Electronic lifestyle, technology: hard-wired

Self-tutoring about possibilities with computers and the Internet: the tutor mentions a case of hard wiring.

The following is according to my understanding.

Back in the day – meaning the late nineties in this case – a lot of serious computer people – gamers, etc – were hard-wired. As I understood it, that meant they had ethernet cable running directly from the wall to their computers. It seems that most computers had that capability by then, but a lot of people still had dial-up, because they didn’t have the ethernet connection to the Internet installed in their homes. One needed, back then, cable for that; cable internet was more expensive. It was called high-speed. Although dial-up was done with telephone line from a computer to a phone jack, it wasn’t referred to as hard-wired, as I recall; only ethernet was.

Perhaps thirty years later, here we are: most people, it seems, have a wireless setup at home, whence a gateway serves up high-speed Internet. However, within the home, how much speed a user gets can depend a lot on their proximity to the gateway, besides their computer hardware. Moreover, it seems a lot of laptops don’t even have built-in ethernet ports anymore. Nonetheless, one might notice ethernet ports on the gateway: can one still be hard-wired, like in the late 90s?

It turns out one can indeed be hard-wired. One needs ethernet cable to plug into the gateway. If the computer lacks an ethernet port, an ethernet-to-USB C adaptor can be obtained.

I bought fifty feet of ethernet cable the other day, along with an ethernet-to-USB C adaptor, in order to hard-wire a laptop, about forty feet away, to the gateway. Afterwards, the reported speed was 760Mb/s. That was around twenty times what they had been getting from wireless.

Interesting, eh?