years.

It’s worked well!

You do need to be a bit careful as coax signal can be shared with neighbors and others sometimes.

You can buy them online for around $10 and they install without tools,

Besides neighbors, you may also need a POE filter if you have certain types of cable modem.

In general they do suck, but they can be pretty decent if you stick them all on one phase, even better if all on the same breaker.

The endpoint in my living room also has a wifi AP so signal is pretty good for laptops and whatnot.

In NYC every channel is congested, I can see like 25 access points at any time and half are poorly configured. Any wired medium is better than the air, I could probably propagate a signal through the drywall that's more reliable than wifi here.

So having something I can just plug into the wall is pretty nice compared to running cables even if it's a fraction of gigE standards.

So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls.

I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience

At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls.

I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax.

My son has ethernet in his dorm with an ethernet switch so he can connect his video game consoles and TV. I think that's pretty common.

Speaking from a US standpoint, it still not common in new construction for ethernet to be deployed in a house. I'm not sure why. It seems like a no-brainer.

Coax is still usually reserved to a couple jacks -- usually in the living room and master bedrooms.

Aye.

Cat5/6/whatever-ish cabling has been both the present and the future for something on the order of 25 years now. It's as much of a no-brainer to build network wiring into a home today as it once was to build telephone and TV wiring into a home. Networking should be part of all new home builds.

And yet: Here in 2025, I'm presently working on a new custom home, wherein we're installing some vaguely-elaborate audio-visual stuff. The company in charge of the LAN/WAN end of things had intended to have the ISP bring fiber WAN into a utility area of the basement (yay fiber!), and put a singular Eeros router/mesh node there, and have that be that.

The rest of the house? More mesh nodes, just wirelessly-connected to eachother. No other installed network wires at all -- in a nicely-finished and fairly opulent house that is owned by a very successful local doctor.

They didn't even understand why we were planning to cable up the televisions and other AV gear that would otherwise be scooping up finite wireless bandwidth from their fixed, hard-mounted locations.

In terms of surprise: Nothing surprises me now.

(In terms of cost: We wound up volunteering to run wiring for the mesh nodes. It will cost us ~nothing on the scale that we're operating at, and we're already installing cabling... and not doing it this way just seems so profoundly dumb.)

They (the homeowner) were getting dedicated custom-built single-purpose wall-mounted shelving for each of these Eeros devices, along with dedicated 120V outlets for each of them to provide power.

Now they're still getting that, plus the Ethernet jack that I will be installing on the wall at these locations because that's the extent to which I am empowered to inject sanity.

(Maybe someone down the road will look at it and go "Yeah, that just needs to be a wall-mounted access point with PoE," and remove even more stupid from the things.

Or... not: People are unpredictable and it seems like many home buyers' first task is to rip out and erase as much current-millennia technology as possible, reducing the home to bare walls under a roof, with a kitchen, a shitter, and some light switches and HVAC.)

For some reason the cable service entry is on the third floor in the laundry room. Ethernet and the TV signal cable runs from there to exactly one place, where the TV is expected to be mounted. Nothing in the nice office area on the other side of the wall.

My guess is that the thinking these days is that everyone's on laptops with wifi and hardwired network connections are only of interest for video streaming. Probably right for 99% of purchasers.

No matter how fancy and directive the antenna arrangement may be at the access point end, the other devices that use this access point will be using whatever they have for antennas.

The access point may be able to produce and/or receive one or many signals with arbitrarily-aimed, laser-like precision, but the client devices will still tend to radiate mostly-omnidirectionally -- to the access point, to eachother, and to the rest of the world around them.

The client devices will still hear eachother just fine and will back off when another one nearby is transmitting. The access point cannot help with this, no matter how fanciful it may be.

(Waiting for a clear-enough channel before transmitting is part of the 802.11 specification. That's the Carrier Sense part of CSMA/CA.)

In an apartment I once had, I ran some cat5-ish cable through the back wall of one closet and into another.

In between those closets was a bathroom, with a bathtub.

I fished the cable through the void of the bathtub's internals.

Spanning a space like this is not too hard to do with a tape measure, some cheap fiberglass rods, a metal coat hanger, and an apt helper.

Or these days, a person can replace the helper by plugging a $20 endoscope camera into their pocket supercomputer. They usually come with a hook that can be attached, or different hooks can be fashioned and taped on. It takes patience, but it can go pretty quickly. In my experience, most of the time is spent just trying to wrap one's brain around working in 3 dimensions while seeing through a 2-dimensional endoscope camera that doesn't know which way is up, which is a bit of a mindfuck at first.

Anyway, just use the camera to grab the rod or the ball of string pushed in with the rod or whatever. Worst-case: If a single tiny thread can make it from A to B, then that thread can pull in a somewhat-larger string, and that string can finally pull in a cable.

(Situations vary, but I never heard a word about these little holes in the closets that I left behind when I moved out, just as I also didn't hear anything about any of the other little holes I'd left from things like hanging up artwork or office garb.)

