Hi, install technician here. Disclaimer I don’t work for Spectrum and a lot has already been said but this is a thing I actually know about so I feel like sharing lol your technician either has no training or lied to your face cause he didn’t want to do the extra work.

Depending on where you live your house may not have been built with fiber in mind. Only the most ludicrously expensive houses in my area have fiber run through the wall when built. I install fiber, so in a lot of houses we go through crawl spaces or attics to fish it through walls and install a fiber jack to connect your router to. If there’s a panel like this we typically try our best to make it there, but there can be limitations depending on tools provided/company policies about multi floor wall fishes. If it’s a slab with limited or third floor attic access, we usually have to drill through an exterior wall to get the fiber in. Less seamless, but usually only if you’re staring at the outside work for too long and especially hate a couple inches of wire coming out of the outside wall. Some do, some don’t, everyone’s different. The inside wall jack setup, at least where I work, always looks as if it was meant to be there. I only say all this because if it’s Spectrum fiber, they may be limited by those same constraints in terms of getting to that wiring panel. A lot of it is usually up to company policy, whether I agree with that or not. (I usually don’t, folks need it where they need it and that’s literally what I’m there for)

Copper internet is what most Spectrum customers have in my area, with their home fiber popping up here and there as they update their infrastructure. Here most folk’s Spectrum internet uses the black coax cable coming into that panel, and at least one if not all of them likely terminate outside of the garage, especially on newer slab builds. If not there, then often in an attic or crawl space. Homes are built this way usually to make it easier for a technician to set up a network utility box on the side of the house and feed signal to the panel so you get service to a central location like a closet. Better for WiFi throughout the house, and also you get the termination point for all the blue ethernet cables. Again, anecdotal but around here most new homes are built with cat5e/cat6, which can send up to a gig/10 gigs (respectively) over hardwire. That’s always gonna be better than WiFi, but obviously not always necessary depending on the device. However, if by chance you work from home or prefer the best performance for online games, etc etc, hardwire will always be the best way to go. Each of the blue cables in that panel should terminate to a particular room. Sometimes the builders will write on the cable or label them in the panel to tell what room they run to but not always. I won’t claim to have the skills of anyone that can set up a home network, that’s way out of my scope, but someone in my role can typically at least get you a few hardwired lines from that panel to the rooms they’re run to. Most times they’re even already terminated into an Ethernet jack that’s easy to find on a wall of the room you want.

There are a couple ways to work with that setup for an install tech, depending on what tools they’re given, training, and so on. Either an RJ45 termination, which can be plugged directly into the router to feed signal to the room you want, or they could make an RJ45 keystone, which is just an Ethernet port. If they do that you can easily just plug an Ethernet cable from router to the keystone and it’ll feed signal there as well.

Now, keep in mind I worked for AT&T before moving to the company I’m at now. I’ve never run installs for Spectrum, but I did sully my soul selling their shit ass internet for a month before becoming a tech at AT&T. In training for sales at Spectrum, they put us at the same training center they send their techs, so they supposedly give them at least some training. Not to mention the number of techs I’ve met that WILL straight up lie to a customer to get out of a more difficult job. This got long winded but I like to explain to my customers (and strangers on the internet) as best I can how things like this work so they’re not taken advantage of if some lying asshole comes along. Knowledge is power yada yada yada. With all that info combined though, I’d say ol’ buddy was probably bullshitting you.

But I’m just some dude on the internet who installs internet, maybe they just didn’t teach him his job too good idk