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Sorry, but 20 years of IT industry here and fixed lines are Still king.
Yup. Ethernet has one big advantage: it is not subject to wi-fi channel congestion. Where I live there's often 15 to 20 wifi AP's from neighbors all competing for 11 channels. The overlapping signals reduce the effective throughput. Sure, I could go to 5 ghz where there's less congestion, but it's only a matter of time before everybody else does that too.
Wired my house for Cat 5 years ago and glad I did. When you want a rock solid reliable connection at full speed that is never compromised, you can't beat Ethernet.
To answer the OP, most of those cables are TV coax, installed before digital television. I don't see any HDMI cables or Cat5/Cat6 ethernet cables. I see three lines for telephone handsets. One line may be wired for ethernet.
For the wifi/ethernet debate, wifi is half duplex and good enough for most low bandwidth internet use. I have an external hard drive connected via ethernet, and gigabit ethernet is much better for transferring large files. Ethernet also has much better range. My shop is connected to the house with direct burial Cat6. The wifi signal out there is unusable, but ethernet still runs full speed.
Well the market is moving towards all consumer devices and appliances on wifi only... many laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore...
That doesn't change the fact that cat5/cat6 is superior to wifi in terms of performance.
I have a work laptop that I use in various places, yet when I get back to my office I dock it to take advantage of the superior performance of a wired connection.
At home I have pulled cat5 to my TV and desktop computer, while other devices at home are wifi based for convenience. The hardware devices have superior performance and fewer service interruptions than anything I have on wifi.
Sure, wifi is more convenient and requires less infrastructure. But it is inferior in every other way. I cannot imagine why anybody would argue against copper if given a choice.
Sure, wifi is more convenient and requires less infrastructure. But it is inferior in every other way. I cannot imagine why anybody would argue against copper if given a choice.
History is full of examples of advanced technologies that disappeared because a more convenient "good enough" alternative took over. In any case, for what most people use the internet, wifi speeds are enough. The real bottleneck is the internet connection so it doesn't matter whether you have wifi or wired.
Wired fixed will live on for corporate use but consumer market has essentially abandoned wired connections.
Why is this even a debate? Wired beats Wireless in every category except for convenience. Wired is faster, more secure, uses LESS POWER (given the waaay higher transfer speeds), and more robust.
I wouldn't say that the consumer market has abandoned wireless. The issue is that for every one desktop computer in a household there are probably 3 or 4 portable devices (laptops, phones, tablets) that use wireless.
A properly implemented local network should utilize both, IMO.
The average user is only browsing facebook or playing xbox games. They aren't running a server or downloading/uploading hundreds of gigs of data per day. The market reflects this by offering consumer products with only wifi networking capability. I don't miss the days where I was basically chained to a big bulky desktop computer and Ethernet cord. Now I take my laptop outside on nice days and work on it there.
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