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Comment by Auracle | Hacker News Reader

That $1700 will be somewhat outdated in 5 years, and definitely outdated in 10.

The conduit used to run the Cat6 or fiber to those APs will probably still be useful in 40 years.

THIS! The fact that of all the things we regulate in housing construction by codes, and how we’re turning to view the Internet as a fundamental access need, you’d think we’d be more prescriptive with “in order to make maintenance of this communication medium flexible and future proof, all communication cables in homes should be ran in conduit.”

Yep. When I was growing up 15 years ago, my dad wired the house with Cat6. I am now a homeowner and wiring my house with Cat6.

10Gbps at 55m (180ft) is plenty for residential when the top-end residential internet offerings cap out around 1Gbps. Unless you have a buzzing internal network, you are wasting your money going above Cat6/Cat6a imo.

Cat7 is no speed increase over Cat6, only distance and cross-talk improvements. Cat8 is rated at 4x Cat6 for throughput and costs 3x more than Cat6 (~$530 per 1k ft vs $170 per 1k feet).

There's no reason to buy a Lambo if the speed limit is 35 mph.

You are lucky, my first network was RG58 (coax), and my second was cat-3 cable (10baseT). They didn't age well. I switch to cat-5 as soon as it was an option and luckily that has aged better.

Indeed I am. I grew up on the cutting edge of tech for sure thanks to my dad. I don't remember a time without internet nor (relatively) fast internet. When I got into a serious relationship, it was a culture shock to find out how others lived tech-wise growing up.

I embarassed myself accidentally in my first apartment when I was mistook an RJ11 for an RJ45 from a distance when I commented to the agent about it having ethernet. I knew what RJ11 were, I just forgot that ethernet wasn't a normal thing to have.

I remember finally getting permission to touch the home server rack in my sophomore year of my CS degree. That was a milestone.

Cat 7 doesn't exist as a standard, it is marketing. The highest current standard is Cat6a and is overkill.

Install Cat 6 and if you need any speeds higher than 2.5G install SM fiber and eat the little extra cost.

Even Cat6a doing 10G within the standards distance is flaky, there are far too many factors that will degrade it.

Are you sure? My B+G access points still work with modern equipment - they are slow, but they work (I need to get them to a recycler as I don't use them). Newer standards are diminishing returns - older equipment is likely to be good enough far into the future just because it is unlikely anything will really need faster.

GP said 'outdated', not non-functional. Your 802.11b/g APs are outdated, like you say 'they are slow' - i.e. you've become accustomed to newer faster models.

True, but I'm not convinced that modern network gear will become outdated. It is fast enough in general so it is hard to think of why everyone should rush to wifi-next anymore.

Time will tell!

So far in networks in general we've increased the size of data we're interested in moving at roughly the same rate as we've increased the throughput available. It's repeatedly been 'fast enough', and then not.

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