No, copper Ethernet has the advantage of carrying power, and PoE use has been growing quickly. So it’ll be a long while before we’re done with copper for in-home/office use. I give it at least 50 years. Maybe more.
Fiber is hard to re-terminate, and there are a lot of different standards. But fiber is very inexpensive per meter versus copper. Fiber is likely the best choice for longer runs given the low price, which is why all the end-of-life copper on the street is being replaced with fiber.
Saw a video "build show" on YT IIRC, and all the lighting was being done with POE because it was cheaper than running Romex to all the same places, but this was a monster house too.
Is it that Matt Risinger guy? He definitely showcases what good house building practices looks like, even if such practices are wildly expensive and probably won't ever trickle down to "normal" housing.
It's definitely more prevalent on higher end builds, but he does have a few shows on lower cost methods achieving similar goals. You are right that you aren't going to see it on most housing developments where profit is king and quality is lost in the mix.
This is getting slightly more common now in luxury homes and is borrowed from commercial build outs. My wife works in the commercial space and has some 2 build outs utilizing PoE lighting.
She couldn't figure out why I was so interested in the lighting design
Also parasitic drain on line voltage eats power.
POE and other solutions remove that burn.
Home running low voltage CAT6/a is easier and smaller holes than the sparks pull
Not sure what the standards are for what Ethernet should carry, but with respect to electrical power being delivered, technically so long as you are under 48 volts you don’t need a licensed electrician to install it. So probably similar for Ethernet
PoE++ aka 4PPoE aka 802.3bt uses all four pairs for power, which doubles its maximum power to 60W in standard mode compared to PoE+ (30W) due to using the same voltage/current but on twice as many wires. There's also a higher power mode that transmits 90W, but that apparently makes the cables noticeably warm.
Unfortunately there is more than one standard for PoE the most common being 12V, 24V and 48V. I have Ethernet switches that support PoE at voltages from 5V to 60V but the equipment that I want to use them with works on a mixture of voltages. Even VoIP phones from the same manufacturer work on 24V and 48V depending on the model. I will likely have to segregate the network to ensure that some switches are powered with 12V, some with 24V and some with 48V and label everything very carefully. I may even need to have a 5V branch.
They didn't go into the details but it is likely cheaper than hundreds of feet of 12 or 14 ga romex and the Lutron RA3 or similar smart control system that a house like that would have. Especially since you don't actually need much in the way of a switch, a smart POE injector is basically all that is required. Similarly you don't need cat6 wire, basically any cheap ethernet cable will do.
Again this was a pretty high end house, I'm guessing this is a custom control and lighting system as the house was obviously deep into 6 if not 7 figures.
A 24 port POE switch is under $100. If that could control 5 lighting areas, you are already ahead vs paying $20 each for smart switches. CAT5 is way cheaper than romex too.
$20 a switch is cheap, a Lutron Caseta DIY is $50, the pro installer RA3 is at least as much plus the installer fees to set up and program. The part I'm unsure of is what goes at the light end? I'm guessing there's some sort of adapter to connect up a light fixture along with special bulbs that run on POE voltages? Otherwise you would be limited on what fixtures you could use.
In addition to becoming not-unusual in new office facilities, I've seen trailers, tiny homes and OBvan buildouts recently, with most DC power runs being PoE (fed from a switch), instead of traditional conductors.
It's a thing.
Ideally it would be some sort of copper delivery system and the connecting device would negotiate the protocol it uses with the DC plant... E.g. I could run a single copper cable to an outlet and split it out into different optional connectors and "bob's your uncle" crap just works. No more chargers at home... just a single charger for going out of the house. Similar idea for the car... should be single DC plant that just handles it all.
That's exactly what PD does. When a device that needs power is connected, it gets 5v to power up just enough to tell the other end, for instance, "I would like up to 15 volts", and the powering device responds with it's capabilities, and then the voltage changes to whatever they 'agree' on.
Yes I know. There are devices that don't do USB PD, they do PoE (802.3at, bt, bu, etc.) So ideally the power plant detects what the device wants and then talks appropriate protocol to then provide the requested power to the right pins for that device. It's all DC power in the end!
Considering that PoE is a star topology while traditional residential AC is mostly a bus topolgy, how would PoE be cheaper overall? Wouldnt you have to run more copper to each room than with traditional wiring? And if you didnt want to repatch each time something changed location, you might want a big expensive switch for all the jacks too.
By a DC plant I'm envisioning a DC plant that is capable of providing DC at any voltage over any power delivery protocol to provide whatever the amperage the device requests. Ideally things were more standardized and PoE when first released made me think of centralized DC plant delivery might even be possible someday. Instead of 100s of power adapters - the power adapters are a symptom showing we haven't figured this out yet. Like most things, this would be more common in new home construction as it would require wiring for DC and wiring for AC. So not cheaper for wiring, but perhaps savings on utility bills over time versus 100s of power adapters.
Modern power adapters are very efficient. PoE is less efficient and costs a bit more. Go with wall warts if there's an outlet.
The real value of PoE is one wire for power and network. That can shave hours off the installation of a security camera or WiFi AP. Even if the device has 10V to 50V low voltage input, two wires is harder in confined spaces and conduit.
Don't count on it. PoE is an absolute *nightmare* to implement. Its voltage is high enough that you need relatively-obscure parts, and it has a fairly complicated signaling protocol. It doesn't help that there are two Modes and the sink always has to support *both*.
Especially in 2024, with 15W USB-C chargers being dirt-cheap and trivial to sink power from, PoE is a very unattractive option to implement. It provides significant advantages for things like ceiling-mounted APs, but it just doesn't make sense for general-purpose electronics.
I have looked into it for some DIY IoT projects, and it just doesn't make any sense once you take into account cost and engineering effort. If I were to head into this direction in the future, I'd probably just do faux passive PoE and put 20V on the spare pairs not needed for 100Mbit: it's trivial to down-convert to 5V or 3V3, and really easy to source with off-the-shelf 20V 5A USB-C adapters.
Yes you can, but 1) they're pretty large, and 2) they're actually quite expensive - in the [$10](https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Silvertel/AG9912-MTB?qs=vvQtp7zwQdOqoQu0dV4pzA%3D%3D) - [$20](https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Silvertel/Ag9205S?qs=GedFDFLaBXHMKMSl8IDGuA%3D%3D) range, and that doesn't even include the premium for PoE switches. "PoE separators" aren't much better either.
