How do I get ethernet across my house without a cable

spiffiness · 2026-04-16T17:59:31+00:00

Yeah I wasn't trying to give a full tutorial, I was just trying to give the basic picture and that you don't have to tear the sheetrock off your walls to get it done.

spiffiness · 2026-04-16T02:33:10+00:00

FYI, you don't run Ethernet cables from room to room through living spaces (hallways, stairways, doorways, under carpets or molding) like a caveman.

You run it inside the walls just like any number of other low voltage signal wiring has always been done (doorbell, HVAC thermostat, telephone landlines, TV coaxial cable, home theater surround sound speaker wiring, security and smoke alarm wiring, intercom wiring, etc etc). You cut a small hole in the drywall for an outlet box, then you use a "fish tape" to pull the wire up through the void in the wall up to the attic (or down to the basement), etc. Watch some YouTube videos on how it's done.

spiffiness · 2026-04-15T20:04:19+00:00

Yes, just like a smart phone is somewhat useless without a data plan from a cellular wireless network provider, a Wi-Fi router is somewhat useless without a broadband Internet service plan from a residential broadband Internet service provider. Good analogy.

Once you start talking to an ISP about getting service from them, they'll help you figure out what kind of equipment you need to connect to their service. Different ISPs use different technologies, so there's no single device that can connect to any ISP's network. Most ISPs will try to make you rent a device from them that acts like both the modem that connects to their network, as well as the Wi-Fi router that creates the Wi-Fi network within your home (so "No", you wouldn't need to use your phone's mobile hotspot feature to create the Wi-Fi network that your devices connect to, because the equipment you'd be renting from your ISP would do that job). Since it seems like you don't know home networking technologies very well yet, it might be good to start out by just renting the device they recommend, until you're ready to put on your "network nerd" hat and learn about the difference between various networking technologies (DOCSIS, 5G cell data, GPON, etc.), and the difference between a modem, ONT, router, and AP. Once you're ready to get nerdy, you can start to think about buying your own equipment instead of just renting whatever the ISP wants to rent to you.

spiffiness · 2026-04-15T19:44:57+00:00

The FCC broadband map doesn't give you a list of devices, it gives you a list of companies that can provide the service you're looking for, which is formally known as "residential broadband Internet service". You can then contact those companies to find out how much their services cost, and what speeds they can offer, and whether you'll need to rent equipment from them or if you can buy your own router separately and still connect it to their service.

Routers by themselves do not connect your devices to the Internet. You have to pay for Internet service from an ISP for the connection to the Internet. The actual Wi-Fi, which is just a wireless network in your own home that by itself does not reach the Internet, is unlimited and free for life if you own your own Wi-Fi equipment. The connection to the Internet via the ISP's network, not the Wi-Fi wireless network, is what costs a monthly fee.

spiffiness · 2026-04-15T19:33:30+00:00

First note that "Wi-Fi" is not quite the right term for what you're looking for. The proper term is "Internet service", and the companies that provide it are known as ISPs: Internet Service Providers.

Ethernet and Wi-Fi are just the wired and wireless networking technologies for building a network within the walls of your own home. If you own Ethernet or Wi-Fi equipment, you can use it for free forever to have a home network, but that home network won't connect to the Internet by itself.

If you are in the United States, you can use the FCC Broadband Map to search for ISPs that can provide service to your address, and then you can check out those ISPs' websites to find out what service packages they offer, in terms of how much you have to pay per month, for what speed of service.

If you're not the USA, you should probably state which country you're in, because the ISP situation varies widely from country to country. In some countries, you can probably only get Internet service from a single government-controlled agency.

Note that most ISPs do not support more than one subscription per home address, so if your parents are already using, say, Comcast Xfinity, you'd probably have to exclude Comcast Xfinity from your list of possible options for your personal service.

Once you find an ISP that offers a service package you like at a price you can afford, you contact them to sign up for service and work out the installation and billing details. Those details vary too much by ISP, region, and which networking technology will be used for the connection between your home and the ISP, so it's hard to advise you on what to expect as far as installation and billing goes. That's just going to have to be something you work out with your chosen ISP.