But if you can pull it off (or even better, move your router closest to the most annoying thing and work from there!), excellent

It’s what you do with that cable that matters :)

Even the telco provided router/ap combo units usually have a built in switch, so you don’t even need another device in most cases.

Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house.

Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA.

Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit.

And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and getting a quote will tell you if its true. The vast majority of houses arent that hard, even old ones. Attic drops through the walls, cables below in the crawlspace, behind the baseboards. Hell just about every house in the USA had cable/dish at one point, and all they did was nail it to the soffit and punch it right through the walls.

Most people don't need a drop every 6 feet, one near the TV, one in a study, maybe a couple in a closet/ceiling/etc. Then those drops get used to put a little POE 8 port switch in place and drive an AP, TV, whatever.

Depending on the age of the house, there's a chance that phone lines are 4-pair, and you can probably run 1G on 4-pair wire, it's probably at least cat3 if it's 4-pair and quality cat3 that's not a max length run in dense conduit is likely to do gigE just fine. If it's only two-pair, you can still run 100, but you'll want to either run a managed switch that you can force to 100M or find an unmanaged switch that can't do 1G ... Otherwise you're likely to negotiate to 1G which will fail because of missing pairs.

Either may "work" with cat3, but that's by no means a certainty. The twists are simply not very twisty with cat3 compared to any of its successors...and this does make a difference.

But at least: If gigabit is flaky over a given span of whatever wire, then the connection can be forced to be not-gigabit by eliminating the brown and blue pairs. Neither end will get stuck trying to make a 1000BASE-T connection with only the orange and green pairs being contiguous.

I think I even still have a couple of factory-made cat5-ish patch cords kicking around that feature only 2 pairs; the grey patch cord that came with the OG Xbox is one such contrivance. Putting one of these in at either end brings the link down to no more than 100BASE-TX without any additional work.

(Scare quotes intentional, but it may be worth trying if the wire is already there.

Disclaimers: I've made many thousands of terminations of cat3 -- it's nice and fast to work with using things like 66 blocks. I've also spent waaaaay too much time trying to troubleshoot Ethernet networks that had been made with in-situ wiring that wasn't quite cutting the mustard.)

They can get stuck, because negotiation happens on the two original pairs (at 1Mbps), and to-spec negotiation advertises the NIC capabilities and selects the best mutually supported option. Advertising fewer capabilities for retries is not within the spec, but obviously helps a lot with wiring problems.

The key thing with the ethernet wiring requirements is that most of the specs are for 100m of cabling with the bulk of that in a dense conduit with all the other cables running ethernet or similar. Most houses don't have 100m of cabling, and if you're reusing phone cabling, it's almost certainly low density, so you get a lot of margin from that. I wouldn't pull new cat3 for anything (and largely, nobody has since the 90s; my current house was built in 2001, it has cat5e for ethernet and cat5e in blue sheaths for phone), but wire in the wall is worth trying.

My intent wasn't to dissuade anyone from trying to make existing cat 3 wire work (which I've never encountered in any home, but I've not been everywhere), but to try to set reasonable expectations and offer some workarounds.

If a person has a house that is still full of old 2- or 4-pair wire, and that wire is actually cat3, and is actually home-run (or at least, features aspects that can usefully-intercepted), then they should absolutely give it a fair shot.

I agree that the as a practical matter, the specifications are more guidelines than anything else.

I've also gone beyond 100 meters with fast ethernet (when that was still the most commonly-encountered) and achieved proven-good results: The customer understood the problem very well and wanted to try it, so we did try it, and it was reliable for years and years (until that building got destroyed in a flood).

If the wiring is already present and convenient, then there's no downside other than some time and some small materials cost to giving it a go. Decent-enough termination tools are cheap these days. :)

(Most of the cat3 I've ran has been for controls and voice, not data. Think stuff like jails, with passive, analog intercom stations in every cell, and doors from Southern Steel that operate on relay logic...because that was the style at the time when it was constructed. Cat3, punch blocks, and a sea of cross-connect wire still provides a flexible way to deal with that kind of thing in an existing and rather-impervious building -- especially when that building's infrastructure already terminates on 25-pair Amphenols. I'll do it again if I have to, but IP has been the way forward even in that stodgy slow-moving space for a good bit now.)

When I was younger I went and bought a new modem so I could play halo on my Xbox in another room than where my parents had the original modem. Found out then I’d need to pay for each modem.

When I was younger and before WiFi was a thing I naively thought I’d just plug in a new modem.

https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1... will give you some additional info.

My house had quite old (likely 1980s) coax home runs and it worked flawlessly. All I did was change out the entry (root)splitter for one that had a point of entry filter. I’m not sure that was even needed, but it seemed sensible and was not expensive or difficult.

Usually those can be found in the wall boxes behind the plate - but not always!

These used to be a bane on cable modem installs for apartment complexes, but the situation should generally be better 25 years later...

If you have newer clients that support it, Wifi 6E/7/802.11ax (or whatever it's called) uses the 6GHz spectrum that isn't as heavily used (yet). I've had good success with it in my multi-unit apartment condo (feels as clean as 5GHz did ~2010). Some higher end APs can also use multi-antenna beams that can help, too.