A tale of a cable.

[Efros]

One of my grandsons came to me shortly before Christmas to get the RAM on his PC upgraded and tuned (we had built this for his Christmas a couple of years ago). While we were doing this I hooked a wifi dongle to the machine to get wifi so we could check for updates and so on. I then went into the explanation as to why we shouldn't just add the RAM but replace it completely, adding it would affect performance negatively compared to just upgrading it. While talking about this he mentioned that the internet in his house was painfully slow, this surprised me as I knew his Dad had upgraded to a 1GB fiber connection but he told me he was lucky if he got 35 Mbps on a wired connection. Quick check on speedtest and even with the dongle we were getting 300 over wifi, my own machine using a better wifi chipset gets closer to 960. So I sent him home with his upgrade and tuned RAM and also a 802.11ac dongle. He texted me later to say the situation had improved but he was now sitting at 150. I told him that was probably down to him being 1 floor above the router and on the other side of the house coupled with the construction of his house, 100 years old wood with 100s of nails everywhere, not a Faraday cage but certainly not helpful for wifi. I told him to take his system downstairs and connect it directly to the ISP router. He did this and was getting 300 over wifi and via wired his familiar 35 Mbps again, bingo! I asked him how old the cable was, he told me that as far as he can remember that it's the same one that he first used the internet on some 17 years ago. 3 days later, Christmas day, I gave him 50ft of cat 6 (7&8 compatible apparently) cable. Some 30 minutes later he texted me this

He showed his Dad whose jaw hit the ground. His Dad is currently awaiting a delivery of a bunch of cat6 cables and a new 10GB switch. We reckon the old cabling in the house was  cat5, and bad cat5 at that, and had been there since about 2006 and probably before that TBH. Anyway job done, and Grandson is happy as are the other two Grandsons! All three of whom have been maxing out their steam downloads. Son in law is also happy to have the problem solved, they had put their pisspoor bandwidth down to their location in the sticks, in Maine.

[Justin_Simpleton]

Hmm... I ran a lot of Cat5 cable back in the day.  I bet those folks are cussing me out or, hopefully, blaming the cable company. 

[Efros]

I wonder how many people have cat5 on their 1Gig fiber connection without even realizing it.

[Admiral_Karasu]

I live in a mausoleum myself, all the wiring in this building is way over 40 years old.

[Wolfswetpaws]

1 hour ago, Efros said:

I wonder how many people have cat5 on their 1Gig fiber connection without even realizing it.

The majority of homes in my area do not have the home wired for internet.  Telephone jacks are more likely than internet jacks.
The upside is that the cables are not buried in the walls of a home.  They're easily accessed by the homeowner.

Having a home with an early example of every room having internet cables within the walls seems to be the problem.
Newer internet hardware and networking standards have made Cat-5 cables obsolete, and accessing them for replacement might not be worth it.
Which means laying new cables on the floor instead of inside the walls.