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by robin_reala 439 days ago
I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a house with pre-existing coax, apart from possibly an antenna connection. Is this a US thing?
3 comments

Lots of US houses have coax to all the main rooms (family, bedrooms) because that was how you got cable TV.

(I still see it in new construction, though if I was having a build done I'd say run multiple Ethernet instead of any coax)

I'm just building a new house this year and Ethernet to every room is standard in this area. In a different state in the US coax is standard in new construction. (We just moved) It varies by location.
Around here it's coax + Ethernet to any "TV" room, Ethernet to all rooms (think - phone line).
I've lived in both Australia and the UK, and the only coaxial cables in any home I had/have have been direct point-to-point connections from the roof-mounted TV antenna to the corner of the sitting room where the TV was intended to be placed. Not terribly useful for computer networking.
In DK I would say it became common with the kitchen and maybe bedroom TV around 1990 and TVs in the kids rooms around 1995.

Cable TV became common in the 1980s (around here). So distribution is just a question about point of entry.

Are the aussies and UKensians that different?

Source: I worked at a TV/electronics shop in the early 90s.

Cable TV (from cables under the road) is much more common in Denmark than in the UK.

Digital, broadcast TV in the UK is mostly received by radio broadcast or satellite broadcast, so the house would only have the appropriate cables from certain rooms up to the roof. Thinking of the houses I lived in, it wouldn't have been practical to put a router of any kind up there.

From recent UK statistics:

- 95% of households have at least one television

- 30% receive TV over satellite

- 13% by cable

- 80% by IPTV

- 48% by terrestrial radio broadcast

- 96% have broadband internet

That's 13% of houses using their cables for a TV subscription, so more than that number have the cables available, but some big chunk probably had it installed to a single room in the 1980s and have never expanded it — the kitchen and the kids' room use terrestrial broadcast.

Nope. As you say yourself: Possibly an antenna connection.

Exactly that. When we redid the floors i our apartment we renewed the electrical wiring and added ethernet and coax. The coax was intended for radio/tv.

There is however an overlap of people who have the foresight to add coax cabling also add ethernet a well.

If I was was re-doing today I would add more empty pipes and fiber.

Cabling ahead has a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) when adding new gear :-)