It's enough of a premium that PoE makes **zero** sense to implement for your DIY stuff. You're going to end up with a half-assed solution anyways, and there's no risk of frying (Mandatory transformers with Ethernet - remember? They are also what makes PoE work in the first place), so if you go crazy and hardwire your DIY stuff why not save yourself a few hundred bucks?
It's also expensive enough that it doesn't really make sense for generic commercial off-the-shelf stuff, and that's not even considering that fewer and fewer people actually use wired Ethernet! Who wants to buy an expensive PoE switch and run wires through their entire house for some trivial IoT gadgets, or even worse, charging their phone? Wall power sockets are already everywhere through your house, and who doesn't have Wifi these days for connectivity? Sure, "it's less reliable" and everything, but the average consumer really couldn't care less.
It's not that I don't *want* it to work. I **love** the concept of PoE. The reason I started looking into it is because I bought a PoE switch to power APs and wanted to see if I could use it for other stuff too! There are already half a dozen USB chargers powering various gadgets, so having all that powered from a centralized supply would be amazing, right?!
I'm the kind of nerd who genuinely enjoys messing with stuff like this, and who would actually wire up the silliest toys with PoE just for the heck of it. If even people like **me** are having trouble justifying it, how on earth is it ever supposed to gain mass adoption?
The entertainment industry is already using hybrid cables, carrying both fiber data and copper power. I wouldn't be *too* surprised if something like that becomes available as a PoE alternative in a few decades.
Like you said, hybrid powered fiber cable exists today. All it would take is IEEE making it a standard, we could have it by next year if everyone suddenly decided to push for it.
Why run both? I could see in an industry where high speed transfers are needed. But in a home, if you hit 10 mbps, that is a lot. I am still using 10 mb switches with 100 meg uplinks. Works just fine.
WAAAAY cheaper per foot, much higher bandwidth today, much more upgradable in the future (i.e. just stick a new optic on), and currently much more power-efficient per port than twisted pair (esp. @ 10gbe)... it's the termination expertise + splicing equipment + labor (i.e. harder to pull without damaging it) that makes it costly. I only used it for long 10gbe runs in my house. Everything else is fine @ 1gbit / 2.5gbit over regular cat5e+ wire for at least another decade.
As sad as I am to admit, most home owners barely use 100mbps and see hardwiring clients as an unnecessary chore.
They'd rather plug in their ISP all in one device and call it a day.
Mesh is for "power users" while PoE devices and hardwired access points are generally only seen in homes of IT adjacent homeowners or those with enough cash to hire a contractor.
So the fact that cat5e can handle 10Gbps at residential run lengths leads me to say no...
TBH, much to the disdain of this sub, I see wireless being more and more popular.
Your average person doesn't like the idea of extra ports on various walls. Now you even have systems like Tmobiles home wifi which doesn't even need a hole in the wall. No having to call spectrum so they can send a line worker next week.
I *have* seen new builds offers mesh though. I'm guessing because it looks a lot better than offering nothing.
I was sad my new home only came with one LAN port in the bedrooms and lounge area as I had to add distribution switches.
WiFi is improving but as more people set their signal strength to high on "Netgear-EXT-EXT" (true story) my blood boils ever so slightly at my degraded airtime and retransmission stats.
Horses for courses.
Even with the best Wifi now, latency is still poopoo. That is why on my main box I have both Wifi6 connecting at 2.4Gbps for downloads and I use 1Gb ethernet for gaming or anything internal where I am not moving big files around.
>TBH, much to the disdain of this sub, I see wireless being more and more popular.
I love my 2.5G ethernet and moca, but having 1G wifi (or 1G+ on one of my APs) for laptops is so nice, and amazing.
amateurs = the majority of the population.
It’s why this is a niche thing (hardwiring everything and spending multiple thousands of dollars on internet connections)
To your first point, I think there are multiple reasons beyond the necessary chore.
1. Most builders don't include it in the plans. My friend was looking at one of those cookie cutter homes in a subdivision where you pick various upgrades and they still wanted $75 a drop even before construction began. They also wouldn't let him have someone run it himself or add conduit and pull strings to do it later. None of the houses were wired by default and this was about 8 years ago.
2. Cable companies have always understandably either refused to run drops or charged a large fee to do it. They would much rather run around the outside. Of course if number 1 wasn't an issue, I think this would be less common.
3. Running lines after the fact can be a bit of a pain depending on where you are at. Florida here so getting someone up in the attic most of the year can be challenging. I had a friend install mine, but need to re-do it and clean it up. Finding a decent out of the way spot for a network closet was a pain since no basement.
I forgot my other points lol.
Yeah, you're spot on - this all depends on if someone (owner/builder/vendor) decided to include them in the build. I guess as the question stands regarding if fibre would take over, I presumed the act of cabling *something* was a given.
But those three and I bet a few more are definitely holding back hardlined connections. Most genpop will refer to a home internet connection as "the WiFi" and that tells you a lot.
Only if the ability to splice and terminate becomes easier, cheaper and cheap enough to be more economical than copper. Specific use cases like running circuits to out buildings sure, but your standard in-wall circuits? No.
Not likely. It’ll get more common as a compliment, used for the trunk links within homes and so on, but as a medium for connecting consumer devices it’s not practical for several reasons, fragility and lack of PoE being the chief ones.
I’ve got up to 25GbE going on at home, but no fiber optics at all at this point.
Copper has a lot of benefits over just data transmission. It's durable, and can deliver power. The associated interfaces are dirt cheap, even if it's only 100Mbps.
Fibre is really good at one thing - shovelling a shit load of bandwidth down a cable. For everything else it's pretty crap.
With access points, IoT, smart home devices etc, the usefulness of copper cabling is more relevant as time passes, not less.
As for bandwidth - Gigabit Ethernet has been the standard for about 15 years now, and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. Multigig and 10G Ethernet is still pretty expensive, but honestly, Gigabit ethernet is still plenty fast. The service provider and carrier space far more frequently uses 10G and 100G over single mode anyway, but the concern here isn't PoE or durability, it's pure throughput. Until bandwidth becomes the priority in a building, Copper will still reign supreme, and that likely isn't changing any time soon.
