Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency.
We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous. And I learned that you can get up to 2.5gbps data transfer over coax using the MoCA standard.
So now, I can run wired networking connections anywhere in the house for wired access points or connecting directly to computers, televisions, etc.
How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.
I've got an ethernet cable running between the two rooms that are farthest apart in my house, but it is kind of ugly. I just screwed in cup hooks or nailed in nails at an angle on the walls up near the ceiling and draped the cable over them.
The right way would be to run it through the crawlspace or attic. I don't want to crawl around in the crawlspace, and my attic is the kind that if you aren't very careful you can put a foot through the ceiling of the room below, and has a bunch of blown in insulation that would probably make it even harder to get around so I don't want to try that.
I've wondered if I could run cable through the attic without actually going into the attic. Open the top of a wall below and drill up into the attic. Attach the cable to a pole and use that to push it up into the attic several feet, with the end of the cable tied into a loop.
Then send a drone into the attic, fly it to the pole, hook the loop, detach the cable from the pole, and fly the end of the cable over to the attic access hatch.
Then do the same with a cable at the other end. Splice the two ends together.
Is that reasonable feasible or is it just crazy?
Wheeled or tracked R/C cars are much easier to control, and can pull a greater force horizontally without losing control. In the 90s it was somewhat standard, especially in office environments with drop ceilings, to use a little 9.6v Tyco Fast Traxx to zip a pullstring across the ceiling grid, then use the string to pull the much heavier cables. (I'm not sure what's in use today, but I put a LOT of miles on that Tyco.)
Leave some slack at each end, sufficient to lift the cable up and place it in ceiling hangers "later", wink wink. Because leaving it flopped along the ceiling grid wasn't professional, nudge nudge.
Anyway, you don't splice in the middle. Neeeeever do that. Hidden splices are madness-inducing. If you need a mid-span location, you should be pulling all your runs from/to a closet and just use that as a distribution frame.
In your case, you could pull string from both ends, tie the strings together, then use the strings to pull a direct run of cable.
(Having that big rechargeable 9.6v battery came in handy other ways, too. There were plenty of times where I needed a talk path but only had a dry pair. Hook up the battery in the loop, with a butt-set or plain old beige phone at either end, et voila!)
To add on to the pull string.. if there is a remote chance you have to run a cable the same direction again in the future, try to leave a pull string in place when you pull all the cables initially.
In a commercial setting at least, it’s not up to code, let alone standards of good workmanship.
I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential.
Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e
With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).
If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.
That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:
Instead of: "I took my $500k/year tech salary which I formerly spent on Teslas and cardboard apartments and just hired a competent electrician or other tradesman to pull cable to every room."
I don't really understand people who pay others to do every little thing they need done around the house, but I suppose they have different values than I so live and let live...
Except the whole point of his post was that he didn't know how to do it competently, there's no way he wants to enter the crawlspace, so has resorted to wacky workarounds.
So, no, it clearly isn't within the skill (or desire) of anyone, but many would rather resort to hackery and hubris rather than pay someone to do it correctly.
I'll counter that and say there's probably minimum wage coders in India who write equal or better code than you at 1/10th of the pay, certainly possible as they have two functioning hands.
I realized that it is cheaper for me to pay someone do some things than doing them myself. Instead, I can either work or do something fun or more interesting.
Worth it, though, and would do it again.
A place I used to live had structured cabling built in and half of it was CCA. I could tell immediately when I cut the cable to terminate it just by seeing the silver ends. It even said CCA on the casing so wasn't even fake.
Electricians are definitely better than you at running cable and knowing where to cut the holes. But make sure you choose the cable and terminate it yourself.
And before anyone adds on with 'lol pay more', they try. The people just aren't there.
You'd have to pay me that kind of money (amortized) to deal with vetting/hiring/managing/scheduling/QC'ing someone else and their work.
So keep an eye out for a neighbor who has an electrician doing work and maybe see how much to just move the cable.
Drones is overthinking it.
That reminds of an idea I had for an app and/or website. I'm never going to get the time to actually try to make this, so if anyone wants to feel free.
