Gig to your domicile is fine, but getting it to various rooms is not a straight forward challenge.
I tried the latest Ethernet over Power and it was abysmal. Wifi5 is good when close to the AP. At this point it's wiring for Cat6 in order to fully utilize my Gige from Comcast.
Depending on the age of your house, and how future proof they were; most houses have a phone jack in most of the rooms. If they were run since the mid-90s, it's probably 4-pair cat3 or cat5, and if you're lucky it's run to a central point that's accessible. Reterminate with rj45 instead of rj11 and boom. If it's 4-pair daisy chained, you'll need to put in two ports at each faceplate and jumpers in rooms you don't use and switches in rooms you do use.
Cat3 doesn't meet the spec for GigE, but in short runs without a lot of crosstalk from dense wiring, it's likely to work and worth a try.
If you only have 2-pair wires in the wall, you can still likely run 100BaseTX, which is OK if not very exciting. At least you'd remove most of the jitter of wifi.
If you're in a rental, I dunno how the landlord would feel about you messing with the jacks, but it's undoable. If you were considering pulling new wire, you likely own.
Thanks. I neglected to mention that my home uses Cat5e for phone, but as far as I can tell, there is no central point that I can access.
I do own, so I don't mind running wires. Though I am being honest, back in 2003, I ran my own Ethernet in my apartment from the main room to my office.
I looked at thin ethernet to run under the carpet, but I am basically going from the main entrance (where the TV/Cable Modem reside) to the opposite end of the townhome, where my office is.
Prior to wires, I'm going to try the wifi6 mesh system from linksys. If I can get ~500-600mb/s to my office, that is a worth tradeoff.
I bought a new construction (I wasn't specifically looking for a new construction so it was already done when I got to it) and was really disappointed to see that:
- no conduit in the walls
- no ethernet in the walls
- coax to every room but it all terminates outside the house
which I'm sure meets most people's needs but was annoying for me. And it would've been so cheap to do it "right."
So I'm relegated to relying on the fact that I have very conveniently located unfinished half of basement and garage where I can do lots of cabling and just pop through the wall right at the end.
I just moved into a 100 year old house and my first home project was wiring the whole thing for ethernet, resulting in a funny situation where my house has gigabit ethernet cables running past the original knob and tube wiring in the attic.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=toast0 stated, check your phone cables, they should be cat5e or even cat6. With new construction you almost should have a levitron panel near by.
This was my first thought too. I have done this successfully to get Cat5e everywhere in a house that used to have coax everywhere. If you do it, I recommend attaching multiple pull strings to the coax, then pulling the coax out, then using one of the new pull strings for the Cat5e - otherwise you risk the Cat5e and the coax becoming detached from one another in the wall.
I tried the latest Ethernet over Power and it was abysmal. Wifi5 is good when close to the AP. At this point it's wiring for Cat6 in order to fully utilize my Gige from Comcast.