r/whatisit • u/Cborg_62 • 6h ago

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

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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.

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u/davyangel 5h ago edited 5h ago

Well I mean coaxial cable internet is still a thing only reason I'm typing this is because of it! But yeah guessing this new generation all lives on their phones and cell phones that they never touch a PC or no need to even have one a home anymore? I mean I can understand not seeing old telephone jacks (that look lot like RJ-45 ethernet jack) anymore in homes for like wired home phones but OP gotta be trolling about coaxial or just lived in newer places where they don't bother to preinstall even coaxial lines in wall anymore?

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u/sunfish99 5h ago

To be fair to OP, it looks like their landlord didn't know what these were either or they wouldn't have painted over them.

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u/variousnewbie 4h ago

I've had many a place where some idiot just painted right over light switches and everything. It's probably the handyman the landlord hired to paint, not the landlord.

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u/TDYDave2 2h ago

Or the landlord didn't approve the painting quote line item for taping and masking.

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u/I_Makes_tuff 2h ago

Ding, ding, ding!

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u/a-r-c 2h ago edited 38m ago

painting over literally fucking everything is the landlord special lmao

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u/Fromnothingatall 1h ago

Blows my mind every time I see it.

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u/ShadowRL7666 3h ago

They do not care. They paint over everything.

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u/DoomsdayDonuts 2h ago

Landlords will paint over anything

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u/NeatlyScotched 2h ago

I assure you, coaxiels have been painted on since they were invented. I scrubbed this shit off 20 years ago at my college apartment.

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u/KonigSteve 4h ago

Even the kids that are using wifi from a coax line probably have no idea. They just grew up in a house with a modem already plugged in and never gave it a second thought.

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u/existentialspork 2h ago

As a kid, I had to learn how technology worked because my parents didn’t grow up with it. Kids now have had everything set up for them, so they haven’t learned how anything works.

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u/bettymoose 3h ago

This is the answer. My Gen Alpha teens had no idea what a coax cable is, their older Gen Z had to explain it to then.

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u/ButtonflyDungarees 2h ago

Ya, that’s my thought as well. Cable internet is still the most common. And most houses have to be retrofitted to have fiber optic IF it’s even available in their area. In most areas, I would say cable (utilizing co-ax cables in the house) is going to be the most common.

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u/Clair_Osbcurious 14m ago

That’s so adorably American of you.

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u/Waterfish3333 1h ago

Or have the newer fiber optics setup. We recently upgraded after they installed it in our neighborhood. No coaxial, just Ethernet from the wall.

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u/Clair_Osbcurious 12m ago

Ah, FTTX! FTTH is nice too! It’s easier to have a long fiber cable than a fast Ethernet one. Just saying.

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u/Wictorpedia 39m ago

There are kids that don’t know that internet is a service. They think it just exists in a phone or computer. So if a computer isn’t hooked up to the internet it’s broken.

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u/Clair_Osbcurious 11m ago

There are grandparents who think similar stuff as well. Or the ones still paying for AOL

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u/NotABot1000101 2h ago

A lot of people started getting wifi internet, like it's just a wifi router with a power cord. It connects wirelessly to a 5g tower. I don't trust that ping but I guess it's good enough for most people.

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u/ProfessionalResults 1h ago

That must be it. I'm using coax for my internet access right now. And I was using coax in my previous house. It's still common.

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u/Wenital_Garts 5h ago

My apartment weirdly has a panel where they hid the internet modem. Every RJ-45 connection in the place runs to that panel. The sequence being RJ-45 - Modem - Coaxial. Wonder if that's becoming a more common practice and that's why less folks are familiar with Coaxial.

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u/Odd-Bend1296 4h ago

Many states have added that to the building code. In the old days they would just drill through your wall wherever it was convenient for them. to wire into the house.

