I had a similar experience moving into a new apartment that had ethernet sockets in all the walls. Took me a while to realize that the cables connecting the sockets up were oldschool Cat5 (100Mbps max) cable, so even though I was plugging Cat6a into the wall it didn’t do a lick of good. Wi-Fi 6 on the other hand is giving me a little under 1Gbps.
Latency and reliability I can see, but at this point the bandwidth has become pretty immense that I would have a hard time saturating it.
I wired up my office, and when I speed tested it, the shitty Ethernet adapter in my USB-C dock was slightly slower than just using wifi.
I had a similar experience moving into a new apartment that had ethernet sockets in all the walls. Took me a while to realize that the cables connecting the sockets up were oldschool Cat5 (100Mbps max) cable, so even though I was plugging Cat6a into the wall it didn’t do a lick of good. Wi-Fi 6 on the other hand is giving me a little under 1Gbps.
You can pretty reliably pull 1G with cat 5 over household distances (10m or so). More likely it’s the equipment limiting the speed.
Could be all the way down to 2 wire cables if they cheaped out hard enough
Nah you need a minimum of two pairs for an Ethernet connection.
Ethernet over coax was very popular until CAT cables replaced them.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/interface-networking-connectivity/ethernet/single-pair-ethernet
There’s hardware that does it with one
Interesting edge case. Not really relevant though.
It is part of the ethernet standards now, though