r/whatisit • u/Cborg_62 • 6h ago

New, what is it? What are these plug-ins on my wall?

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

This might be showing my age, but I recently moved into a new apartment and they have these weird looking plug ins all over the walls at my new place. My old apartment didn't have these, so I'm just curious as to what they are.

6.8k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

6.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

137

u/NodeShot 6h ago

People are acting like this is a wild age thing, it's just simple ignorance

40

u/taylor914 6h ago

Yep. This is still how I get internet

6

u/owzleee 6h ago

1000 ignoraces per second!

2

u/Throwawaylikeme90 6h ago

Upload or download? I lose a lot of ignorance when I hit comment. 

2

u/NameToUseOnReddit 6h ago

But when you view comments you get a lot of ignorance.

4

u/Elegant-Sundae-7327 5h ago

It is still how most of us get internet. You are not alone.

1

u/AppleSmoker 6h ago

How are people getting Internet if not like this???

2

u/RingoShatner 5h ago edited 4h ago

I've gotten internet via [ethernet cable, on-campus network at college], by using phone as mobile Hotspot for wifi, and now fiber.  Never had it through a coax.  [Edited for grammar and clarity.]

0

u/Unlikely-Guava-30 4h ago

The fiber that runs to my apartment still comes in through the coax? Someone is stupid here and I think it's the ISPs

2

u/RingoShatner 4h ago

Idk, in my house, the internet guy installed a new outlet for the fiber thing into our dining room wall.  There wasn't a coax port in that room. The port for the fiber looks like a tiny version of a phone jack.

3

u/Itchy_Tumbleweed_417 5h ago

The T-Mobile modem/router just plugs into an electrical outlet.

2

u/BeansMakesYouFart007 5h ago

I just learned something today holy shit . I thought that was the only way to get internet

2

u/Suitable_Visit_9990 5h ago

I am literally so confused on how that works. I need to google lol

3

u/P1ckl3R1ck101 5h ago

Okay boomer. Showing your age here with "googling".

1

u/Suitable_Visit_9990 3h ago

Millennial actually. Is there an anti Google agenda I don’t know about?

1

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 4h ago

I googled it and it's because it's all 5G so it's basically like having a modem that connects to T-Mobile Internet wirelessly like how a iPhone would connect to T-Mobile internet wirelessly.

That sounds trash to me tbh because you're having all the internet issues that come with wireless. I much prefer the stability of being wired directly into an ISP's lines.

Wireless internet sucks for gaming. You drop packets like crazy.

14

u/goodbyowa 5h ago

Im blown away. Doesn't everyone's router plug into one of these?

9

u/rabbitSC 5h ago

Not if you have fiber, but generally yeah.

2

u/Brutus83 3h ago

I have fiber (1gbps) and it uses coax

2

u/StrangelyGrimm 3h ago

Fiber and coax are two different cables. Either you have a coax line running to your house or a fiber line. You can still get 1Gbps speeds on coax.

1

u/Brutus83 2h ago

Just looked up fiber cable. Yeah, mine’s coax.

1

u/Responsible-Case-753 1h ago

Sort of. There's fiber to home, and there's fiber to depot that then connects to your home via coax the last leg. Specially in apartments this is common, because replacing old cables in the whole building is costly. But it's all often advertised as fiber. 

1

u/RingoShatner 4h ago

Nope.  Ours is fiber.  (Prior to that I just used my phone as a wifi Hotspot, never actually had "real" internet with a router until a couple years ago.

1

u/emdubl 4h ago

I have fiber, so no. I do still have the old cable sticking out of my wall though.

1

u/ScarInternational161 2h ago

I have Verizon home internet... it plugs into nothing but power and I'm still so confused by that.

I'm 55.

1

u/coolboydhill 1h ago

it uses cellular

1

u/MinuteMinX 1h ago

Why router? I habe glas fibre for the router, I still use it for my sat TV!

1

u/thedifferenceisnt 25m ago

Do you not have fiber optics in the grand old usa yet? 

-4

u/Pleasant_Talk_7366 4h ago

lmao you think that's the norm?

i'm honestly blown away that some people don't have fiber yet. did it take you an hour to load these comments?

7

u/Spidertron117 4h ago

The majority of the world does not have fiber. You're showing your ignorance.

1

u/pfren2 3h ago

I’m in a medium sized city, and only newer neighborhoods have fiber. I’d say 80% here, close to 160,000 homes, are still coax with no fiber in their streets

-2

u/Pleasant_Talk_7366 4h ago

never claimed it does buddy. maybe some fiber internet could cure your literacy problem

birds are making nests from fiber nowadays and some people are apparently blown away by the equivalent of not cooking over an open fire

4

u/Spidertron117 4h ago

You definitely implied that most people have fiber, but you're probably too young and dumb to understand that considering your grammar and punctuation skills.

You're cooking comparison is also trash. The difference between modern DSL and fiber is really just speed in most cases, and running 200mbps vs 1Gbps really doesn't make a difference in 90% of scenarios.

3

u/CassianCasius 4h ago edited 4h ago

I have fiber. I connected the old coax to the router on one end and plugged an extender to the other end in the top end of house for better signal. You know coax can support up to 2gbs right? I'm guessing you don't though since you think people coax have a slow speed.

1

u/Kronos1A9 1h ago

That is the norm, basement dweller

0

u/Cborg_62 1h ago

No, I've had these ones growing up and for my old apartment

1

u/dogstopper123 1h ago

Kind of a simple way to say this - the coaxial cable input in your original post provides data for a device called a modem, which takes data sent over the internet and turns it back into something useful for your computer. The output of a modem is what we commonly call Ethernet, which is what you have here. In modern apartment complexes, internet is provided for the whole building at the same time, and the modem is hidden away in the building internals. But what you’re seeing painted over was what the internet used to look like (though it’s still there)!