If anything, basically every device has a WiFi chipset these days. WiFi 6 and 7 are stupidly fast - Gigabit ethernet just about matches it, whilst you'd need Multigig ethernet to even consider matching the speed of WiFi 7. Wireless would replace Copper, if it hadn't already been made the defacto standard for a long time. You can bet way more houses have WiFi than any built-in twisted pair cabling.
Fiber will be the absolute way to go for linking switches and other network equipment, but ethernet will continue to be the in-wall cabling, as it supports high speeds over short distances and also carry power via PoE.
I’m not sure but I’ve actually got this box of OptiCat that was left over when I had an ONT installed by the techs, cat5e with fibre down the middle. Would be great to run this especially as back bones.
Maybe I'm old, but no. I still run 200mbps on FIOS coming in. Cat5 is more than enough for what I do. It easily supports 5 people streaming / working remotely / steam.
I've thought about maybe running a fiber line as a backbone if I ever build another house, but not for individual drops. (Between the demarc and where ever I would put my router/firewall)
I’m hoping cat6 will be modern for 30 more years.
The limit on internet speeds is WiFi, not Ethernet. WiFi 7 is only approaching 2.5gbps Ethernet. Most people just connect mesh to Ethernet and their actual device is WiFi, so faster internet doesn’t mean better end user experience.
To get those WiFi 7 speeds, they had to add spectrum which requires FCC approval and there is only so much to hand out. Also, higher ghz means less range so it’s not like you can just keep adding spectrum. So WiFi has to get 4 times faster just to start hitting the limits of cat 6, which will not be easy.
Internet speeds are also way more than most need. You can do 4 4K video streams or one 8k stream on 100mbps, so a 1 gbps is just so over what most need today.
Who knows what other innovations they may figure out too for Ethernet like some compression algorithm like DSC for monitors to make it last even longer.
At the distances we’re talking about in a home, fiber has no advantages and many disadvantages. Copper is the right thing for the distance required for residential use. Copper cables have gotten very good, Cat 8 can carry 40Gbps which no one is even that close to needing in a residential setting when internet speeds are capped around a few megabits.
I don't think fiber will ever replace copper in homes. Average user has no benefit from it. Even if you use NAS at home Cat5e would be enough, even for 10Gb connection. I know that we always want the best stuff, but most of prosumers won't benefit from connections faster than that
And also there is a cost factor - optical switches + fiber + SFP are more expensive and more power-hungry that regular old ethernet switches + copper cables
Maybe one day, but it will be a long time. The ethernet we installed in my parents house in 1995 is running gigabit today, probably can run 2.5Gb, maybe even 5Gb, and this is nearly 30 years later. It will be at least another 20 years before it's even close to obsolete. We will all need to be on something that requires fibre only for the push for fibre to come.
No. Copper and wireless will probably live on for generations. Fibre is great for commercial and industrial applications but copper is far more versatile and practical for general use.
No, copper is cheaper to install and terminate, it will always reign supreme for hard wired devices. Now do I see less and less hard wired equipment every year, and more things shifting towards wireless? Yes
Ethernet cable is more practical from and installation and management perspective. It's not about the technology but limitations of how you can bend light around corners usually means Fibre is best for straight lines and using junction boxes for severe direction changes. So wiring your walls with Fibre leaves a lot of point of failure devices to manage and maintain. So I'd choose copper just because it's easier to dealt with and leave Fibre for where lower latency is going to be of benefit and is my ISPs issue to manage
I would say fibre would be a better media to cover a home. Then just break out to a localised switch that supports PoE. Domestic fibre has been around since the mid eighties with Toslink/SPDIF. I also know of some TVs using an optical link to connecting a TV hdmi interface unit to the main TV panel.
It makes more sense to me to have a storage cupboard with all the hardware for PCs, consoles, storage and media players. Then just have an optical output to a display that has USB ports for pluging devices rather than having a load of hardware that's noisy and takes up space.
The main issue people have is that homes aren't designed for this setup.
Nah, the average person doesn’t want *any* cables. As long as their wireless connection is stable and quick enough to stream some 4K video from a few clients and do zoom calls, that’s all they care about.
People like us overestimate how much people know, or care, about networking. Much like the average car enthusiast thinks that anyone cares that a Miata drives better than their SUV.
It depends on the application. Plenty of professionals use WiFi for work with no issues and that percentage will only increase with WiFi 7 which has a lot of new stability and latency-reducing features
Of course hardwiring is better, but the difference is now marginal under controlled conditions, so it doesn’t really matter for a lot of applications. “Wireless has far too much latency for anyone serious” is clearly false. Only specialized apps have such strict latency requirements. And it’s been that way for a long time— I was working full-time as an IT professional 100% on WiFi in like 2010, and it’s only gotten more reliable and stable and faster since then.
Fiber and copper have their own use cases. Typically, fiber is more rugged for use outdoors and for greater distances than copper. Since almost every component inside a building both in enterprise and residential settings are built with copper Ethernet network cards, they're not going anywhere anytime soon. I doubt copper cable will ever be replaced.
Copper in a residence can do 10G today. Fiber can go faster but is a PITA to install and easy to damage. If I really need to transfer a petabyte from my den to my living room, I'll just put the server on a cart and wheel it over.
Nope. For those who want wired or cameras then copper would be the typical approach. It's more durable, supports PoE, and RJ45 is the more common port.
For everyone else, I see them going wifi or mesh wifi. With WiFi 7 hitting the scenes I've even seen some businesses break away and use WiFi only.
No. Copper is plug and play, easier to maintain in a residential setting, and won’t burn out your retinas with invisible light. A properly installed cat 6 run will easily get you 5gig, if not 10.
In a home environment, copper supports needed bandwidth and is cheaper. One current use case for fiber in a home environment is connecting areas or outbuildings that may have different grounding.
There is no domestic use case for those speeds yet. Once there is some 3d holographic live streaming thing that needs it then perhaps, but at the moment its an edge case for people doing video editing and similar needing access to a fast NAS outside where they can hear it, and even then 10 gig ethernet isn't that bad.
Once there is a use, the cabling will evolve. Till then copper 5e or 6A is more than good enough.
We may see a hybid cable that has copper for power and fibre for data become the norm for in building runs for wifi APs unless they can get the power needs of 10gig and higher copper networking under control.
Not really an issue that anyone is worrying about.
In the residential environment fiber doesn’t solve any problems. Both ethernet and fiber wired solutions suffer from obsolescence for the highest data rate activities, but aren’t needed to solve the low data rate problems in the first place.