I've had small tasks I wanted done that would only take someone with the right skills and equipment a few minutes that I didn't want to DIY either because I lack the skills or I'd need to buy some equipment I don't have and would not get enough future use out of to justify the cost, but I also didn't want to pay for the minimum of 30 minutes or 1 hour of labor that many contractors and companies charge.
A good example is that there was a security light mounted on a pole on top of my garage. I wanted to remove the bulb, but it was screwed in tight enough that using one of those light bulb removers on a pole I could not get it to budge. I'm not agile enough to be willing to try to climb onto my garage roof.
The idea is that I'd list this task on the app, with how much I'd pay (probably $20 cash) and my neighborhood. Then handymen, roofers, electricians, etc., could check the app or site when they are out on a job site and it would show them such tasks that are near them.
So say some roofers are doing something for a neighbor. They could check the app, see that it's a quick $20 cash for one of them on their way home or on their lunch break to come over and spend a minute or two doing my task. I was in no hurry to remove the light bulb, so I would have no problem waiting until someone with a ladder and a few minutes to spare happened to be working in the area and be willing to make a quick easy $20.
(Beyond that, even if they’re already in the area, by the time they pull up the truck, load and unload the ladder and actually do the job, the per-minute rate is probably already a fair bit worse than what they would earn from real customers - it may seem to you like you’re offering an easy job at $10/minute, but it’s probably a tenth of that all in from their perspective.)
They have expenses, fuel, insurance. Most charge $100 as a trip fee.
Although in an ideal scenario that’s a really great idea, as quite many people (I believe) may be in need of such services.
It's probably not worth it for anyone you might actually want to hire and doubly so for anything to which substantial chance of liability attaches. It might make more sense as a list of things your friends/neighbors/family could use help with playing up altruism angle and minimizing emphasise on liability. You know more like neighbor helping neighbor. You could also hopefully integrate positive things like sharing things that may still have value eg you upgraded your washing and dryer but the old set are still workable or things to do that others might want to share in so its not all a distributed version of your grandma's chore list.
Incidentally a have a great domain used for a fairly half-assed implementation of a not entirely different idea.
What ever happened to taskrabbit anyway?
On the assumption you are, just climb in the loft and drag the cable over, it's not that bad, I've been in and out of lofts since my early teens doing house re-wires with my father and never put my foot through a ceiling.
Unless you're mobility limited, everything in an attic should be accessible.
The main considerations are:
- Do work when it's cold outside. Do not be up there when it's warm and sunny
- Wear a breathing mask. N95 / painter's mask works fine. Glass insulation particles aren't lethal, but also aren't stuff you want in lungs
- Think twice. Then move. Slowly. And feel you're standing on something stable before fully transferring your weight
- Mind your head. The roof plywood will likely have roofing nails sticking through
- Bring 2 lights, preferably one lantern-type. That way you can leave one en route
They're regularly spaced from the exterior wall to an interior beam, all running the same direction, and the support boards up to the roof will run down to one.
Some of the old insulation will make you itchy as hell and probably not something you want to breathe but otherwise yeah, it's just a chore its not difficult assuming you are able bodied (I'm UK so our houses (until recently) had heavy duty joists so you can just clamber around on them, if gonna me up a while take a board up and lay it over a few to kneel/lay on and that's about it.
My office is in the basement corner with the sump pump, and said pump is located inside an undersized closet along with some pipework for the furnace, and all that like I said is in the very most corner space of the basement, basically inside a drywall box about 3 feet square. All things considered, it looks pretty nice. However I wanted ethernet back here for obvious reasons, and for several other reasons relating to layout, using either of the basement-facing walls wouldn't work.
SO: I realized that to run the plumbing and such from the furnace and utility area to this corner, they left a cavity a few inches tall in the ceiling at the outside-facing wall to this little cabinet. I bought a piece of 10-foot PVC pipe an inch wide, and slid it into this cavity between the existing pipes, securing it in place with a little bracket and some junk screws. Then I shoved four ethernet cables through that, into this little closet, and installed an ethernet wall plate in the door since it isn't regularly used and hooked it up there with enough slack that the door can move easily when we need to have any mechanicals serviced in there.
