[zabzonk]

Most unreliable network I ever had the misfortune to use (not to install) was coax thin ethernet when I worked at the BBC - termination problems were terrible. Twisted pair for the win as far as I'm concerned or better, WiFi. I don't think I have any coax in my fairly modern UK house.

[tssva]

You are talking about two cometelt different technologies. You are talking about 10BASE2 Ethernet which runs over RG-58/U coax cabling and as you mention requires termination at each end. It ran at a speed of 10Mbs. It could be unreliable for a variety of reasons such as connections coming lose, someone deciding to move their computer disconnecting a cable and breaking the continuos connection between stations that is required or a large number of Ethernet collisions because if either misbehaving nics or too many stations on a segment.

Currently there is MOCA hardware which supports speeds up to 2.5Gbs. The standard for 10Gbs has been released but no hardware for it is currently available. At least not to consumers. MOCA runs over the coax that is often already installed in homes to support cable, satellite or over the air antenna TV. It uses different frequencies and thus can coexist with these on the same cable. MOCA is not Ethernet. It is a half duplex shared medium protocol using time division multiplexing. It was originally developed to distribute IP TV without the need to run additional wiring in a house. Today it is mostly used to bring broadband internet connections into a home or to bridge Ethernet connections through a home. Different frequencies are set aside for each purpose and so both can be done at the same time. It is very reliable. I use it to extend my network to several out buildings on my property which had coax run to them many many years ago.

[zabzonk]

Thanks for that - very informative. I must admit I haven't done anything with wired networks for many years! But I still like twisted pair, and wifi :-)

[tialaramex]

Depending on how modern it is, you might well have "telephone extensions". In principle this is Cat 3 cable strung in a tree shape, but in practice the electrician is probably buying wholesale cable - carrying one reel of Cat 5 for all jobs is easier than owning a Cat 3 reel and a Cat 5 reel and bringing the right one for each job, the price is usually either identical or within pennies. So there's an excellent chance it's Cat 5 cable anyway†.

Now, Cat 5 cable is a perfectly good telephone cable, but it's also Gigabit Ethernet (over reasonable distances, you don't live in a mansion). The tree shape won't work for networking, but the individual cables buried in walls or elsewhere are basically just right there already. You just hook the existing cables to new Ethernet shaped faceplates. I am literally writing this from a wired connection in a bedroom, nobody built this to have Ethernet, they built it to put a phone in the main bedroom, but it's 2025, nobody owns a wired phone, everybody needs Internet.

† Also the network cards can't tell, they will try to achieve 1000 Mbit/s and chances are they succeed even if the cable isn't actually rated Category 5. I have retro-fitted modern switches to an ancient building (the old Mountbatten chip fab at the University of Southampton, before it burned down) and in 90+% of cases this "upgrades" the connection to Gigabit because the Cat 3 cable pulled a decade or more earlier was good enough.

[Symbiote]

They don't mean 10Base2 "Thinnet", common in the late 1980s and in cheap installations in the early 1990s.

They mean a modern (ish) device which uses existing TV cabling, to avoid rewiring in houses.

[superjan]

Coax ethernet was often deployed as a bus: 20something computers that must be directly connected to a single cable going from room to room. If one of the plugs was unplugged or not tightened correctly, everyone on that line suffered. This happened a lot, people moved computers around. And the tech looks simple.

That is a different situation than installing a fixed, point to point connection.