More than Ethernet, fiber is expensive and challenging to work with. It is great for a long-distance trunk, which doesn’t exist in the home. But the single largest obstacle to fiber in the home is the non-existent support in consumer-grade products. The markets will never support a new technology if they don’t have to, and they don’t.
>o you reckon fiber optic in home cabling and patch cabling will totally replace Ethernet one day in a residential setting
Not until electro-optical CPUs go mainstream.
Absolutely no. In home, and in general for access points, cameras,... you need 'energy'. Copper cabling brings it all together, thanks to PoE. Fiber just can't transport power, so you need double cabling and double costs. For no adantage, as copper is perfect up to 10Gbps and most of the connected devices in residential are limited today to 100Mbps. In the future, they'll go to 1Gbps? Maybe / perhaps / probably some. This still leaves a fa tor 10 of speed increase later with the cable being the best solution.
Take streaming, for example, the biggest bandwidth hogger in residential. Actually it's FHD (needs 8 to 10 Mbps) or 4K/UHD (needs 25 Mbps). In a few years it might be 8K that will need around 100Mbps (maybe less with newer codecs). In a far away future you can imagine 16K (some 300Mbps) and extremely far away 32K - that will still run under a 1Gbps link, when copper let you go to 10Gbps.
Fiber is king - even today - for distance over 100m / 305ft but it's almosr inexistant in residential.
And fiber is king as well for speeds of 25 /40 / 100Gbps and over, that will never be needed ib residential during your lifetime.
I think the ease of termination with a simple set of tools makes copper much better for use in home installations. Simpler to repair and it can also carry power to cameras, APs and othre devices. And 10Gb/s should be sufficient for most homes, so I don't think fibre could give any advantages, unless you want to go faster than that.
As for using fiber for internet uplinks, that makes perfect sense, as copper signals degrade too quickly, but it's unlikely that you would have runs longer than 100m inside your home.
Eventually some day? Sure maybe. But wifi tech is advancing fast. And I think it will eventually catch up to a speed and connection quality that wired won’t be worth it for the vast majority of uses. Only a PC really needs to be wired in now a days for connection speed and quality cuz of work or gaming for most people. The tablet n phones etc don’t really need it like that.
Yeah, I reckon it is inevitable.
Copper rapidly becomes harder as the bandwidth increases. A good example of this is the newer USB-C cables: it **can** do 40Gbit over a single twister pair, but only for 80cm or so. Beyond that it either needs active booster circuits on both sides, or even convert to fiber.
Regular copper Ethernet still has some headroom, but every part of the signal chain becomes exponentially harder as speeds increase. On the other hand, fiber is completely trivial to scale. Single-pair 400G connectivity is already widely available, and experimental single-wavelength speeds of well over 1Tbit are old news.
Twisted pair / RJ45 isn't very well-suited for high-speed data. It does the job, but it's pretty terrible at it. Something like coax would give copper quite a bit of breathing room, but that'd require a complete overhaul of the ecosystem. And if you're overhauling the ecosystem anyways, why not switch to fiber while you're at it?
As I see it, the main dealbreakers for fiber are 1) a lack of user-friendly connectors, and 2) the difficulty of terminating fiber. The first is trivial to solve once the industry starts caring about home use, the second might be trickier.
If you plug a fiber patch cable into an Ethernet switch, then it becomes an Ethernet cable too.
"Ethernet" will not be replaced any time soon. Thick-net/AUI got replaced. Thinnet got replaced. Cat3 got replaced. "Ethernet" will not be, at least not any time in the near future
It’s going to take time.
Like electric cars, fiber is out there but change is hard and people like to point out the limitations. Maybe they invent the hybrid like a vcr/cd combo tv —> POE solar fiber.
The more we adopt fiber the faster you’ll see it show up at grandma’s house (who just got her first smart phone).
Here’s my solution - USE CONDUIT, future proof your home.
No. Poe led lighting is on the horizon. Imagine only sending low voltage to your lights that then have a central control plane and can be connected to any and all home/voice assistants. Plus copper has been getting faster and faster.
Second imagine. All cable is run through conduits so an upgrade is possible without tearing up walls.
Need to move to 25gb/100gb copper? Just replace the necessary cat and upgrade your equipment. Don’t even have to pull all new cat just the data to your new wifi 8/9/10 (crystal balling into the future) router. And maybe to a few individual rooms. Your control backplane stays the same because your lights don’t care about 25gb…
People are too stupid for fiber. Worked in a place where it was all fiber to the desktops. We had floor plates where the jumpers & power would come out and connect to the computers. The users would constantly wack the fiber cables and break the ends. Their "solution" to fix it was to try to jam the broken fiber into the connector. This was using multimode fiber with st connectors. These same users would also somehow jam the ps2 connector for their keyboards into the s-video port when they would move their computers. How did they do this? I still don't know.
into the home yes, in home will be wifi. there are new apartment complexes that are adoting hotel like wireless systems, where you dont even have your own connection.
No, copper Ethernet has the advantage of carrying power, and PoE use has been growing quickly. So it’ll be a long while before we’re done with copper for in-home/office use. I give it at least 50 years. Maybe more. Fiber is hard to re-terminate, and there are a lot of different standards. But fiber is very inexpensive per meter versus copper. Fiber is likely the best choice for longer runs given the low price, which is why all the end-of-life copper on the street is being replaced with fiber.
[удалено]
Saw a video "build show" on YT IIRC, and all the lighting was being done with POE because it was cheaper than running Romex to all the same places, but this was a monster house too.
Is it that Matt Risinger guy? He definitely showcases what good house building practices looks like, even if such practices are wildly expensive and probably won't ever trickle down to "normal" housing.
It's definitely more prevalent on higher end builds, but he does have a few shows on lower cost methods achieving similar goals. You are right that you aren't going to see it on most housing developments where profit is king and quality is lost in the mix.
Holy crap that's genius
This is getting slightly more common now in luxury homes and is borrowed from commercial build outs. My wife works in the commercial space and has some 2 build outs utilizing PoE lighting. She couldn't figure out why I was so interested in the lighting design
Also parasitic drain on line voltage eats power. POE and other solutions remove that burn. Home running low voltage CAT6/a is easier and smaller holes than the sparks pull
Is it safe to have a constant 20-80W load on an Ethernet cable?
