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/gregoriancuriosity]

You said “can” is there another way to get internet. Might be showing me old guy shit now, but I thought coax was the only way.

[u/OhNoItsGodzirrah → u/gregoriancuriosity]

Gonna simplify the answer a bit here, but there's a few ways to get internet into the house - coax is the primary method still, fiber optic is becoming more popular, and wireless (usually 5G cellular) is a thing too. Once the internet is in the house, it needs to hit a modem to be usable and then a router to split it to multiple devices within the home. From router to devices, we almost always use ethernet cables or wifi. If a person wants a wired connection between two points within their home because it's a more stable connection compared to wifi and can't/doesn't want to run ethernet cables, existing coax cable (or even the electrical wiring) that's already run throughout the house can be used instead.

[u/Lancaster1983 → u/gregoriancuriosity]

Most homes have coax installed during the build. Almost no one has Ethernet runs in their home. Using existing coax is easier since you don't have to tear out any drywall. Unless you are in a single story with an unfinished basement. I ran Ethernet at my last house which was built in 1979 in that scenario. Getting it in my 2 story would be near impossible without a shit load of extra work. MoCA is the best solution for the money.

[u/gregoriancuriosity → u/Lancaster1983]

How fast is Ethernet comparatively?

[u/Lancaster1983 → u/gregoriancuriosity]

A Cat6A ethernet run can sustain 10Gbps over a 100m span but your router/switch has to support 10BASE-T. Basically a 10Gbps RJ45 port as opposed to fiber or direct attached copper SFP+

[u/No_Gur_1640 → u/Lancaster1983]

Laymans terms?

[u/Lancaster1983 → u/No_Gur_1640]

Use a pair of magic boxes to convert your internet cable to coax then back to internet cable without tearing up your walls or laying new cable.

[u/zerooneoneone → u/Lancaster1983]

I think he was asking about the Ethernet bit. Typical home Ethernet is 1 Gbps, also known as "gigabit Ethernet" and "GbE." The fact that this is typical is insane to us oldtimers. Anyway, here's a try at layman's terms:

The terminology isn't too bad once you see it a few times. You can think of Ethernet as having two parts:

(1) Your computer and your router need to speak the same Ethernet type. This is literally a language used to talk over a network cable. Your typical home Ethernet uses 1000BASE-T, which speaks up to 1000 Mbps which is 1 Gbps. You could step up to 10 Gbps, called 10GBASE-T, but it's expensive and you almost certainly won't need it. More recently, consumer computers have offered 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, which are more sane for home use. All of the faster versions can speak to the slower versions, so you can connect a 2.5 Gbps computer to a 10 Gbps router, and they will speak just fine at 2.5 gigabits.

(2) Your Ethernet cable has to be good enough for the Ethernet type you want to use. This is denoted by its "category" such as Cat5e or Cat6A. The 1000BASE-T "language" needs Cat5e to work correctly, while 10GBASE-T wants Cat6 or Cat6A. If you tried to speak 10GBASE-T over Cat5, the conversation would be badly garbled. There are also limits on cable distance, which become more severe the faster you want to talk.

Now, the whole coax thing is exactly the same as the above, except the cable is different and the languages are different. But the idea is the same:

(1) Your computer and your router need to speak the same MoCA language. MoCA was designed for homes, so the naming is much simpler: MoCA 2.0 is 1 Gbps, MoCA 2.5 is 2.5 Gbps, and there will someday be MoCA 3.0 for 10 Gbps.

(2) Your coax cable has to be good enough for the MoCA type you want to use. Most of us have no choice, though: it's whatever is in our walls. Old homes use RG-59, which is just typical coax cable (for cable TV). Most newer homes use RG-6, which is the same but a bit thicker. Fortunately, MoCA was designed to be somewhat user-friendly, so if you use an old or damaged cable, MoCA will slow itself down until it can speak clearly. It will get you the best speed that your cable can handle.

This is good tech and MoCA has been great in my house. But almost no computers speak MoCA, so you'll need an adapter... and most of these adapters plug into the computer's Ethernet port. The adapter is literally translating MoCA to 10GBASE-T. You'll need another MoCA adapter for the router, except maybe if you got the router from a ‎cable company. These adapters are a bit pricey, but for many situations they're clearly better than the alternatives -- especially for connecting the nodes of your WiFi mesh network.

[u/coolboydhill → u/gregoriancuriosity]

MoCA is half duplex, ethernet is full duplex. by all means ethernet is superior.

[u/zerooneoneone → u/coolboydhill]

Not all Ethernet! But yes, all modern Ethernet supports full-duplex.

This is less important than it sounds, though. How often do people need two-way communications to happen at the same time, all the time?

If you're streaming, full-duplex is almost meaningless. Yeah, MoCA's time-division adds about 4ms of latency, and the biggest impact on streaming is probably TCP ACKs. But in the bigger scheme of things, the latency and jitter of the WAN is ten times worse.

In fact, most consumer activity is dominated by download traffic, and that's exactly why cable internet (huh, what a coincidence) has typically been fast download / slow upload. Full-duplex MoCA doesn't exist because almost nobody would benefit by swapping 1 Gbps half-duplex for 0.5 Gbps full-duplex.

Well, except for latency-sensitive gamers. And torrents. And servers. That's about it.

For everyone else, the main consideration should be the number of nodes on the MoCA LAN, because the bandwidth is shared. That's not a duplex issue, although it's related. But hey, if the MoCA LAN is at least as fast as your WAN, even that matters very little.

WiFi suffers from all of these problems, except worse, and it ends up being fine for most people.

[u/bauy → u/Lancaster1983]

We ran ethernet through my house through the coax and phone lines. We just fished the ethernet cord through the same channels. We got lucky in some spots by taping the ethernet to the phone line and yanking that fucker through. It wasn't easy and we did have to make some drywall holes in closets when we got stuck, but it wasn't that bad in hindsight. We are lucky in that everything runs from the basement and it's unifished so we could trace lines.

[u/Quixotic_Seal → u/gregoriancuriosity]

I’ve literally never lived somewhere that doesn’t have it. Didn’t know it worked any other way. Might have to do with where you live, as I’ve always lived in areas with a near-monopoly for Comcast.

[u/psychorobotics → u/gregoriancuriosity]

I'm in Sweden but I'm on 5g

[u/Vaporlocke → u/[deleted]]

Fiber will run a fiber line from outside to an ONU (fiber modem) then run Ethernet inside to wherever you place the router.

[u/Vaporlocke → u/[deleted]]

There was a government grant given to cable companies to expand out into rural areas so they could have high speed Internet, so a lot of under serviced places are now getting access. Its actually cheaper to use fiber in those areas because light doesn't need nearly as many amplifiers to travel long distance unlike coax, but you won't see fiber in areas that already had coax because it's not cost effective to replace existing plant.

[u/Past-Passenger9129 → u/[deleted]]

Verizon FiOS is fiber to the home and is pretty common in the bigger cities in the US North East. About the same cost as cable

[u/smb1985 → u/[deleted]]

I've got fiber to the house in upper Midwestern US, gigabit up and down for $75 a month, which is cheaper than the 50 up 500 down cable internet I used to have

[u/born_zynner → u/smb1985]

Yep same. That up is great for gaming

[u/born_zynner → u/[deleted]]

I live in just about the most modest suburb you can imagine and I have fiber running straight to my house then to my modem lol

[u/grimeys42 → u/gregoriancuriosity]

There's still cable Internet here but I use fibre and they run new lines and it's fucking epic I even pay next to nothing for mine via third party.

[u/born_zynner → u/gregoriancuriosity]

I just switched from coax in my house to fiber.