It's worked perfectly for the last 5 years. Love it.
Run them all over the damn places, anywhere you might want Ethernet or coax or HDMI or whatever is big ten years from now. You don't even need to pull the Ethernet now; just put blank covers on the boxes you don't need.
Once you have the tubes in all your walls, future cable pulls become a snap; you don't even need fish tape half the time, you can just push Ethernet in one side and have it pop out the other.
I did some interior inspection with my Mini 2 in an area that was too small for me to crawl to.
I did get it to work, but it was a close thing. Air currents in tightly enclosed spaces do not play nicely with drone stability algorithms.
Also, if you have blown-in insulation, it will fly up and get stuck in your motors in a matter of seconds to minutes unless you can keep a ~6' standoff. FWIW.
The most annoying is to go through fire blocks in the walls. Because this requires you to open up and patch the drywall at 1.5m height if you bring the cable from the attic. From the crawlspace the hardest part is to make sure you drill inside the wall, not through the floor! For that I found that somebody with a powerful magnet in the house while you carry metal washers with you under is helpful to locate precisely the walls. You can often see the nails holding the floor plate as well to fine tune the location.
I recommend a good respirator mask, and a jumpsuit to retain some psychological distance with the spiders.
That being said, I removed my EOP after I ungraded to Eero 6e's. The wireless backhaul was much faster than the wired at that point, and Eeros won't load balance between the two interfaces, so the hardwire was actually slowing things down.
Sure is handy when you need a cable and same-breaker sockets are nearby, though!
But to answer your question: depending on distance, you can consider using rigid plastic conduit, and thread the cable using that through the crawlspace, assuming you have access at the origin and destination. This is how we thread cable through a ceiling without any crawl space (flat roof)
I am 45. Last year, before I moved to a new house, I decided to run CAT8 Ethernet everywhere. Some people told me that they consider this excessive, but compared to the cost of the house, the extra cost was negligible and I hope this network will do well into the 2050s.
(We just tape the string to the balls with a few loops of duct tape, though.)
If you’re up there a lot or doing a lot of things, it’s also exhausting paying that much attention. And inevitably, you’ll screw up.
Re: the sibling's suggestion of wifi: If your cabling works at 100, I think the case is pretty clear for wired 100 vs wifi; consistent 100m is better than variable whatever you get. At 10m, not so clear, especially since cabling that's that old is also likely to be daisy chained, so you're looking at maybe a daisy chain of switches running at 10m. That said, cabling is often better than the spec it was tested to, and ethernet cable requirements are for long runs in dense conduit; it's worth trying 100M on old telephone wiring if it's already in the wall to see what you can get.
Let's not even talk about how miserable it would be to download modern games over this.
Would I want to use it to transfer large files around internally nowadays? No.
Works for everything else assuming you are the only user of that cable in that corner basement room? Absolutely.
Also insert appropriate "kids these days" joke. I guess it's like HD. Once you have it, you are not going back. Do I need a triple A game I just bought and want to play to download in 2 minutes vs 2 hours? No. But kids these days expect it I guess. No patience.
It’s perfect for apartments that have cabletv jacks in every room. Just make sure you are using the appropriate wideband splitters and have a filter at the cable demarcation in your dwelling.
These prices are also recently reduced. Without them you're looking at $150/170 a pair depending on the version you buy.
https://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-MoCA-Network-Adapter-Ethern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/powerline/tl-pa70...
TLDR: It's still bad.
https://www.servethehome.com/over-a-decade-later-powerline-a...
But times have changed a lot. In those days there was more focus on collision detection and avoidance which is no longer relevant with today's switches.
Ps it was not the same coax as for TV. TV coax has 75 ohms impedance. Ethernet (and most radio equipment) uses 50 ohms. It was annoying not being able to those cable TV stuff but handy for me as a radio amateur to be able to use the same cables.
Ten whole megabits to share between up to 30 computers, on a single multidrop bus.
To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.
It was worth it. Even though I have an HD Homerun, the fact that my TV's menu's and remote work as-designed for live TV helps make things run much more smoothly.