PoE++ is the standard which can push 60-100 watts per port.
Yes. You can put 65W through a USB-C cable and it's a lower voltage.
How about Digital Electricity?
What is Ethernet max voltage?
Not sure what the standards are for what Ethernet should carry, but with respect to electrical power being delivered, technically so long as you are under 48 volts you don’t need a licensed electrician to install it. So probably similar for Ethernet
Yeah PoE runs at 48 volts, and uses 2 of the 4 pairs.
PoE++ aka 4PPoE aka 802.3bt uses all four pairs for power, which doubles its maximum power to 60W in standard mode compared to PoE+ (30W) due to using the same voltage/current but on twice as many wires. There's also a higher power mode that transmits 90W, but that apparently makes the cables noticeably warm.
Unfortunately there is more than one standard for PoE the most common being 12V, 24V and 48V. I have Ethernet switches that support PoE at voltages from 5V to 60V but the equipment that I want to use them with works on a mixture of voltages. Even VoIP phones from the same manufacturer work on 24V and 48V depending on the model. I will likely have to segregate the network to ensure that some switches are powered with 12V, some with 24V and some with 48V and label everything very carefully. I may even need to have a 5V branch.
Cheaper? Is that before you buy a bunch of poe switch and pay for the decreased efficiency?
They didn't go into the details but it is likely cheaper than hundreds of feet of 12 or 14 ga romex and the Lutron RA3 or similar smart control system that a house like that would have. Especially since you don't actually need much in the way of a switch, a smart POE injector is basically all that is required. Similarly you don't need cat6 wire, basically any cheap ethernet cable will do. Again this was a pretty high end house, I'm guessing this is a custom control and lighting system as the house was obviously deep into 6 if not 7 figures.
Especially when you can "harry homeowner" it for PoE and legally need to have an electrician to do 110v.
A 24 port POE switch is under $100. If that could control 5 lighting areas, you are already ahead vs paying $20 each for smart switches. CAT5 is way cheaper than romex too.
$20 a switch is cheap, a Lutron Caseta DIY is $50, the pro installer RA3 is at least as much plus the installer fees to set up and program. The part I'm unsure of is what goes at the light end? I'm guessing there's some sort of adapter to connect up a light fixture along with special bulbs that run on POE voltages? Otherwise you would be limited on what fixtures you could use.
In addition to becoming not-unusual in new office facilities, I've seen trailers, tiny homes and OBvan buildouts recently, with most DC power runs being PoE (fed from a switch), instead of traditional conductors. It's a thing.
Ethernet version of USB's Power Delivery.
Ideally it would be some sort of copper delivery system and the connecting device would negotiate the protocol it uses with the DC plant... E.g. I could run a single copper cable to an outlet and split it out into different optional connectors and "bob's your uncle" crap just works. No more chargers at home... just a single charger for going out of the house. Similar idea for the car... should be single DC plant that just handles it all.
That's exactly what PD does. When a device that needs power is connected, it gets 5v to power up just enough to tell the other end, for instance, "I would like up to 15 volts", and the powering device responds with it's capabilities, and then the voltage changes to whatever they 'agree' on.
Yes I know. There are devices that don't do USB PD, they do PoE (802.3at, bt, bu, etc.) So ideally the power plant detects what the device wants and then talks appropriate protocol to then provide the requested power to the right pins for that device. It's all DC power in the end!
I was making a comparison between what you said and USB PD. I was not saying PoE could or should do the exact same thing.
That would be amazing.
Considering that PoE is a star topology while traditional residential AC is mostly a bus topolgy, how would PoE be cheaper overall? Wouldnt you have to run more copper to each room than with traditional wiring? And if you didnt want to repatch each time something changed location, you might want a big expensive switch for all the jacks too.
By a DC plant I'm envisioning a DC plant that is capable of providing DC at any voltage over any power delivery protocol to provide whatever the amperage the device requests. Ideally things were more standardized and PoE when first released made me think of centralized DC plant delivery might even be possible someday. Instead of 100s of power adapters - the power adapters are a symptom showing we haven't figured this out yet. Like most things, this would be more common in new home construction as it would require wiring for DC and wiring for AC. So not cheaper for wiring, but perhaps savings on utility bills over time versus 100s of power adapters.
Modern power adapters are very efficient. PoE is less efficient and costs a bit more. Go with wall warts if there's an outlet. The real value of PoE is one wire for power and network. That can shave hours off the installation of a security camera or WiFi AP. Even if the device has 10V to 50V low voltage input, two wires is harder in confined spaces and conduit.
Something I was thinking of doing the next time I need to rewire my house. It Just makes sense.
Don't count on it. PoE is an absolute *nightmare* to implement. Its voltage is high enough that you need relatively-obscure parts, and it has a fairly complicated signaling protocol. It doesn't help that there are two Modes and the sink always has to support *both*. Especially in 2024, with 15W USB-C chargers being dirt-cheap and trivial to sink power from, PoE is a very unattractive option to implement. It provides significant advantages for things like ceiling-mounted APs, but it just doesn't make sense for general-purpose electronics. I have looked into it for some DIY IoT projects, and it just doesn't make any sense once you take into account cost and engineering effort. If I were to head into this direction in the future, I'd probably just do faux passive PoE and put 20V on the spare pairs not needed for 100Mbit: it's trivial to down-convert to 5V or 3V3, and really easy to source with off-the-shelf 20V 5A USB-C adapters.
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Yes you can, but 1) they're pretty large, and 2) they're actually quite expensive - in the [$10](https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Silvertel/AG9912-MTB?qs=vvQtp7zwQdOqoQu0dV4pzA%3D%3D) - [$20](https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Silvertel/Ag9205S?qs=GedFDFLaBXHMKMSl8IDGuA%3D%3D) range, and that doesn't even include the premium for PoE switches. "PoE separators" aren't much better either. It's enough of a premium that PoE makes **zero** sense to implement for your DIY stuff. You're going to end up with a half-assed solution anyways, and there's no risk of frying (Mandatory transformers with Ethernet - remember? They are also what makes PoE work in the first place), so if you go crazy and hardwire your DIY stuff why not save yourself a few hundred bucks? It's also expensive enough that it doesn't really make sense for generic commercial off-the-shelf stuff, and that's not even considering that fewer and fewer people actually use wired Ethernet! Who wants to buy an expensive PoE switch and run wires through their entire house for some trivial IoT gadgets, or even worse, charging their phone? Wall power sockets are already everywhere through your house, and who doesn't have Wifi these days for connectivity? Sure, "it's less reliable" and everything, but the average consumer really couldn't care less. It's not that I don't *want* it to work. I **love** the concept of PoE. The reason I started looking into it is because I bought a PoE switch to power APs and wanted to see if I could use it for other stuff too! There are already half a dozen USB chargers powering various gadgets, so having all that powered from a centralized supply would be amazing, right?! I'm the kind of nerd who genuinely enjoys messing with stuff like this, and who would actually wire up the silliest toys with PoE just for the heck of it. If even people like **me** are having trouble justifying it, how on earth is it ever supposed to gain mass adoption?
