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...