Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
spectrum.ieee.org
The technology has become the standard LAN worldwide
  • @cerevant@lemm.eeEnglish
    106•7 months ago

    “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.

  • @XTL@sopuli.xyz
    25•7 months ago

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

    • aard
      31•7 months ago

      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.

    • AmberPrince
      18•7 months ago

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

      • ajlanes
        1•7 months ago

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

        • AmberPrince
          5•7 months ago

          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.

    • Unaware7013
      10•7 months ago

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

    • r00ty
      4•7 months ago

      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.

    • RaccoonnOP
      3•7 months ago

      I never even realised that. Thanks for mentioning it…

  • @randombullet@feddit.de
    17•7 months ago

    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
      8•7 months ago

      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
        8•7 months ago

        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.

  • @Raxiel@lemmy.world
    13•7 months ago

    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
      11•7 months ago

      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.