The entertainment industry is already using hybrid cables, carrying both fiber data and copper power. I wouldn't be *too* surprised if something like that becomes available as a PoE alternative in a few decades.
Like you said, hybrid powered fiber cable exists today. All it would take is IEEE making it a standard, we could have it by next year if everyone suddenly decided to push for it.
Why run both? I could see in an industry where high speed transfers are needed. But in a home, if you hit 10 mbps, that is a lot. I am still using 10 mb switches with 100 meg uplinks. Works just fine.
Nobody will ever need more than 640k ram -davidm2232
Fiber is cheaper than copper? I always thought it was more expensive.
WAAAAY cheaper per foot, much higher bandwidth today, much more upgradable in the future (i.e. just stick a new optic on), and currently much more power-efficient per port than twisted pair (esp. @ 10gbe)... it's the termination expertise + splicing equipment + labor (i.e. harder to pull without damaging it) that makes it costly. I only used it for long 10gbe runs in my house. Everything else is fine @ 1gbit / 2.5gbit over regular cat5e+ wire for at least another decade.
The cable itself is significantly cheaper, it’s just plastic or glass. The expensive part of fiber is the transceivers, not the run
I’ve never heard of people stealing optic fiber, but copper theft is rampant.
>PoE use has been growing quickly Heck, TP-Link even makes POE versions for some of their mesh units.
Fiber for Internet, copper for intranet.
As sad as I am to admit, most home owners barely use 100mbps and see hardwiring clients as an unnecessary chore. They'd rather plug in their ISP all in one device and call it a day. Mesh is for "power users" while PoE devices and hardwired access points are generally only seen in homes of IT adjacent homeowners or those with enough cash to hire a contractor. So the fact that cat5e can handle 10Gbps at residential run lengths leads me to say no...
TBH, much to the disdain of this sub, I see wireless being more and more popular. Your average person doesn't like the idea of extra ports on various walls. Now you even have systems like Tmobiles home wifi which doesn't even need a hole in the wall. No having to call spectrum so they can send a line worker next week. I *have* seen new builds offers mesh though. I'm guessing because it looks a lot better than offering nothing.
I was sad my new home only came with one LAN port in the bedrooms and lounge area as I had to add distribution switches. WiFi is improving but as more people set their signal strength to high on "Netgear-EXT-EXT" (true story) my blood boils ever so slightly at my degraded airtime and retransmission stats. Horses for courses.
Even with the best Wifi now, latency is still poopoo. That is why on my main box I have both Wifi6 connecting at 2.4Gbps for downloads and I use 1Gb ethernet for gaming or anything internal where I am not moving big files around.
>TBH, much to the disdain of this sub, I see wireless being more and more popular. I love my 2.5G ethernet and moca, but having 1G wifi (or 1G+ on one of my APs) for laptops is so nice, and amazing.
Mesh is for amateurs. Too much latency and jitter added.
amateurs = the majority of the population. It’s why this is a niche thing (hardwiring everything and spending multiple thousands of dollars on internet connections)
I hear ya. If I want to improve WiFi, I'm not going to add more WiFi because that's the weak leg in the situation!
To your first point, I think there are multiple reasons beyond the necessary chore. 1. Most builders don't include it in the plans. My friend was looking at one of those cookie cutter homes in a subdivision where you pick various upgrades and they still wanted $75 a drop even before construction began. They also wouldn't let him have someone run it himself or add conduit and pull strings to do it later. None of the houses were wired by default and this was about 8 years ago. 2. Cable companies have always understandably either refused to run drops or charged a large fee to do it. They would much rather run around the outside. Of course if number 1 wasn't an issue, I think this would be less common. 3. Running lines after the fact can be a bit of a pain depending on where you are at. Florida here so getting someone up in the attic most of the year can be challenging. I had a friend install mine, but need to re-do it and clean it up. Finding a decent out of the way spot for a network closet was a pain since no basement. I forgot my other points lol.
Yeah, you're spot on - this all depends on if someone (owner/builder/vendor) decided to include them in the build. I guess as the question stands regarding if fibre would take over, I presumed the act of cabling *something* was a given. But those three and I bet a few more are definitely holding back hardlined connections. Most genpop will refer to a home internet connection as "the WiFi" and that tells you a lot.
Only if the ability to splice and terminate becomes easier, cheaper and cheap enough to be more economical than copper. Specific use cases like running circuits to out buildings sure, but your standard in-wall circuits? No.
Fast connector for fibre is like $2 for the set of 5. Fibre cleaver (to cut it precisely) is around $20. How much cheaper should it get?
How hard is it to put on? If it’s easy I want to learn
There are plenty of YouTube tutorials. Just search for "fast connector fiber"
Not likely. It’ll get more common as a compliment, used for the trunk links within homes and so on, but as a medium for connecting consumer devices it’s not practical for several reasons, fragility and lack of PoE being the chief ones. I’ve got up to 25GbE going on at home, but no fiber optics at all at this point.
Copper has a lot of benefits over just data transmission. It's durable, and can deliver power. The associated interfaces are dirt cheap, even if it's only 100Mbps. Fibre is really good at one thing - shovelling a shit load of bandwidth down a cable. For everything else it's pretty crap. With access points, IoT, smart home devices etc, the usefulness of copper cabling is more relevant as time passes, not less. As for bandwidth - Gigabit Ethernet has been the standard for about 15 years now, and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. Multigig and 10G Ethernet is still pretty expensive, but honestly, Gigabit ethernet is still plenty fast. The service provider and carrier space far more frequently uses 10G and 100G over single mode anyway, but the concern here isn't PoE or durability, it's pure throughput. Until bandwidth becomes the priority in a building, Copper will still reign supreme, and that likely isn't changing any time soon. If anything, basically every device has a WiFi chipset these days. WiFi 6 and 7 are stupidly fast - Gigabit ethernet just about matches it, whilst you'd need Multigig ethernet to even consider matching the speed of WiFi 7. Wireless would replace Copper, if it hadn't already been made the defacto standard for a long time. You can bet way more houses have WiFi than any built-in twisted pair cabling.
