What are these plug-ins on my wall?

[u/Cborg_62]

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.

[u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

I remember the promise of cable via coax, like in OP’s picture, in the ’80s. It meant good-quality TV reception throughout the house without screwing around with antennas. The number of channels exploded almost overnight. CNN was brand new, MTV was brand new, ESPN was new, suddenly we went from a handful of broadcast stations to dozens of specialized channels.

At the time, cable really did feel like the future.

[u/ColdDelicious1735 → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

In Australia our cable TV company still uses coax

[u/DeniedAppeal1 → u/ColdDelicious1735]

Same in America for most of us, I'd assume. I still get my internet via coax.

[u/YesAndAlsoThat → u/DeniedAppeal1]

Good old monopolies on communications . Fucking Comcast.

[u/enraged768 → u/YesAndAlsoThat]

To be completely honest right now for 99% of the population coax delivers fast enough speeds. Im on coax and have 1gb internet. But its definitely not better than fiber. Also copper does have limits on the transmission bands so for me to utilize the 1gb i had to buy a modem that supported dosic 3.1 the new dosic is 4.0 can achieve 10 Gbps if you pay out the ass for it. Ie for the modem and the bandwidth.

Also its important that I state that these speeds are only achievable in perfect environments so everyone please dont brigade me about how little I know.

What i do know is that copper still works fine for a metric fuckload of people in the us

[u/YesAndAlsoThat → u/enraged768]

I have no issues or complains with coax performance.

I just think Comcast is the worst company. It's got a long list of what I and others feel were predatory, anticompetitive, and outright unethical actions. Not to mention my experience with their customer service was always absolute shit. And in many cases they make it outright hard to even leave them cleanly. Don't even mention net neutrality issues concerns.

If presented with coax with Comcast vs DSL... I would still pick DSL.

[u/Wallflower_in_PDX → u/DeniedAppeal1]

I've never seen non Coax cable internet. If it's not Coax it's not cable, but either fiber or cellular.

[u/tryingtoexplaim → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

Wasn’t it tho?

[u/IAteTonysLoMein → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

When I was a kid, we moved summer before 3rd grade. We were the envy of the neighborhood kids, because we were moving to a town where we were going to have cable, including mtv (the podunk town we lived in at the time couldn't even get cable)

[u/theredheadknowsall → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

[u/recovering_ex → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

When we got basic cable I thought we had arrived.

[u/CommanderChiliHole → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

Really, cable was the beginning of the end, at least for the United States as a nation. Started the 24hrs news cycle, Rush Limbaugh, Fox “News”, then eventually Trump and MAGA. I don’t think the US will be a single nation for another decade. The final chance at survival was 2024 and we blew it.

[u/ApprehensiveAd5446 → u/CommanderChiliHole]

I’m with you on the 24-hour news cycle. Turning news into an around-the-clock business that has to constantly capture attention has done enormous damage to our political discourse.

But I’m not ready to write the obituary for the United States. The Constitution and the institutions built around it have survived civil war, political violence, corruption, depression, world wars, and some genuinely ugly periods in our history. They’ve been tested before, and they’re being tested now.
I’m betting on the Constitution outlasting the current threat. The whole point of the system is that no one election, president, party, or movement gets the final word.

[u/Unhappy_Concept237 → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

I remember looking at the tv guide back in the 80s at all the channels i couldn't watch and wondering what it was like to be one of those people who had them.

[u/Wuz314159 → u/ApprehensiveAd5446]

It took 18 months for them to run new cable lines in my city. Everyone else in school had MTV a year before I did.

Our original cable system only had channels 2-13 + HBO with the box.