Nobody runs the Ethernet cables from 50 years ago, we use modern standards to run the Ethernet network over modern cables. Typically the ‘UTP’ cables but not necessarily.
If all you have is old phone wires in the wall, you can get a pair of xDSL (HVDSL) modems back to back and get up to 10Mbps or so. Better than nothing.
Obviously a bit late for this, but I don’t understand, if there’s “coax to nearly every room” how can it also be “not feasible” to run new cables?
If nothing else surely you could just run ethernet or even fiber in the physical channels now used by coax? Especially if the alternative is setting up an entire switching set up for moving ethernet over coax.
It’s always possible. Not always pretty, but possible.
Also, why not replace the coax cable with UTP? Tape some fish tape to your coax cable, and gently pull the coax cable on the other end. Then ape some UTP to the other end of the fish tape and pull again slowly. Pretty easy actually.
- put cable modem in basement where line comes in.
- do something that goes from router to into 2-3 coax lines heading into the home.
- have some little box in those rooms that expose an Ethernet port.
See the diagram in this guide: https://www.motorolacable.com/documents/MM1025-QuickStart-re...
Note both the usage of the PoE (point of entry, not power) filter, as well as the MoCA network encapsulating both DOCSIS and Ethernet traffic.
Some set-top boxes and modems are MoCA compatible, but I prefer using a discrete unit.
Thank you for these links. This is exactly what I needed to move forward.
Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.
So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.
I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.
I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.
How is it? Is it really 2.5gbps or is it like Powerline adaptors that are an order of magnitude slower than their advertised speed? :P
There is a latency hit when using MoCA compared to Ethernet:
MoCA: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 3.24/4.02/4.64
Ethernet: 192.168.0.1 : xmt/rcv/%loss = 10/10/0%, min/avg/max = 0.365/0.461/0.515
Fiber ONT/Modem -> Access Point -> MoCA adapter 1 -> Coax Splitter
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 2 -> Switch -> bunch of devices
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 3 -> Switch -> Access Point + bunch of devices
Coax Splitter -> MoCA adapter 4 -> Access Point
the MoCA adapters actually report 3Gbps+ between each other, but my access points only have gigabit Ethernet so that's my bottleneck.
There are different standards of coaxial cable (RG-6, RG-59, etc). If you see low speeds with MoCA, it is probably a cable problem and not an adapter problem.
Running Ethernet alongside it is rarely any easier than fishing from scratch.
with wifi over 1gbps and Ethernet stuck at 100mb/s or a single port of 1gbps or a single one that’s faster and none of my devices having that port or the cat5e wires being questionable
what time span were you talking about? Was this decades ago?
I guess that would just be eating cake, so not really any form of penance
"The one who knows how wireless works, uses cable." ;)
When renovating an apartment I have put a shitload of ethernet sockets everywhere, there is no place in 80m2 apartment, where you would be more than 2m away of nearest (including toilet) and as 4 of them were not enough behind TV, I have added a router there.
Wifi is just a patch if you don't have that option. On fiber, my cost to uplink is 1000/500 for 35 euros / month and I want to use it on clients too.
I have 2.4 and 5GHz turned on, but the LTE is better alternative so no one uses them. I have Mikrotics everywhere and Wave 2 is an option, but really, why bother if the ethernet cable works so much better? Not to even mention PoE (+ injectors).
Physics cant be broken by whatever the current fashion is.
So at the end, if you cant (for whatever reason) use ethernet in apartment and your mobile sucks? Go for the latest trend in wireless. This is not an issue? Use cable, nothing comes close to it.
Taking a 4k stream as an example, a compressed 4k stream is not going to exceed about 50Mbps, so even a 100Mbps data rate will have a 2x safety factor - and since you're wired, you're going to get full use of that data rate unlike Wi-Fi. You're not streaming uncompressed video as that would require more than 2.5Gbps, and if you want to upgrade to 8k video, you'll need a new TV anyway...
I always wire in my TV and other fixed infrastructure because, since they aren't moving, there's no advantage to using a data layer protocol that, by definition, enables mobile access. In addition, latency and jitter is always better on wire versus wireless, and keeping these devices off the wireless frees up precious airtime that the rest of my devices that do move can use instead. It's a win-win-win all around.
