What is an Ethernet cable? Here's how to connect to the internet without Wi-Fi and get a speedier connection

Krenum said:
I remember back in 1999ish, my friend and I successfully linked two 56k modems together, we thought it was the coolest thing ever. We were able to download files at a blistering 11kb a second. It was awesome!
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I remember doing this, too. After tweaking the modems further I was able to get the equivalent of 128 Kbps ISDN and was downloading in bursts of 20 KB/sec or more. My latency in Counter-Strike was cut in half to 15-20ms. Funny how 100ms latency is considered acceptable these days when I was going 5 times as fast on a dial up connection 20 years ago.
 
Armenius said:
I remember doing this, too. After tweaking the modems further I was able to get the equivalent of 128 Kbps ISDN and was downloading in bursts of 20 KB/sec or more. My latency in Counter-Strike was cut in half to 15-20ms. Funny how 100ms latency is considered acceptable these days when I was going 5 times as fast on a dial up connection 20 years ago.
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Man, those were the times werent they? I remember only having a 56k connection at my house. But I had a friend with pretty well off parents, they had cable internet. We would have LAN parties every weekend at his house. Our Counterstrike latency was 20-30ms. It was great! That was back when Napster & Kazzaa and the Warez sites popular too.
 
That was funny.

Yesterday, I just ran my 36th and 37th Cat6e ethernet cable to my patch panel in my basement. Gotta laugh at the "wifi" is better. I may have gone overboard with hardwiring my home internet, but my LAN all my devices love it.
 
johnrea77 said:



Ha - These were the old 10base5 taps (thickwire) we used to use with Digital Equipment Corp back in the 80's (pre 10base2 thin wire and 10baseT). We used to run around with the vampire kit and drill into the cable.
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I have done that.. at UCSB I had a job at the comsup lab in the Engineering 1 building.. I had to crawl through a tiny crawl space and tap in at the nodal points on the "thick net" to feed labs with network connectivity.. this was in like 94 ~ 95? ish.. technically I guess that was my first tech job but it felt more like sort of like a place to hang out between classes and I got paid a little too. God it was hot in that crawl space!


In related news.. my first Doom mutliplayer was played over a 10Base2 network in my old living room we setup.. We discovered how important terminators were that night.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I run Ethernet runs all over the house.
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Out of curiosity, did you have easy access to make runs (i.e. either attic and basement)? Drill through studs/beams in wall to make runs? My house literally has no attic as it's a "box style" house, and access is limited to wherever I cut a hole in the drywall, and only then because of the roof slope only half of that space is really accessable (guess which half my computer is in the house!)
 
sfsuphysics said:
Out of curiosity, did you have easy access to make runs (i.e. either attic and basement)? Drill through studs/beams in wall to make runs? My house literally has no attic as it's a "box style" house, and access is limited to wherever I cut a hole in the drywall, and only then because of the roof slope only half of that space is really accessable (guess which half my computer is in the house!)
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Living in an old home makes things like this easier.

There are plenty of places you can sneak through wires.

On the first floor my method of choice has been to lift up the metal covers that cover the holes were the hydronic pipes go through to the hot water baseboard heaters, run the cables through there, and then cover the hole back up again.

The house (built in 1962) also has a retrofitted forced air duct system for the central air. Many of the tubes run through closets and other semi rough-spaces, so I can just loosen the trim, snake through the wires, and then tighten everything down again.

In most cases I don't even have to drill any holes!

Anywhere the cable would wind up being visible, I just use those adhesive backed cable raceways closely matched to the wall or the wood trim in color for it to blend in. It takes a little time, but once it is done, it looks nice and professional.

The ideal solution would be to run cables in the walls and install faceplates everywhere, but that is a really big job unless you are pulling off the drywall for some reason. snaking the cables through holes you have drilled in 2x4 cross beams with your access point being nothing but a hole in the wall the size of a faceplate is frustrating to say the least. Pretty easy to do while you are renovating though. Heck, even if you are just repainting, it is fairly trivial to cut out and replace a section drywall, since you are probably going to sand, spackle and paint over it anyway.

because of this, I have done the short term solution where I take advantage of existing holes, until such time as I am renovating a room, at which time I might install faceplates.
 
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wait so if I go wireless, I won't need all these wires?
 

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I have 1GB ethernet to every room in my house. Honestly I'm gonna be a bit annoyed when 10GB ethernet is cheap and ubiquitous enough that I'll have to redo everything. It was a pain to do in the first place.
 
TheSlySyl said:
I have 1GB ethernet to every room in my house. Honestly I'm gonna be a bit annoyed when 10GB ethernet is cheap and ubiquitous enough that I'll have to redo everything. It was a pain to do in the first place.
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When I had my house built 5 years ago I had them put one in every room but bathrooms, and even put one in the garage. I asked them if they could do cat 6a or cat 7 but the best spools of cable they could find were cat 6. I recently finished the basement myself with cat 7 so at least that's ready.

I think we have a long wait until it's actually worth upgrading every room to 10 gb over 1.

I only have 1 gig fiber available to me, and even if I did have 10 I'm not sure I would pay for it, or realistically be able to take advantage of it anytime soon.
 
First thing I did when I bought my condo was tear out all the old legacy phone jacks and dropped ethernet in all the bedrooms and living room. Got it all running to a subtle network setup in a hall closet. I almost died doing the work so I appreciate it just more and more.
 
GoldenTiger said:
How did you almost die doing that? :eek:
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I was in my crawlspace dropping cable when it got knotted in the wall. I started pulling it, it suddenly came loose, and I slammed my head on the roof. Looking up, I had just narrowly avoided the nails the roof tiles were nailed in with. Long, sharp nails, that would have possibly gone right into my skull. I stopped, cleaned up, and went straight to Home Depot for a hard hat.
 
SuperSubZero said:
I was in my crawlspace dropping cable when it got knotted in the wall. I started pulling it, it suddenly came loose, and I slammed my head on the roof. Looking up, I had just narrowly avoided the nails the roof tiles were nailed in with. Long, sharp nails, that would have possibly gone right into my skull. I stopped, cleaned up, and went straight to Home Depot for a hard hat.
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Yeah, I've had a few close calls with roofing nails myself. Not pulling anything, but standing up (which is almost as bad). Busted my skull more than a few times on various things when standing up...should probably just always have a hard hat on.
 
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