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Comment by gcheong | Hacker News Reader

I think you want to be a bit ahead of where the technology is now to have some room for future possibilities and assuming you're pulling cable you might as well pull the "biggest" one you can(i.e. fiber). To give an analogy, we recently remodeled our kitchen, which required a rewiring of the electrical given current standards. That alone used up all the remaining circuits of our 100 amp panel. But we have several gas appliances that we eventually want to switch to electric heat-pump technology (water heater, dryer, furnace) and an EV which I'd like to have a level 2 charger for but that would most likely mean a service upgrade to 200 amps. On the flip-side, we have 1000Mbps; thinking about whether we have enough bandwidth to do X isn't even a thing now.

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You remodeled in 2023 and you only provisioned 1 Gbit? There are already 2.5 and 5Gbit copper Ethernet PHYs out there. You said "pull the biggest one you can" but - 1Gbit of fiber?

I mean, I guess if your chief usage of traffic is to the outside world, a really snappy LAN doesn't mean much at all; it's not your bottleneck. But I'm confused about your post which appears to contradict itself. Perhaps I misunderstood, and your kitchen remodel only involved AC electrical and no networking. No IoT fridge yet?

If I were pulling network cabling today for a remodel, it'd surely be multi-mode fiber in the 100Gbit range, right? Right?

The 1 Gbit is the service to the house, not the LAN, and it was (still is?) the fastest we could get at the time we got it (2016). The remodel was the kitchen cabinetry, electrical, and plumbing only, no network. While I personally don't see a need for an IoT fridge in my foreseeable future, I'm not opposed to internet connected appliances generally if I see an advantage to having one.

I definitely don't want a fridge that can self replace the mayo. I'm not sure what other people need something like that for

The Internet is a utility and flows like water, so in this analogy, homes should have enough Internet to meet their daily needs, but they don't need so much as to be a factory. For a theoretical household of 4, 8 Mbit is way too low, but it does say that 10 gigabit might be excessive. The thing is though, that the analogy breaks down when running fiber allows for future backend upgrades and faster future speeds over copper.

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