But every computer I use other than my laptops are wired with cat6 or better. I even run an ethernet line all the way out to the separated garage because I have a backup computer out there.
Ethernet is great, but wifi is also pretty great, they each have their use cases.
When I visit you and poop, do you have a way for me to connect my phone to your wired network?
I'm going to be honest with you: Modern WIFI is really awesome. I don't have problems with reception now that I bought a powerful router. (And "just run a wire" isn't a solution; the devices that had reception problems don't support wired ethernet.)
Not in my bathroom yet though, I'm still renting.
Scientifically, of course you are 100% correct. But does it really matter if I can install a 3 satellite mesh and get 200 Mbps over WiFi even at the biggest “dead zone” in my home?
Why the toiled though?
Yeah, we can compensate for that with hardware, but it's ridiculous to do 100G or even 10G in 1500 byte chunks.
To make jumbo frames easier to use switches should forward them by default and hosts should accept frames large than MTA (but send MTU sized ones).
If your switch is configured on defaults and not running a for purpose config, you probably don't need jumbo frames.
If that's the case it's a shame we didn't take the chance with IPv6 to push to higher default MTUs since IPv6 already relies to a much higher degree on PMTUD since it lacks fragmentation.
the internet has a whole bunch of non ethernet stuff, a lot of which has different frame sizes. Its totally possible that backhaul is running jumbo frames, or something like it, but you'd never really know that.
Conversely ADSL has odd frame sizes(inherited from ATM; 48 bytes if I remember correctly), but you don't see that because its hidden from you. Cable has a frame sizes ranging from ~500 up to 2000 bytes. Again, hidden from you.
One of the joys of TCP/IP is that different frame sizes are handled for you. Sure it might be beneficial to have a frame size that marries up with packet size, it might not. you don't really know, because the internets.
Also the GP is correct to say we fossilized on 1500 byte packets, since the layer 3 MTU is the relevant thing when talking about fossilization in the internet at large. This number was driven by 802.3's standard frame size being 1514 bytes, but that one is not even fossilized as much. It takes work, but you can control your own network and roll out jumbo frames. You can't roll out larger packets on the internet.
Devil's advocate: why not? We're in the middle of a long-term push for IPv6, and we have interim solutions to help the migration like Teredo tunneling. It's slow going, but we'll get there eventually.
Why don't we start a similar global migration to jumbo frames?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame
Also, while we are being picky, datagram is one word not two.
Modern ethernet, on wires anyhow, is very different from the original one with a shared broadcast domain. Ironically, wireless networks are still very much like the original "you've got a piece of wire and everyone yells into it after listening for a short period of time" mechanism.
Maybe not that ironically since Ethernet derives from ALOHANet, the wireless network connecting Hawaiian schools. Early Ethernet was basically ALOHANet piped over a wire instead of radio waves just like cable tv for a while was just broadcast TV over wires instead of radio waves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
I have layer 3 switches doing eBGP.
There's fragmentation, but that's separate from NAT and often broken.
I didn't care about that, I cared about what someone in this thread said, it's amazing that you can plug a 10Mbit hub in and have it work with 100mbit, Gbit, etc.
In my mind, it was all about the packet format, if they are the same then we get cheap switches. And that is what we have today, I saw this coming around 1990.
And for you guys hating on the 1500 bytes, the SGI memory interconnect taught me that bigger is not better. When you are doing cache misses remotely, big is not good. I'm doing a shit job explaining but there is some value in smaller.
If you guys want, I'll try and write it up.
Hahaha. Love it.
Stable Diffusion XL is only about 8 gigabytes and can render a shocking array of different images from very short prompts with very high fidelity.
1gbps might be enough for more than we think.
For me it's just 2€ more expensive than the standard 1g plan. It's really unfortunate to see how bad internet prices are, especially in the US and other countries with ISP monopolies. The only reason my internet is so relatively cheap is because early on there was a lot of competition in my country.