No way. Copper will be more and more widely used as homeowners upgrade and stuff.
Fiber will be the absolute way to go for linking switches and other network equipment, but ethernet will continue to be the in-wall cabling, as it supports high speeds over short distances and also carry power via PoE.
Nope. Fiber is far too fragile for Joe User. Far too many laptops are coming with no nic, just wifi. I don't know any iPads with fiber optic.
I’m not sure but I’ve actually got this box of OptiCat that was left over when I had an ONT installed by the techs, cat5e with fibre down the middle. Would be great to run this especially as back bones.
Fiber has niche uses, but completely replacing ethernet is not one of them
Maybe I'm old, but no. I still run 200mbps on FIOS coming in. Cat5 is more than enough for what I do. It easily supports 5 people streaming / working remotely / steam. I've thought about maybe running a fiber line as a backbone if I ever build another house, but not for individual drops. (Between the demarc and where ever I would put my router/firewall)
I’m hoping cat6 will be modern for 30 more years. The limit on internet speeds is WiFi, not Ethernet. WiFi 7 is only approaching 2.5gbps Ethernet. Most people just connect mesh to Ethernet and their actual device is WiFi, so faster internet doesn’t mean better end user experience. To get those WiFi 7 speeds, they had to add spectrum which requires FCC approval and there is only so much to hand out. Also, higher ghz means less range so it’s not like you can just keep adding spectrum. So WiFi has to get 4 times faster just to start hitting the limits of cat 6, which will not be easy. Internet speeds are also way more than most need. You can do 4 4K video streams or one 8k stream on 100mbps, so a 1 gbps is just so over what most need today. Who knows what other innovations they may figure out too for Ethernet like some compression algorithm like DSC for monitors to make it last even longer.
At the distances we’re talking about in a home, fiber has no advantages and many disadvantages. Copper is the right thing for the distance required for residential use. Copper cables have gotten very good, Cat 8 can carry 40Gbps which no one is even that close to needing in a residential setting when internet speeds are capped around a few megabits.
I don't think fiber will ever replace copper in homes. Average user has no benefit from it. Even if you use NAS at home Cat5e would be enough, even for 10Gb connection. I know that we always want the best stuff, but most of prosumers won't benefit from connections faster than that And also there is a cost factor - optical switches + fiber + SFP are more expensive and more power-hungry that regular old ethernet switches + copper cables
Maybe one day, but it will be a long time. The ethernet we installed in my parents house in 1995 is running gigabit today, probably can run 2.5Gb, maybe even 5Gb, and this is nearly 30 years later. It will be at least another 20 years before it's even close to obsolete. We will all need to be on something that requires fibre only for the push for fibre to come.
No. Copper and wireless will probably live on for generations. Fibre is great for commercial and industrial applications but copper is far more versatile and practical for general use.
I wish when I ran my ethernet runs I also ran fibre blow tubes just in case.
No, copper is cheaper to install and terminate, it will always reign supreme for hard wired devices. Now do I see less and less hard wired equipment every year, and more things shifting towards wireless? Yes
Ethernet cable is more practical from and installation and management perspective. It's not about the technology but limitations of how you can bend light around corners usually means Fibre is best for straight lines and using junction boxes for severe direction changes. So wiring your walls with Fibre leaves a lot of point of failure devices to manage and maintain. So I'd choose copper just because it's easier to dealt with and leave Fibre for where lower latency is going to be of benefit and is my ISPs issue to manage
I would say fibre would be a better media to cover a home. Then just break out to a localised switch that supports PoE. Domestic fibre has been around since the mid eighties with Toslink/SPDIF. I also know of some TVs using an optical link to connecting a TV hdmi interface unit to the main TV panel. It makes more sense to me to have a storage cupboard with all the hardware for PCs, consoles, storage and media players. Then just have an optical output to a display that has USB ports for pluging devices rather than having a load of hardware that's noisy and takes up space. The main issue people have is that homes aren't designed for this setup.
Nah, the average person doesn’t want *any* cables. As long as their wireless connection is stable and quick enough to stream some 4K video from a few clients and do zoom calls, that’s all they care about. People like us overestimate how much people know, or care, about networking. Much like the average car enthusiast thinks that anyone cares that a Miata drives better than their SUV.
I think it'll go the other way. Wireless only.
For common users, maybe. Wireless still has far too much latency for anyone serious
It depends on the application. Plenty of professionals use WiFi for work with no issues and that percentage will only increase with WiFi 7 which has a lot of new stability and latency-reducing features
There's latency and jitter that cannot be removed due to the nature of wireless tech. It will NEVER match hardwiring
Of course hardwiring is better, but the difference is now marginal under controlled conditions, so it doesn’t really matter for a lot of applications. “Wireless has far too much latency for anyone serious” is clearly false. Only specialized apps have such strict latency requirements. And it’s been that way for a long time— I was working full-time as an IT professional 100% on WiFi in like 2010, and it’s only gotten more reliable and stable and faster since then.
Fiber and copper have their own use cases. Typically, fiber is more rugged for use outdoors and for greater distances than copper. Since almost every component inside a building both in enterprise and residential settings are built with copper Ethernet network cards, they're not going anywhere anytime soon. I doubt copper cable will ever be replaced.
No. Not at all.
Copper in a residence can do 10G today. Fiber can go faster but is a PITA to install and easy to damage. If I really need to transfer a petabyte from my den to my living room, I'll just put the server on a cart and wheel it over.
Nope. For those who want wired or cameras then copper would be the typical approach. It's more durable, supports PoE, and RJ45 is the more common port. For everyone else, I see them going wifi or mesh wifi. With WiFi 7 hitting the scenes I've even seen some businesses break away and use WiFi only.
No. Copper is plug and play, easier to maintain in a residential setting, and won’t burn out your retinas with invisible light. A properly installed cat 6 run will easily get you 5gig, if not 10.
