Hardware

Yeah. Very significant thing, coax ethernet was different enough to really be its own thing given how the networks were built.

I tend to split Ethernet into hub-era collision fest ethernet (coax and early twisted pair) and the current twisted pair connected via switches era.

pancakes used to be waffles

I cook both. The differences elude me. One's got more flour and a bit of vanilla flavor? Or is it just a shape thing? Have I been making waffle shaped pancake crêpes all this time?

I also hear microprocessors are still going strong after 50 years.

I still remember early lanparties, where you couldn't leave early because you could not just unplug your T connector from the Coax without messing up the line termination!

That was a fun aera.

That was a very visible but in the grand scheme of things it was just a small change, it still carried almost the same electric signal and the same Manchester code, the real big change was at gigabit ethernet, it's pulse-amplitude modulated since.

Don't forget the thick net cable.

And I hated base2 network, so fiddy to work with and can be unreliable if a terminator was removed by a prankster or if there's a faulty network hardware somewhere. BaseT was the best of both reliable and cheap.

I still remember a trick to remember which is which: hub, switch, and router. A hub is like an intersection with only stop sign. Good for low traffic but high collision risk with high traffic. Switch is like an intersection with traffic light, better for high traffic. And router is like an intersection with police car present to enforce traffic.

It does and it doesn't. Most wired ethernet isn't on shared media, so it doesn't need/use csma/cd... But wireless is based on ethernet and uses csma/cd (wifi) presumably

That's why it's so bizarre that people support losing the ability to plug in headphones on their smartphones because the 3.5mm jack is "old".

Please stop using the term 'old'! You won't stop them refusing it that way. All you do is to induce FOMO.

It's not old, it's proven … Proven to be sturdy, robust and long-serving technology and just reliable.

Nobody removed it because it's old

With how stable my new WiFi 6 router is for me, personally I don't feel the need for ethernet anymore even for gaming.
So I have no issue if I buy a laptop that can be thinner without RJ45
Will I appreciate it if they still manage to fit it? Sure, a little bit? But it's definitely not a make or break decision for me.
Same case with headphone jacks, I love the benefits of wireless enough to ignore the benefits wired bring, so my purchase decision isn't considering a headphone jack, sure if a phone I have has it, it'll be a nice little thing, but I'll probably not be using it.

Why change it? To improve it. That’s why there have been dozens of changes and improvements to it.

Ethernet is too old.

Let's change the plug so it has no clip and can fall out easily.

Ethernet is too old.

Let's change the plug so it has no clip and can fall out easily.

I mean path of exile is good but I don’t know if it’s that good

The cable standard has not remained the same. Cat5 and Cat7 are quite different despite using the same connector (sort of) and having the same number of conductors. Also Cat8 can push 40Gbit/s, so you have at least until then to look forward to.

We don't use the same cable. Cat 8 is the current standard, it can go up to 10Gbit for 100m or something like that.

what is the max speed we can put through and Ethernet connection??

Copper-based Ethernet and DSL share quite a few similarities. So why can't you just keep easily increasing DSL bandwidth? Because to send more information you either have to send it at a faster clock rate, use fancier encoding (e.g. instead of just on/off you could also carry information using light polarisation or colour, if we use light of course) or literally increase the bandwidth and use more frequencies.

A larger bandwidth means using more frequencies, and higher frequencies drop off more quickly with distance, to say nothing about cross talk and other effects. You also get cross talk, interference, and other effects which raises the noise floor and makes it harder to tell a genuine signal from background noise.

Frequencies don't propagate at the same speed either, which also poses limits on the clock speed, because over a small enough time scale the signals blur out. You're also capped by hardware limitations.

Encoding more information not only requires more processing (see above), but you need to be able to hear what's being said. Same principle as talking in a quiet room, vs. yelling and having to repeat yourself a lot very slowly in a crowded area (fall back to slower speeds, retransmission of data, increasing redundancy).

You can add more pins and wires as you say, but then that means you need more wires, more shielding, it can make the cables harder to work.

I would estimate 40GBASE-T is probably a reasonable limit for copper-based Ethernet. If you switch to fibre that limit keeps going up and up, for now. And given the ability to multiplex different wavelengths of light over the same fibre, while I'm doubtful that's going to be needed in consumer grade equipment for a long time, that gives Tb/s of capacity using today's technology over a single fibre. And even single wavelengths are doing around 400Gb/s.

USB-C has much more limited range than Cat5e/6a Ethernet cables so that wouldn't make sense at all. Even network runs in small buildings would basically be impossible.

Cat5(e) cables have 8 pins/wires and can generally do up to 1-10Gb data transfers. HDMI has 19 pins/wires and as of now can do up to 48Gb of data for displays.

Cat5(e) cables have 8 pins/wires and can generally do up to 1-10Gb data transfers. HDMI has 19 pins/wires and as of now can do up to 48Gb of data for displays.