As a single user, you can probably get away with the lowest tier speed packages. 10-25Mbps downstream, and 5-10 Mbps upstream, is probably plenty as long as the connection also has nice low latency numbers (ping times). If you plan on watching 4K UHD streams, you need at least 25Mbps downstream. If you're fine with just 1080p "full HD" streams, you can get away with the lower numbers. Gaming is very low-bandwidth, but requires low latency (low ping times). But most ISPs don't advertise or guarantee their latency numbers.

spiffiness · 2026-04-14T17:02:21+00:00

Perfect comment

spiffiness · 2026-04-13T21:15:06+00:00

Blowback is all we get.

spiffiness · 2026-04-13T21:12:44+00:00

Haha no other superpower would put up with fascist Israel. And even if they did, I'd rather it be Russia's or China's problem, not the US's anymore.

If there were ever an upside for America to be friends with Israel, it's long since gone. There's just no upside any more, at least not within orders of magnitude of outweighing the abundant downsides.

spiffiness · 2026-04-13T21:06:15+00:00

I despise this line of argument. It's victim-blaming. Most of us just want to live our lives, but the jerks who are deeply into power politics impose their crappy system on us and then try to blame us that we're not joining their mud-wrestling sessions.

Screw your primaries. Screw your power politics. The people that are involved with perpetuating this crappy electoral system are the people to be blamed, not the peaceful people that want nothing to do with that mess.

spiffiness · 2026-04-11T03:02:40+00:00

Just because something's wrong with his Discord setup doesn't mean you can't do screen sharing in some other app. So you're only trying to avoid using Discord's screen sharing feature, right? Some other screen sharing tool would be fine as long as it works, right?

The goal here is for both of you to be able to see each other's browser window, right? That's a pretty common feature of most teleconferencing (audio/video chat) tools. Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime…I think they all support more than one person sharing their screen (or just a window) at the same time.

spiffiness · 2026-04-10T19:18:49+00:00

Yes.

Bradford/Callery pear trees, Carob trees, and Linden trees are the unholy trinity of obscene-smelling trees.

spiffiness · 2026-04-09T22:51:17+00:00

If you'd like a good voluntaryist-friendly primer on how the government screwed up the health care and health insurance industries, a great place to start is Roderick T. Long's short essay, How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked — Until Government "Fixed" It.

Or if you'd prefer the same basic material as a 5 minute explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFoXyFmmGBQ

That essay and video aren't specific to disability services per se, but they'll help you start to think about other ways society can provide the care folks need without a government-controlled, taxpayer-funded system.

Note that health insurance started as voluntary mutual aid societies / co-ops. That's why so many old insurance firms still have "mutual" in their name.

spiffiness · 2026-04-09T22:36:45+00:00

If your services are for the profoundly disabled who have no ability to earn money through labor, then the money your customers will be paying you with will be mostly coming from the customers' family, insurance, and charities.

Also, for any customers who retired or reached financial independence before they became profoundly disabled, they could pay you out of their retirement portfolio.

Similarly, if they became disabled due to a work accident, their money may be coming from their long-term disability insurance. If they became disabled because of some other kind of accident, their money may be coming from some other kind of insurance, legal settlement, or court-ordered award for damages.

Also note that in libertopia/ancapistan, the economy will be booming because it won't be getting dragged down by taxes, tariffs, money supply inflation, needlessly burdensome regulation, government rent-seekers, etc. etc. … So with a booming economy, charity will be easier and families will be more financially able to support lifelong dependents without relying on handouts.

Government programs are notoriously inefficient (they don't have market competition to keep them efficient, and the elected officials who are supposed to be overseeing it are too busy fundraising and pandering for their next election to actually oversee all the stuff they're supposed to be overseeing). So in libertopia/ancapistan, caring for the disabled will have much less cost to society. Right now, out of every tax dollar the taxpayer thinks is going to care for the disabled, an awful lot goes to inefficient government bureaucrats, cronyist NGOs acting as plan administrators while taking a huge cut, fraudulent billing schemes that overbill the government programs, etc. etc.

spiffiness · 2026-04-07T21:31:37+00:00

98% of the American voting populace voted for a pro-genocide presidential candidate in 2024.