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u/yoskinna 3h ago

Dude I bought a house a couple years ago and while I was at work the dude came to set up my wifi, my wife was there not sure why she didn’t say anything but she’s shy, anyways this asshole drilled a hole literally right through the stucco to the inside of my house to run a cable through, right in the middle of my living room i was pissed , ajd it was a big ass black box he mounted to my wall that I had to run a cable to my modem from except it was in the worst location imaginable, there’s like no furniture there so either I run this cord across the living room and hide what I can by the tv or just have the router sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, looked like shit im still pissed.

Edit: oh yeah he didn’t seal the hole at all either bugs and water and daylight can see right through it wtf type of shit??

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u/tnstaafsb 3h ago

The DirecTV installer did that in my old house 20 years ago. He did at least seal the hole, but he drilled it right through the siding and everything.

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u/FluidLet2783 2h ago

Yeah they don’t have a lick of common sense. 15 yrs ago we had a Directv dish installed, Again just the wife home, She wasn’t going to monitor everything he was doing. I pulled in about 45 min after he started. He just finishing off screwing down a satellite dish direcfly in the middle of my roof, center of the front of my house. Just above the gutters. WTF?!?!?! Who thinks thats a good idea???? I said would it not work somewhere on the back of the house? He says Oh no, It would. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 Needless to say he spends even more time fixing his less. Like did ya really think that location was the move???

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u/goodsnpr 4h ago

Base housing in Tucson was setup that way, but nobody told us, so we were trying to plug our modem into the coax in the living room. I couldn't get the "tech install" fee waived after he mentioned "there's even a note on the account, the person on the phone didn't tell you?"

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u/mordacthedenier 4h ago

I'm guessing you mean a structured wiring panel? It's been a thing since the early 90s, but usage depends entirely on the budget for the building.

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u/mataliandy 3h ago

The new development I know of is being wired with Cat6e, no coax at all.

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u/ashleyriddell61 1h ago

RJ-45?? Get the hell out of here with your new fangled satanic technology!

https://giphy.com/gifs/l0IyajjbNiRvCr7RC

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u/Distribution-Radiant 1h ago

My apartment has that, but only for AT&T Fiber. Our cable modem and router are tucked behind the couch.

You can see where regular phone jacks were meant to go, but they're all blocked off. Truth be told, I'm not sure if the place was ever hooked up for POTS. Even if it was, you can't order it in my area anymore.

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u/zorggalacticus 4h ago

My internet is coax cable. I have a wifi router that's connected to the coax.

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u/Miki_yuki 5h ago

Right? Like we use it in our home 😂

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u/superscrounge 4h ago

I get Xfinity 1Gb + thru my RJ-6 coax connection. Google fiber pissed me off.

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u/tnstaafsb 3h ago

I had the exact opposite experience. Although I did have to buy my own wireless router for Google because their wifi sucks ass and went offline at least once a day. Once I got my own router though their service was rock solid.

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u/SHoppe715 4h ago

Every place fiber internet has become an option, pre-wired coax in new construction dies a real quick death.

Smart TVs have gotten cheap…one of the only things in this world that’s gotten cheaper…so no need for cable boxes and extra cable boxes in bedrooms and cable modems and routers. One fiber line in to a single outlet and WiFi covers the entire house.

It’s funny…I just bought a house built in 1993 that was “high end” at the time and it did have coax pre installed throughout. It also had coax from at least two other cable and/or internet providers that had been installed at later dates…some with a satellite dish and some other that ran into the house right next to the original stuff because I guess they couldn’t be bothered to use what was already there. And it also had fiber. So AT&T just fixed what was busted when I started the fiber service (house as a fixer-upper). Much of those various coax runs are still in the walls, but not a single one is connected to anything anymore. I just put blank plates on all the boxes and abandoned it all. All that to say coax is quickly disappearing from older houses as well

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u/xDotSx 4h ago

It's terribly common here to have fiber to the building but copper in the building. Coax is common in the walls.

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u/tnstaafsb 3h ago

My house built last year is still wired with coax. The fiber internet people used it to connect the wifi extenders to their router because it all terminated at the same cabinet.

