[jdeibele]

We downsized from a house built in 1914 with phone jacks everywhere to a house built in 2007 with coax and ethernet ports in every room, some rooms with two.

At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls.

I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax.

My son has ethernet in his dorm with an ethernet switch so he can connect his video game consoles and TV. I think that's pretty common.

[runjake]

> I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax.

Speaking from a US standpoint, it still not common in new construction for ethernet to be deployed in a house. I'm not sure why. It seems like a no-brainer.

Coax is still usually reserved to a couple jacks -- usually in the living room and master bedrooms.

[sidewndr46]

Adding cat5e or cat6 to each room is just a cost. Builders generally compete on cost.

[Retric]

It’s a cost that doesn’t show up on listings. There’s a surprising number of ways new US construction sucks that just comes down to how it can be advertised.

[sidewndr46]

Unless I'm mistaken there are no requirements for what has to appear at all in real estate listings. Maybe some local regulations exist. I know where I exist the seller is required to provide an "energy audit", but I'm not sure there is any mechanism to enforce that.

[creato]

Most people think they can just use WiFi, and most of them are probably right.

[tguvot]

i live in 2003 built house in usa. i have 2 x cat5e and 2 x coax (they are bundled together ) coming to outlet in every room. everything goes to (un)structured media enclosure.

[runjake]

I'm not saying there are no homes built with Ethernet. I'm just saying it's neither common, nor the norm. At least in the western United States.

[Analemma_]

Powerline Ethernet is a coin toss though. Depending on how many or few shits the last electrician to work on your house gave, it could be great or unusable. Especially if you're in a shared space like an apartment/condo: in theory units are supposed to be sufficiently electrically isolated from each other that powerline is possible; in practice, not so much. I've been in apartments where I plugged in my powerline gear and literally nothing happened: no frames, nothing.

[superkuh]

Powerline Ethernet is directly equivalent to littering in the park. By using it you are littering and being a jerk, even if you don't realize it. The FCC only tests such setups in very limited contrived ways. When it comes to actual house wiring the copper wiring is never impedance controlled, constantly approaches and leaves large metal objects, etc, so that it is always radiating radio waves. And powerline ethernet is HF (<30MHz) frequencies so those radio waves travel around the entire earth, ruining a shared medium. Just like littering in a public park is ruining a shared medium.

[ssl-3]

> I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax.

Aye.

Cat5/6/whatever-ish cabling has been both the present and the future for something on the order of 25 years now. It's as much of a no-brainer to build network wiring into a home today as it once was to build telephone and TV wiring into a home. Networking should be part of all new home builds.

And yet: Here in 2025, I'm presently working on a new custom home, wherein we're installing some vaguely-elaborate audio-visual stuff. The company in charge of the LAN/WAN end of things had intended to have the ISP bring fiber WAN into a utility area of the basement (yay fiber!), and put a singular Eeros router/mesh node there, and have that be that.

The rest of the house? More mesh nodes, just wirelessly-connected to eachother. No other installed network wires at all -- in a nicely-finished and fairly opulent house that is owned by a very successful local doctor.

They didn't even understand why we were planning to cable up the televisions and other AV gear that would otherwise be scooping up finite wireless bandwidth from their fixed, hard-mounted locations.

In terms of surprise: Nothing surprises me now.

(In terms of cost: We wound up volunteering to run wiring for the mesh nodes. It will cost us ~nothing on the scale that we're operating at, and we're already installing cabling... and not doing it this way just seems so profoundly dumb.)

[toast0]

Sheesh. I would expect a high end house to have ceiling mount ethernet jacks for fancy APs in most rooms. At least family room(s) and bedrooms. Very much not worth it to retrofit later in a multistory building, but would be super handy.

[ssl-3]

Yeah, that first meeting with the other contractors was like walking into bizarro-world.

They (the homeowner) were getting dedicated custom-built single-purpose wall-mounted shelving for each of these Eeros devices, along with dedicated 120V outlets for each of them to provide power.

Now they're still getting that, plus the Ethernet jack that I will be installing on the wall at these locations because that's the extent to which I am empowered to inject sanity.

(Maybe someone down the road will look at it and go "Yeah, that just needs to be a wall-mounted access point with PoE," and remove even more stupid from the things.

Or... not: People are unpredictable and it seems like many home buyers' first task is to rip out and erase as much current-millennia technology as possible, reducing the home to bare walls under a roof, with a kitchen, a shitter, and some light switches and HVAC.)

[dpb001]

We just moved from a 70's-era house where I spent some time with a fish tape running cable to a 2025 three story townhouse (drywall already finished when we purchased).

For some reason the cable service entry is on the third floor in the laundry room. Ethernet and the TV signal cable runs from there to exactly one place, where the TV is expected to be mounted. Nothing in the nice office area on the other side of the wall.

My guess is that the thinking these days is that everyone's on laptops with wifi and hardwired network connections are only of interest for video streaming. Probably right for 99% of purchasers.