I always find these "give me a crystal ball" posts interesting, but let's not kid ourselves - none of us have any real idea. There's no way anyone can know what's going to be adequate in 10 or 20 years. The most likely candidate is fiber, but that's outside most people's ability at present because we don't really know how to connect it. Some do, but not most of us. As one person noted, conduit (with long, gentle bends and as much diameter as possible) is probably the best bet because any attempt to predict the future even 10 years out is a guess, at best.
In our home, we're going with conduit where necessary (basically runs between and through the length of buildings) and filling it with direct burial cat 6 for the inevitable moisture inside the conduit. It's not terribly expensive and for almost any normal home use, it's more than enough. When it comes time to replace it we can connect the new stuff to one end and pull. For all else, we're going with wireless because that's become reliable and adequate for most purposes. But to each their own, and hey - with Hubitat working so reliably, we need SOMEthing to talk about.
What @Madcodger has said is probably most accurate. No matter what you do there is something you won't think of.
It is really what is most affordable woth the best performance. Do that and just ride it out until something new is needed. The wiring for 10gb ethernet shouldn't be to hard to come by weather it is 6a or above.
There aren't many home use cases today were even 1gb connections are insufficient. The only real good thing to use it for today for normal home use someone pointed out was for a NAS appliance. That is simply so if you have more then one person at one time accessing data you can feed at full speed. I doubt any home user is using much beyond spinning disk for mas storage at home with a large collection of data and such. Most of them capped out around or a little bit above wirespeed for 1GB.
The big problem with speeds bove 1GB at home is that the ability to use it is minimal. It isn't just about installing the wires, but you have to have devices to drive it. Check your router for how much bandwith you actually usem i bet you will be suprised how little of what you pay for is really used. I work for one of the largest ISP's in the US. I would never suggest anything near the top teir to most people and that is simply because they will never use it.
Could things grow in the future certainly, but i have also had conversations with my companies engineers and frankly the home user isn't someone they are building the high bandwith networks for. It is to driver other services for corporate companies to provide to home users. We are just cash cows because the perception bigger is better and generally speaking home users are easily convinced they need it.
The problem is that if we use all of the bandwidth that we pay for, we're penalized for exceeding our arbitrary and useless caps (or charged more for the privilege).
I work in IT, I also work from home. My kids have recently moved out but up until then I had two teens streaming music, gaming, streaming video from YouTube and various other sources all while I was teleworking from home. I have Verizon FiOS and have 100mb speed up and down. It’s plenty fast for everything we did / do. People always ask me how fast they really need from their ISP and I tell them don’t buy into the marketing hype of gig speeds. When I tell them what I have, they’re shocked. Inside the home I run all CAT6.
Yep that is exactly my view as well. I do have fiber to the home and pay a little more for faster internet, but I also have a plex server that can stream out high bitrate video.
I have always found it funny talking to the marketing folks in my company. They never liked what I had to say about there internet offers.
Reminds me of the "Feeds and Sppeds" battles with home printer specs. How many times in the last year did any home user hover over their printer, frantically grabbing each page as it came out to meet a deadline? Ahhh yes...never.
Perhaps not in the past year, but I have had to print 50 copies of a 10 page document on my home printer. As each copy came out of the printer, I grabbed it and stapled the pages together. Thus, I was glad to have a printer capable of 32 ppm. It still took over 15 minutes to print all the copies.
I am retired now, but I worked as a technical service representative for a paper company. I have seen printing presses that can print an entire truckload of paper in a single day (22 tons of paper).
The fastest laser printers can print over 300 pages per minute. Obviously, such equipment is designed to supply large data centers who print bank statements, phone bills, etc. by the millions. Some of those printers are sheet fed using paper similar to what you use in your own home. Other are continuously fed by rolls of paper that weight about 1000 lbs each.
For home use, ink jet printers normally print at least 10 ppm in black and white or 5 ppm in color. Some of the more expensive ones can go 25 ppm.
Laser printers tend to be faster. Even the lower priced black and white ones will often do at least 25 ppm with some doing over 40 ppm. Color laser printers tend to be around 25 ppm.
The thing is..... most people don't grasp how fast 1Gbps really is and how much data it can carry in 1 second.
1Gbps is 100 million characters per second. That equates to around 20,000 text pages per SECOND. If the fastest printer is 300ppm (which is 5 pages per second) its still not anywhere remotely close to Gigabit. Even the fastest printers could run very comfortably on 100Mbps with bandwidth to spare.