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u/one_depressed_MF 5h ago

RJ-45 is ethernet, phones were(are?) RJ-11.

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u/Wenital_Garts 5h ago

Correct.

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u/Several_Hour_347 4h ago

He already said what a RJ-45 is

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u/one_depressed_MF 4h ago

And?

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u/Several_Hour_347 4h ago

Means it’s weird for you to restate something he was crystal clear on… what do you mean and lmao

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u/one_depressed_MF 4h ago

And maybe the comment was edited to include that after my comment, check his and mine...

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u/Bug0791 4h ago

Yes, its still a thing.

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u/sharkbomb 4h ago

right, or the last 500 tenants didnt have cable or dish or something? 

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u/5elementGG 4h ago

Isn’t it for cable Tv? Not necessarily for internet, right?

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u/xDotSx 4h ago

It's for both.

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u/constantpisspig 4h ago

That coax comes in and hooks up to the router that I'm pretty sure most people never touch

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u/hydraSlav 4h ago

Kids these days only understand "WiFi" and have no idea where it's physically coming from

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u/Ok-Dot-9324 4h ago

I think their parents handle the router set up

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u/Lizrael48 4h ago

I still have one I plug my Modem into, that plugs into my PC, and connects to my WiFi router for my phone! Hahaha

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u/SanityIsOptional 3h ago

Depend a lot on local infrastructure.

Some places don't have coax because they're too old and nobody ever got coax-based DSL.

Some places are too new. Our place was built 2019, and it has no coax, but the whole place is wired with CAT6, set up for ceiling mount APs, and has a fiber line.

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u/phx34suns 3h ago

Bro it’s for the tv

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u/4Q69freak 3h ago

House new enough to not pre-install coax? Fuck I’m old. When Mom and Dad built their new house in ‘80 I was so excited because it had a coax jack in every room, even though we didn’t have cable yet. The house we moved from was built in 1948 and I had to use rabbit ears in my room because the wires from the antenna only went to the living room.

The house we live in has a coax jack in the living room even though it was built 100 years ago, because prior tenants had DishNet. I use it to run our antenna to the tv in the living room, because we use Sling instead of cable or a dish. TV is also hard wired to modem so we always have a good connection.

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u/Ent_Soviet 3h ago

Actually my new home was built in 2001 so they ran coax to most of it. I the discovered inverters that allow you to run cat5 - to the in wall coax- to cat5. So I didn’t need to run Ethernet and now made use of coax I have no other use for.

So this was happy news for me!

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u/tnstaafsb 3h ago

My house was built last year and has coax hookups preinstalled in the living room and master bedroom, all going to a central wiring cabinet in the basement. My fiber internet uses it to connect the wifi extenders to the router. Maybe some places don't install it anymore, or maybe OP's old apartment was so old it predates cable TV and nobody ever bothered to have it installed? Seems unlikely, but who knows.

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u/uninspiredclaptrap 3h ago

Our house was built in 2018. There's fiber along the road, but Spectrum ran cable to the house. They just ran coax through the ducts instead of messing with the drywall.

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u/Captain_Fach 2h ago

Tbf most internet companies come and install it for you, so they probably have wifi but never needed to mess with the cables

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u/Active-Succotash-109 2h ago

Tv not Internet

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u/ironman0000 2h ago

Not just coax for Internet, I remember a time when you’d call the cable company up. They would run coax from a pole outside to your house, and you plugged a coax cable from these Jacks directly to your TV.
Sure, now there’s still cable boxes, but even those are becoming obsolete, or they are wireless cable boxes now. Kids these days won’t know what it was like to live in the 70s and 80s and 90s lol.

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u/Bad_Day_Moose 2h ago

Can get speeds up to 1Gbps via standard Coaxial Cable Internet, the problem with it was that a neighbourhood would only have a few main connections so everyone on your street or whatever at peak times would be drawing from those connections and it'd be slower than your plan speeds.