If you get 10 GB, the question is, then what? I have bidirectional 1 GB plugged into a $200 EdgeSwitch, which then feeds Cat 6 throughout the home ($100/500 feet). This then filters down to $20-30 unmanaged 1 GB switches elsewhere. The whole thing is under $500.
If I wanted to go up to 10 GB I don't just need to change to a $2K~ EdgeSwitch, I also need to run fiber/6E to be able to deliver more than 2.5 GB to any endpoint, then invest in expensive switching infrastructure elsewhere in the home to turn the incoming 10 GB signal into something more devices can accept (e.g. 1 GB or 2.5 GB).
Safe estimate, is to go from 1 GB bidirectional to 10 GB bidirectional, it would be $5K in equipment and pulling new cable.
For $100/month I can do 10 GB, but I won't because of the equipment cost/diminishing returns rather than the ISP cost difference. If network equipment comes a LONG way, and I can do it for under $1K, I'd consider it.
A lot of people already get more than that from their ISP. I had at least 2.5g on every consumer product from the past 5 years. Small businesses use at least SFP on the floor level. Yada yada yada. Point is it's probably a regional thing.
2.5G is rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity, and the advantage of higher total bandwidth is to support multiple people doing high bandwidth tasks.
In this scenario a 2.5G (or 10G) router is all that's really required to get the benefit, while using the existing 20 year old wiring.
I ended up purchasing a “lifetime” spool of Cat 6 to fill in some blanks, but it’s the optimal networking setup for me.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
From the article on the origin of the name.
And this is just terminology: An Ethernet protocol data unit is a frame because it's Ethernet and an IP protocol data unit is a packet because it's IP. You could switch the terms around and nothing would actually change.
He also says the reason Ethernet keeps getting better is because they keep rebranding new, novel signalling and encoding schemes as Certified Ethernet. It sounded like he had a grin on his face when he said it.
https://hanselminutes.com/900/from-ethernet-to-geothermal-en...
^ The '/s' is implied.
It feels like the only thing in this godforsaken industry that is anywhere near "it just works."
What I would like to say, however, is that in an industry as young as IT, it is hard to overestimate when technologies have proven themselves over decades. All the "latest hot sh*t" ideas/technologies/brainwaves/products first have to stand the test of time (no, 2.5 years is not enough) to be taken seriously without any doubt.
What's marketed as "Ethernet" today is vastly different from the 10base5 "yellow hose" originally called Ethernet. Entirely different wiring, signaling, collision management, topology, interconnection strategies, et cetera. But it's been demonstrably the biggest of wins to promote each next generation, however technically different from and incompatible with the previous generation, under the same brand name!
The framing is compatible across all of these changes: your 802.11 NIC has an Ethernet MAC address and can talk to to a copper-connected GigE interface. Copper and fibre interfaces can also talk to each other.
Part of the reasons for the concept of OSI Layers is that you could change things at lower layers (Thicknet, Thinnet, co-ax, etc) and at higher layers (IP, AppleTalk, etc) and would continue to work.
The OSI Layer 2 is the same for all the "variants" of Ethernet. That makes it 'the same' as the original.
Twisted pair was easier to work with than coax, and star topology avoided a lot of trouble with other topologies so it won out anyway, but it wasn't cheaper at first.
I have a few SFP+ 10 GbE connections internally that are useful for large file transfers.
https://assets.fixr.com/cost_guides/hardwired-computer-netwo...
We have a pitched roof but there are trusses, and I am not built like a hobbit if I need to replace the cable.
On the high end, it is a fragmentation mess of high speed (100Gbit+) technologies and mac/phy's.
There is no midrange at this point.
And the low end is price discriminated such that the Nbase spec couldn't even mandate all of 1/2.5/5/10 as required as part of the spec with the speeds being automatically selected based on cable quality.
And its largely dead because its to expensive and Wifi is more convenient.
Instead of further pushing mesh, we could have educated the market about putting Ethernet links, or we could have wired the house as if they were good old telephone cables.
No one noticed.
Wi-Fi uses the CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detect) that was developed for Ethernet. I view Wi-Fi as wireless Ethernet.
"b" = bit
The ubiquitous 1000BASE-T form of Ethernet transmits 1 gigabit per second (1 Gb/s).