I'm selling 100GbE to my corporate accounts, most are running them at 4x 25GbE using copper direct attach cables (QSFP28). I'm starting to see consumer PC's with the 2.5GbE support. I don't know if the consumer switches/AP/routers are there yet. I don't spec out the networks themselves, so I only see the compute side of our deployments.
Where I worked, we had a huge datacenter with upwards of 10,000 servers. We were early on the bandwagon with 1GigE and 10GigE, were moving from 25GigE to 100GigE for trunk connections last year because of the amount of data we moved around (terabytes hourly).
But I don't do anything like that in my house.
A year ago I had 5 people in the house doing Zoom video meetings all day long - 4 remotely working full time and 1 college student. I have a single 1GigE backbone, two AC-1900 access points for WiFi, and a FiOS connection of 1Gbps up/down. 3 of those people were on the WiFi (5GHz). We barely touched the available bandwidth.
If I were wiring today I'd probably put in Cat6a at the minimum to support 10GigE, but I'd probably still only install 1GigE gear. 1Gbps is fast. I'll likely never update my Cat5e in the house.
The thing is, we humans hit OUR limits, and after that there's not much point in going faster. Many people in these forums work in tech, so they see the ever-increasing appetite for speed at, say, a corporate datacenter. But back at home, it's the same humans, and they're not getting upgrades at the same rate as the silicon chips. They're only going to read so fast, listen so fast, etc.
We may have thought we were at those maximums at 9600K, as some have noted in earlier posts, but that, of course, wasn't true. But as we start to hit 1 gig and beyond, you start to wonder whether more speed is really going to be all that useful. I feel the same about things like video resolution, in that the newer screens coming out just seem like marketing ploys to me.
But hey, I might just be leaning more and more toward my forum handle. Only time will tell.
Faster throughput, processing etc leads to a more seamless/integrated experience so eventually we might not have to worry about our limits - things will just work the way we want them to without us having to delve into the messy details (unless we want to).
I am a ham radio operator. We still continue to use some very slow means of communication. When the telegraph was used, information was sent using Morse Code. A highly proficient operator might be able to send and receive at 40-50 words per minute. That type of communication is still used, but the method is now continuous wave RF signals rather than wired telegraph.
The next step up was communication using Baudot Code which is a 5 bit code used for transmitting capital letters and numerals only. This code is still used by radio operators as RTTY, radio teletype, to send information at 40-50 words per minute.
The first modems were developed by AT&T Bell Labs in the 1950s. These modems used two audio frequency tones, alternating between them to transmit data at 300 bits per second. My first modem operated at this rate. Later the mode was increased to using four distinct tones allowing speed of 1200 bps.
Further increases in technology by 2000 allowed sound modems to operate at the phenomenal speed of 56 kilobits per second.
One of the earliest wired networks was the IBM Token Ring network that could transmit data at 4 Megabits per second. The first Ethernet networks operated at 2.94 mega bits per second which is orders of magnitude greater than a sound modem. Today, the very fastest networks that comprise the backbone of the Internet operate at up to 400 giga bits per second.
Thus, over the past 50 years, I have seen my data communications evolve from 40 baud teletype machines, to sound modems operating between 300 baud and 56K baud. I now have a cable modem that will allow me to download data at 100 megabits per second, a 1 gigabit Ethernet network and a WiFi 6 (AX) network that can go even faster than that. However, the advances that I have noted in my own 50 years of computing are likely to continue. While the 40 baud teletype accomplished my computing needs for input and output 50 years ago, I would hate to be limited to that speed today. Fifty years from now, those who are still alive may well live to see every home with 100 gigabit Ethernet. Thus, nothing is ever futureproof. You can only anticipate the next 5-10 years, if that.
This has not been my experience, I designed and built my home network around 15 years ago, a cat5e cable went to every bedroom and living room, 3 cat5e cables went to my home theater, one in the kitchen, and there was a dedicated space allocated for the switches/routes/NAS. Each network cable is plugged into a gigabit switch. I have not come close to needing more bandwidth to any of my end devices. Streaming 4K bluray rips (about 2-3 times the bandwidth of Netflix Ultrahd) only requires, at most, 120 Mbits/second. I will have no problem when 8K becomes mainstream, its bandwidth requirements will be well below gigabit.
So far, my well designed home network has lasted me 15 years and I will be surprised if I don't get another 15 years out of it. I really don't think people realize:
Are you advocating that 5e should go in NEW wiring projects? I understand that your home network design is a hill you're willing to die on, but that's existing while the OP is talking about new wiring. The vast majority of commenters here are talking about what they would do for a NEW wiring project.
