Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org)
from furycd001@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 10:26
https://lemmy.ml/post/8175475

Milestone-Proposal:Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN), 1973-1985

#technology

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Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works on 19 Nov 2023 10:42 next collapse

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.

ladicius@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 11:03 next collapse

Not to forget: The cables are so sturdy you can strangle attackers with them. Comes in handy sometimes.

Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works on 19 Nov 2023 11:16 next collapse

Very true, and if you arrange them carefully they can even trip unsuspecting invaders. Built in home defence.

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 11:42 collapse

Haha, when I first moved into the house I’m living in now, my wife was never done tripping over my cable. I’d yet to mount it to the wall at that point…

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 11:20 next collapse

Let’s hope it never has to come to that…

midori@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 13:24 next collapse

Oh, shit. We’re dealing with a sysadmin.

ThePantser@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 13:35 next collapse

Sythadmin

Bene7rddso@feddit.de on 19 Nov 2023 19:29 collapse
humancrayon@sh.itjust.works on 20 Nov 2023 00:36 collapse

They are also strong enough to pull down stray branches stuck in a tree.

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 11:19 next collapse

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…

Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works on 19 Nov 2023 11:22 next collapse

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

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 11:40 collapse

Yea WiFi is definitely great for certain things, but not everything. My wife has friends over at the house from time to time, and some of them ask why I’d rather run a cable from the router to my computer instead of just using WiFi. It’s easy enough to explain, but because they are not all that technical, it’s hard for them to understand, I guess…

gramathy@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 14:59 collapse

For me it’s more that I have enough devices that if they were all on WiFi they would be eating all the airtime and the devices that need WiFi would have worse bandwidth.

ThePantser@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 13:38 collapse

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.

lud@lemm.ee on 19 Nov 2023 19:10 collapse

POE is an amazing invention

aard@kyu.de on 19 Nov 2023 14:18 collapse

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.

circuscritic@lemmy.ca on 19 Nov 2023 15:29 collapse

Seriously? This is 2023, we don’t have to pay homage to, or clarify our language regarding implementations and topologies that only a tiny fraction of current users are even aware they exist, and most of those have only read about them in a book, or manual.

sunbeam60@lemmy.one on 19 Nov 2023 19:41 collapse

Sir, this is a technology community!

[deleted] on 19 Nov 2023 11:30 next collapse

.

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 19 Nov 2023 11:49 next collapse

I never even realised that. Thanks for mentioning it…

AmberPrince@kbin.social on 19 Nov 2023 11:59 next collapse

To be pedantic: Ethernet is a protocol so mentioning the medium used outside of a historical context is kinda irrelevant.

ajlanes@thegoatery.dyndns.org on 19 Nov 2023 13:29 collapse

@@kbin.social A history plaque and its additional explanatory text is surely exactly the historical context to mention things like medium?

AmberPrince@kbin.social on 19 Nov 2023 13:58 collapse

And it did. It started with coaxial. The fact that ethernet is now largely used in conjunction with UTP or STP doesn't add much when talking about the Ethernet protocol itself.

aard@kyu.de on 19 Nov 2023 12:28 next collapse

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.

Unaware7013@kbin.social on 19 Nov 2023 13:14 next collapse

Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol, what does the layer 1 medium have to do with it?

r00ty@kbin.life on 19 Nov 2023 14:06 collapse

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.

philpo@feddit.de on 19 Nov 2023 22:26 collapse

Not to forget the war cry of every LAN Party:

“Who did not terminate?”

cerevant@lemm.ee on 19 Nov 2023 13:30 next collapse

“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.

Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee on 19 Nov 2023 22:11 collapse

To be fair, a decent WiFi setup shouldn’t do that either.

Confused_Emus@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 2023 00:56 next collapse

There are no decent WiFi setups in college dorms.

huquad@lemmy.ml on 20 Nov 2023 01:35 collapse

Key word, shouldn’t

XTL@sopuli.xyz on 19 Nov 2023 18:05 next collapse

One day Ethernet will be replaced with a new technology. It will be called Ethernet.

altima_neo@lemmy.zip on 19 Nov 2023 22:58 collapse

Mythrilnet

[deleted] on 20 Nov 2023 04:06 collapse

.

pixelscript@lemmy.ml on 20 Nov 2023 16:19 collapse

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, “gold armor trimming, 10k”

Raxiel@lemmy.world on 19 Nov 2023 21:46 next collapse

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.

philpo@feddit.de on 19 Nov 2023 22:28 collapse

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.

Elonkilledmydad@lemmy.ml on 20 Nov 2023 03:42 collapse

Why do you find that you need a drop in the bathroom?

kadu@lemmy.world on 20 Nov 2023 04:05 next collapse

How else would I get great signal integrity for the bathroom 4K camera?

philpo@feddit.de on 20 Nov 2023 13:13 collapse

Smart Speakers. And it turned out it would have been the perfect spot for one of the hotspots.

randombullet@feddit.de on 19 Nov 2023 22:13 next collapse

I run fiber because fiber SFPs are cheaper than copper lol.

But if it doesn’t move in my house, it’s wired.

deur@feddit.nl on 20 Nov 2023 02:14 collapse

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…

randombullet@feddit.de on 20 Nov 2023 03:27 collapse

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.

Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz on 19 Nov 2023 22:23 next collapse

I FUCKING LOVE ETHERNET

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 20 Nov 2023 15:38 collapse

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.

furycd001@lemmy.ml on 20 Nov 2023 16:13 collapse

You should totally go ahead and do it. It will be totally worth it…