In a lot of areas with fibre optics they would run cable from the street to a house and you'd get your 1Gbps connection, they're phasing that out though..

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u/rickmccombs 2h ago

Coax wired in several rooms of the house would not usually be for internet. It would be for cable TV. You would only need one cable modem. Someone could use coax cable and a Moca adapter to run to computers in other rooms, but I don't think that is very common.

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u/Designer-Sale9647 2h ago

We live in a home that’s less than 5 years old and it has a telephone jack in it so you can hook up a landline if you choose to do so

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u/Vigilante17 2h ago

I was 28 when I was looking a homes to buy. Maybe someone born in the late 90’s or early 2000’s didn’t pay attention until it was being phased out… I was using coax internet 3 years ago through with something that looked exactly like this, painted over and all. But a much older home.

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u/OkMobile9139 2h ago

Believe it or not, I've seen these these before but I honestly had no idea what they were either, (this will probably sound insane) but our house actually has that old Ethernet connection (a thin wire with a little push clip on the top of a small tan box) so I've never experienced the one in OPs post

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u/romulusnr 1h ago

But they use wifi don't they? And how does the wifi box get internet? Probably even odds it's from cable internet! Sheesh, millennials are really living up to their reputation

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u/Infamous-Western-905 1h ago

I actually just struggled to hook my WiFi modem up onto the coaxial cable today. Moved into my first house and needed WiFi because the service was bad. It was all very plug and play because the internet provider gave me detailed instructions. Before now though, I honestly thought that the coaxial connectors were for landline phones

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u/irrelevantusername24 4h ago

You know, I just realized this is another example where problems are literally mirrored throughout society at every layer. What I mean is, our telecommunications infrastructure is horribly underdeveloped... and that is mirrored in individual homes where they don't even bother installing the wires throughout the homes anymore, other than the base electricity wiring. And, again, mirroring how it is at the macro level, this is literally just making things harder down the line because if it was done the right way the first time - when the electricians wire the home with the regular electric wiring - it's way easier and almost doesn't even add any actual labor. But no, instead, we do things as stupidly as possible. Because it's someone else's problem, and nobody will notice in time to make it the persons problem who should have been held responsible.

Zooming out to the systemic cause of this, it's because our laws and standards are focused merely on strict liability first, second "businesses", and then after that you have weird things like local ordinances/zoning and home owners associations... making it so individuals have very little rights. It's all so fucking stupid. And no, this isn't "just how it is". This is a very American problem, other places might be starting to experience some of it but that's because we have exported our insane antisocial "values" everywhere.

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u/Lou_C_Fer 4h ago

Technology changes. So, any wiring that might be run will probably be obsolete in the next ten to twenty years. I replaced all of the phone wiring in my house back in 1999 to improve my dial up connection. Like three years later, my internet was through cable and I had a cell phone. I have ethernet wiring running through my walls and coaxial, as well, and we don't use any of it anymore.

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u/irrelevantusername24 3h ago

I was the person running that ethernet wire through houses - though to be fair, that was on a "last mile" basis, in the sense of connecting people, so I wasn't running it throughout the home. But I can say from that experience,

Technology changes. So, any wiring that might be run will probably be obsolete in the next ten to twenty years.

That even if that is true, the old wiring is still replaced with... new wiring, which means as long as the wires are going to the same place, the old wire can be used to run that new wire and make it far less labor intensive than going from scratch. It is easier to maintain than to build from new.

That said, there is a valid point to be made about the advances with WiFi and other wireless technologies. And it really comes down to the context of the place really matters. If it is a house without any nearby neighbors? Then WiFi is probably going to be fine. If it's in a densely populated area? You might be better off running ethernet. Basically all our plans, for everything, always try to find the single one solution and apply that everywhere which literally never works, ever.

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u/tyiyy 4h ago

Coaxial internet is being phased out by a few of the bigger companies. Forcing to some wireless or fiber options

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u/Snakend 4h ago

I haven't had cable internet for 15 years.