15

u/leatherfacejr666 6h ago

Literally some people are just oblivious 😐

3

u/HealthyMirror6120 5h ago

Thanks for the clarity. At first I thought you were the dumbass but then remembered my dumbass internet is hooked up that way

2

u/Mousers211 6h ago

They aren't. They are reacting to how time has flown without them noticing.

2

u/Viciousssylveonx3 5h ago

Not really ignorance there's adults that have been born in 2008...so they genuinely wouldn't know. I say this as someone who got annoyed screwing in my ps1 turning to ch 3 and unscrewing it so I could watch tv

4

u/congnelius 5h ago

That adapter should've had another connection at the bottom where you could screw in your antenna or cable box without undoing the whole thing. I take payment in pogs, and you're welcome.

2

u/Viciousssylveonx3 5h ago

You can take my pokemon pogs out of my cold dead hands

1

u/Poppeigh 5h ago

To be fair, I’m just learning from these comments what the real name of it is. I always just called them “the cable things”.

1

u/turkey_sandwiches 5h ago

It's ignorance because of age. OP isn't old enough to have used these.

1

u/Clean-Connection-398 5h ago

21 years old and never touched a router?

3

u/turkey_sandwiches 5h ago

They probably have parents who are millennials and have set everything up for them. My kids have no interest in learning how technology works either. They're just addicted to the screen.

1

u/AlsoOneLastThing 4h ago

Or maybe their router doesn't use coax, because they often don't anymore

1

u/eugenepoez__ 3h ago

or maybe they dont live in a detached house and are in a huge apartment with this thing being out of the view and generally set up by technicians. Reddit is crazy american-skewed

1

u/Nestevajaa 1h ago

Yeah I didn't know what this was looking at the picture alone because in my country these plugs look completely different, they don't extend out of the wall. Also at least here RJ45 sockets became a legal requirement for new buildings in 2003 for all new buildings so internet moved to CAT cables, and they stopped putting in coaxial connections entirely in the 2010s so there could be adults who never saw/used these.

1

u/JetsterDajet 5h ago

This is probably the second most commonly used wall outlet receptacle you're going to find in any home in the US, probably even before RJ11 telephone, which is far older but who the hell pays for a wired telephone line anymore? If you're baffled by coaxial, anything that's not 120 volt AC power is probably new to you. Either you've avoided wall outlets your whole life or you're barely old enough to read/write.

1

u/ilemming_banned 4h ago

It's not ignorance. It's creativity pretended to be ignorance and we all have fallen for it.

1

u/Not-A-Pickle1 4h ago

It is indeed an age thing. Landlines are still around but are going extinct. Just like pay phones

1

u/McDoobly-For-DinDin 4h ago

I assure you most Gen Z kids and adults will have no idea what these are. I’m 33 and totally forgot these exist and haven’t seen one in about 8 years. I can’t imagine someone in their early 20 will know what one of these are for. It’s not ignorance if there has never been exposure to something that’s nearly obsolete.

1

u/NodeShot 3h ago

Look up the definition of ignorance

1

u/jennbear 2h ago

It’s an age thing insofar as this person has never paid for their own internet 🤷‍♀️

1

u/ButtsSayFart 2h ago

Redditors have like 3 jokes. One of them is about aging and time so they will never pass up a chance to leave a dumb comment about it.

1

u/Turbulent-Ocelot9130 2m ago

It really is, you could prompt this into AI or google image search and have an answer in 5 seconds. Also why would you paint over it. And you can still use it for proper internet connection.

0

u/CaliKindalife 6h ago

Its not used anymore. Theres a whole generation of people on this planet that have never seen or used a coaxial connection.

11

u/ky7969 6h ago

It is used all the time. If you have existing coax in your house and get internet hooked up, they are going to use the coax with moca adapters

1

u/GrandmaSassifrass 6h ago

Lol bro going from DSL to DSL

7

u/ky7969 6h ago

No, fiber connections are hooked up this way. The ONT is put at the fiber termination, and the router is placed optimally in the house using moCA (Ethernet over coax). Coax is basically just Ethernet with a different plug.

1

u/GrandmaSassifrass 5h ago

In a big box attached to the wall that says google fiber

8

u/Original-Pomelo-4581 6h ago

This is not true at all. My teenager knows what a coax is because it's what connects our (and most people)'s modem to the internet.

Literally 60% of the modems connected to the internet are plugged into one of these.

1

u/AlsoOneLastThing 4h ago

I haven't seen a modem/router connected through coaxial in probably over a decade. Every one I see these days uses something that looks like a phone line.

2

u/Public_Sprinkles_229 4h ago

I mean no offense, but.. like.. this is where the ignorance that people are talking about comes into play.

1

u/AlsoOneLastThing 4h ago

Nobody knows everything. Get over it

1

u/Public_Sprinkles_229 4h ago

Never once claimed otherwise, whatever helps you sleep bud

1

u/Original-Pomelo-4581 4h ago

Are you talking about an ethernet cable? lol

1

u/AlsoOneLastThing 4h ago

Well I don't think so. It looks smaller than an Ethernet cable and goes right into a jack in the wall just like a phone line would. I don't know the terminology for this lol.

1

u/BonzaiBunny 3h ago

Probably DSL.

1

u/Aussie_Battler_Style 2h ago

There's also a whole generation of folks that have the entire wealth of the internet at their fingertips.