Why do people associate ethernet cords with old outdated technology? I have found that newer houses are much more likely to be wired up with jacks in every room, and it is trivial to plug in your laptop through a dock or a cheap adapter. Most people I work with do exactly this.
Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.
To anyone that just bought a new/newish house with only RJ-11/phone outlets installed...
Pull off the face plate and check to see what kind of wire they used. Chances are that it is cat-5/6/7/8 and you MIGHT be able to use it as an ethernet outlet if it was installed appropriately.
This was done in a former property of mine and I went through the place and replaced certain RJ-11 outlets with RJ-45 ones.
If you’re building a new house it’s close to free to run a bunch of Ethernet in the scheme of things so why not. But at some point you do draw a line. I probably wouldn’t run speaker wire everywhere these days.
And I’m always grabbing a laptop and taking it to another room; I have a separate desktop. So I prefer to keep my laptops untethered as much as possible.
Back in 99 my mom was building a new townhouse. I had them run cat-5 everywhere. I also had them run a 3" stack down the utility wall.
The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots.
We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived.
I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
>I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days.
Nah. Two houses ago I couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working. Turns out the builders had wired it up completely randomly, i.e. it didn't go orange-white, orange, green-white, brown... and each termination was different. I had to redo them all.
White/orange orange white/green blue white/blue green white/brown brown is the typical standard[0] used for both ends of a straight-through cable. Of course, the color order doesn't really matter as long as it is the same on both ends, or one end only swaps the 1st and 2nd wire with the 3rd and 6th respectively[1].
[0] T-568B
[1] Normally this would be the green and orange pairs, resulting in T-568A. Modern Ethernet ports are pretty much all auto-sensing and will handle being connected either straight-through or crossed-over regardless of what device is on the other end.
Until something happens near your home (big event, accident, terrorism, etc), mobile cells crap out under the strain of thousands trying to call at the same time, and you're left with no connection.
Maybe! But some folks would like some redundancy on infrastructure, particularly for emergencies. My elderly parents, for example, held on to a land line until they had both cell and fiber internet in their very-rural home. They wanted to have more than one way to reach emergency services (or me) in the event of disaster. I live in a more-urban area and am quite a lot younger, so I'm not as concerned about it.
Most consumer-internet infrastructure is built on the expectation that only a small percentage of people will actually use it at any given time. Chances are a localized emergency will be precisely the time you see the limits of this approach.
Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.