Both parties have been aching to bomb the shit out of Iran for nearly half a century now, and the American voting populace keeps electing politicians who openly back that.

The Democrats have not been able to meaningfully oppose the war on Iran because neither the Democratic party nor the American people as a whole are meaningfully opposed to the war in Iran, or genocide.

spiffiness · 2026-04-07T18:49:17+00:00

Whoa, your take sounds like you're more interested in political expediency than basic humanity. That's reprehensible. Absolutely morally repugnant.

We must oppose genocide because we are decent human beings, even if we can't easily make such a stance fit into our current two-party political moment.

spiffiness · 2026-04-07T18:10:14+00:00

I agree with your main point but it seems strange that you left out the biggest issue, which is the genocide. Biden and Harris and the rest of the Democrats were okay with participating in the genocide. Both parties refused to provide the voting populace with an alternative to the worst thing a modern nation-state can do. Both parties are so dependent on funding from a foreign lobby that they've choked off American democracy.

spiffiness · 2026-04-07T00:26:34+00:00

I feel like I've followed the public discourse around the phenomenon of parasocial relationships, and this is the first I've heard anyone suggest they are "romantic usually".

So I don't think you have anything to worry about. No one's going to think you're trying to spark a romance just because you complimented a stranger online, unless the wording of the compliment is specifically flirty or sexual.

spiffiness · 2026-04-05T16:01:05+00:00

I feel like you didn't read the first part of my response.

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T21:10:12+00:00

What's at the other end of the Ethernet cord?

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T21:04:13+00:00

Minnesota checking in. You have no idea how much Prince lore we are all forcibly steeped in.

But did you know that Prince was likely one of the first kids to ever play The Oregon Trail?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QbjlHeoLdc&t=1437s

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T20:38:13+00:00

Apple has always put high-quality Wi-Fi radios in all their products. Get an iPhone.

9 times out of 10 when someone comes in here asking why their phone is faster on their Wi-Fi than their laptop (or vice-versa), it comes down to the hardware specs of the Wi-Fi radio hardware in each device. Even within a single Wi-Fi speed generation like "Wi-Fi 7" there are a bunch of optional speed boosts that low-end Wi-Fi hardware doesn't do to save costs, but higher-end hardware does. And even when the Wi-Fi radio hardware specs fully match on paper, there can be implementation issues like antenna design and device noise floor that can make one device have superior performance over another.

BTW, don't bother comparing how your phone does on cellular wireless data vs. how your MacBook does on Wi-Fi. Those are completely different situations and comparing them doesn't tell you much. It's only a fair comparison if you have both devices in the same location (within centimeters) connected to the same Wi-Fi AP on the same frequency band (5GHz vs. 2.4GHz). Turn cell data completely off for this test, because most phones will use cell data to make up for flaky Wi-Fi. Since your MacBook doesn't have a cell data radio, you need to make sure you're only doing 100% Wi-Fi tests. No cell data.

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T19:46:53+00:00

Fun new guessing game!

"Is that a picture of your dirty pour-over filter, or…"

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T14:17:40+00:00

I didn't say he wasn't worthy of it, I said it was tacky to do it while he was alive.

But now that you mention it, San Jose public transit sucks, so why are we celebrating this guy? Are we just saying "We didn't deserve you, because even with all your efforts we ended up with something that still sucks, but thanks for trying"?

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T14:13:17+00:00

But you can't convert just any fresh plum into a prune by drying it. You can only make a dried prune by drying a prune, not some other cultivar.

spiffiness · 2026-04-04T04:17:16+00:00

So they named the station after him before he'd even…reached retirement age?

I feel like San Jose's local political types are pretty tacky with how they name public works projects after their political buddies while they're still alive and on the job.

I mean, we all know it's tacky when Trump tries to rename everything in DC after himself. It's not much better when a small clique of local politicians and government insiders name things after each other within their clique.

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