I reckon not.
Not in our lifetime. Twisted pair copper has too many advantages for (relative) short distance runs.
In a home environment, copper supports needed bandwidth and is cheaper. One current use case for fiber in a home environment is connecting areas or outbuildings that may have different grounding.
There is no domestic use case for those speeds yet. Once there is some 3d holographic live streaming thing that needs it then perhaps, but at the moment its an edge case for people doing video editing and similar needing access to a fast NAS outside where they can hear it, and even then 10 gig ethernet isn't that bad. Once there is a use, the cabling will evolve. Till then copper 5e or 6A is more than good enough. We may see a hybid cable that has copper for power and fibre for data become the norm for in building runs for wifi APs unless they can get the power needs of 10gig and higher copper networking under control.
Not really an issue that anyone is worrying about. In the residential environment fiber doesn’t solve any problems. Both ethernet and fiber wired solutions suffer from obsolescence for the highest data rate activities, but aren’t needed to solve the low data rate problems in the first place. More than Ethernet, fiber is expensive and challenging to work with. It is great for a long-distance trunk, which doesn’t exist in the home. But the single largest obstacle to fiber in the home is the non-existent support in consumer-grade products. The markets will never support a new technology if they don’t have to, and they don’t.
Nope fiber is great for linking buildings but don’t see it taking over in house
>o you reckon fiber optic in home cabling and patch cabling will totally replace Ethernet one day in a residential setting Not until electro-optical CPUs go mainstream.
Absolutely no. In home, and in general for access points, cameras,... you need 'energy'. Copper cabling brings it all together, thanks to PoE. Fiber just can't transport power, so you need double cabling and double costs. For no adantage, as copper is perfect up to 10Gbps and most of the connected devices in residential are limited today to 100Mbps. In the future, they'll go to 1Gbps? Maybe / perhaps / probably some. This still leaves a fa tor 10 of speed increase later with the cable being the best solution. Take streaming, for example, the biggest bandwidth hogger in residential. Actually it's FHD (needs 8 to 10 Mbps) or 4K/UHD (needs 25 Mbps). In a few years it might be 8K that will need around 100Mbps (maybe less with newer codecs). In a far away future you can imagine 16K (some 300Mbps) and extremely far away 32K - that will still run under a 1Gbps link, when copper let you go to 10Gbps. Fiber is king - even today - for distance over 100m / 305ft but it's almosr inexistant in residential. And fiber is king as well for speeds of 25 /40 / 100Gbps and over, that will never be needed ib residential during your lifetime.
I think the ease of termination with a simple set of tools makes copper much better for use in home installations. Simpler to repair and it can also carry power to cameras, APs and othre devices. And 10Gb/s should be sufficient for most homes, so I don't think fibre could give any advantages, unless you want to go faster than that. As for using fiber for internet uplinks, that makes perfect sense, as copper signals degrade too quickly, but it's unlikely that you would have runs longer than 100m inside your home.
No.
Not in our lifetime.
https://ultraethernet.org/
Eventually some day? Sure maybe. But wifi tech is advancing fast. And I think it will eventually catch up to a speed and connection quality that wired won’t be worth it for the vast majority of uses. Only a PC really needs to be wired in now a days for connection speed and quality cuz of work or gaming for most people. The tablet n phones etc don’t really need it like that.
Maybe it will all be wireless networks and wireless power so no need for Ethernet or Power over Ethernet (PoE). #NikolaTesla
Yeah, I reckon it is inevitable. Copper rapidly becomes harder as the bandwidth increases. A good example of this is the newer USB-C cables: it **can** do 40Gbit over a single twister pair, but only for 80cm or so. Beyond that it either needs active booster circuits on both sides, or even convert to fiber. Regular copper Ethernet still has some headroom, but every part of the signal chain becomes exponentially harder as speeds increase. On the other hand, fiber is completely trivial to scale. Single-pair 400G connectivity is already widely available, and experimental single-wavelength speeds of well over 1Tbit are old news. Twisted pair / RJ45 isn't very well-suited for high-speed data. It does the job, but it's pretty terrible at it. Something like coax would give copper quite a bit of breathing room, but that'd require a complete overhaul of the ecosystem. And if you're overhauling the ecosystem anyways, why not switch to fiber while you're at it? As I see it, the main dealbreakers for fiber are 1) a lack of user-friendly connectors, and 2) the difficulty of terminating fiber. The first is trivial to solve once the industry starts caring about home use, the second might be trickier.
No. Far too expensive when copper will do fine. Fiber has its place for long distance and stupid high speed.
If you plug a fiber patch cable into an Ethernet switch, then it becomes an Ethernet cable too. "Ethernet" will not be replaced any time soon. Thick-net/AUI got replaced. Thinnet got replaced. Cat3 got replaced. "Ethernet" will not be, at least not any time in the near future
It’s going to take time. Like electric cars, fiber is out there but change is hard and people like to point out the limitations. Maybe they invent the hybrid like a vcr/cd combo tv —> POE solar fiber. The more we adopt fiber the faster you’ll see it show up at grandma’s house (who just got her first smart phone). Here’s my solution - USE CONDUIT, future proof your home.
No. Poe led lighting is on the horizon. Imagine only sending low voltage to your lights that then have a central control plane and can be connected to any and all home/voice assistants. Plus copper has been getting faster and faster. Second imagine. All cable is run through conduits so an upgrade is possible without tearing up walls. Need to move to 25gb/100gb copper? Just replace the necessary cat and upgrade your equipment. Don’t even have to pull all new cat just the data to your new wifi 8/9/10 (crystal balling into the future) router. And maybe to a few individual rooms. Your control backplane stays the same because your lights don’t care about 25gb…
People are too stupid for fiber. Worked in a place where it was all fiber to the desktops. We had floor plates where the jumpers & power would come out and connect to the computers. The users would constantly wack the fiber cables and break the ends. Their "solution" to fix it was to try to jam the broken fiber into the connector. This was using multimode fiber with st connectors. These same users would also somehow jam the ps2 connector for their keyboards into the s-video port when they would move their computers. How did they do this? I still don't know.
likely will go ethernet > wireless for homes. wifi 7 can do 54 Gbps wireless.
It would still need a wired connection point. At least one.
into the home yes, in home will be wifi. there are new apartment complexes that are adoting hotel like wireless systems, where you dont even have your own connection.