As some may remember from earlier this year, my friend was buying a new "semi-custom" home. "Semi-custom" is a marketing term, meaning you get to choose (pay more) pre-determined builder options. It is not custom designed.
The home builder was not installing any wired broadband utilities in the new neighborhood. No cable coax, no telephone DSL, no fiber optic. The only option was wireless, with a special deal with a specific 5G wireless cellular provider.
Originally, the builder's sales agent (i.e. the people working in the model home selling houses) said new homes didn't need (and would not have) a wired "demarc" location and no ethernet or coax outlets. Not my house, but I was surprised when I heard that. I like wired connections when possible for any fixed devices, and WiFi only for mobile devices.
I visited his new house over the Thanksgiving Holiday.
The sales agent was partially wrong and partially correct. Never believe the sales agent spiel.
The built house came with exactly FOUR wired ethernet outlets in the living room and each bedroom/office (x2 Cat6 jacks each outlet). But no wired DEMARC, no coax outlets, and no wired broadband utilities in the neighhood. The wired ethernet jacks were needed because the wireless 5G base station ended up in an upstairs bedroom window for signal strength reasons. The in-house wired ethernet was needed for a WiFi extender in the living room.
I wouldn't be happy, but it seems to work for his family. The 5G deal was cheaper than what he was paying at his old house.
According to the real estate realtor, not the builder's sales agent, broadband is now in the top three things home buyers want to know. Some states require the realtor MLS to disclose broadband access in the home listings. Broadband access disclosure not required in this state.
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This sounds terribly broken.
I doubt it will be long until sense prevails.
Mark.
It's always too late.
Installing facilities after the fact will cost 50 times more
than if they had been done during neighborhood construction. Nobody
will want to pay for that. It will not pencil out for a competing
provider to foot the bill... Especially when they can expect a low
take rate competing with a cheap alternative that is "good enough" for
most folks.
--TimH
When I bought a new house a couple years ago, I told the realtor: I
will only consider homes where gigabit wired broadband is available
from at least two service providers. When I made an offer, I wrote it
into the contingencies: I would pay for the installation immediately
upon the offer's acceptance but would not close until the installation
was complete and verified.
Personally, I would worry about the resale value of a home which had
neither wired communication services available nor conduit in which
such could trivially be added. But I guess to each his own.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
It's easy and relatively cost-effective to make a new home pretty
future-proof for connectivity by running conduit (of sufficient size,
without tight bends) from the telecom area to the outlet box(es) in each
room. For today run a coax and one or two cat6A; then whatever system
appears in the future can quickly replace those in the conduit. Considering
the importance of telecommunication/entertainment it's a surprise that very
few new homes seem to take that option, but I guess it's not "trendy"
enough.
For the below example, it seems like an extreme example of cost-cutting,
along with believing that "wireless is magic". When the real-world concerns
about coverage and capacity appears, and the residents have 5 smart TVs
competing to stream video on Wi-Fi along with game consoles downloading
100GB games (all of which should have been wired-in), is when they realize
the difficulties of not planning the network and layout.
By that time the builder will be long gone with the money...
Beyond that, my home (c. 1996) has RJ-45 stapled to the studs every X feet, jacks in every room, and super-fat coax similarly fastened to studs in 3 rooms. Of course, none of this is in use. How many times have I wished they used conduit.
One smart US guy wrote in the alias (around 2007) that wireless is about 7x more expensive per bit than wired, and there are no reasons to believe that it will ever change.
The economy would prevail sooner or later.
Ed/
One or two home owners are about to lose their ****
Mark.
When we built our new house 3 years ago, I had the electrician pull Cat7 and coax to most of the rooms in the house, since it would be way easier to do it before the drywall went up. They initially resisted because they had never worked with Cat7 before. I struck a deal with them where I bought the Cat7, they pulled it, and I terminated and tested it, and they were OK with that. Everything lands in the basement at our telco demarc sits, and everything has been working perfectly since then. The rack where everything lands is also tied to the house ground. I might consider 5G as a backup to our terrestrial fiber option, but haven’t gone there yet.
The local electric utility tests our UPSs for free roughly once a month 
Thank you
jms
Excuse my ignorance, but why, in this day and age, coax?
Joly
I can’t speak for the original poster. But SDI over coax comes to mind.
How else would you distribute cable and sat tv? I would never buy a home or build a home if there weren’t hard wired services to the home. The last thing I want to do is run all media streaming and internet surfing through a wireless 5g connection.
You could use modern media distribution systems over IP or HDBase-T.
But yeah, I would still run coax to each TV location – even if you don’t intend on using it. You may find a use for it at some point, and the next person who lives in the home may want it.
Broadcast television is still very much a thing. Monthly recurring cost for an antenna is $0. Coax is the most common transmission line for this purpose.
Cable companies are still doing coax for new neighborhoods and even overbuilds in 2024, for some reason.
One of the major cable operators just got done tearing up my neighborhood north of Houston (that already had coax from another major operator in addition to XGS-PON) to pull in coax with blazing fast speeds of up to 1200mbps down, 35mbps up, not even mid-split DOCSIS 3.1. When I reached out to said operator to ask why they were not pulling fiber, I was told that their “fiber rich” network was “just as good as fiber to the home”.
Its so cheap, its an opportunity cost thing.
Their staff knows how to run coax, how to troubleshoot coax and how to
repair coax. To do something else, they have to hire and/or train
staff for it and then have enough of it in their system to keep that
staff in practice. How many _new neighborhoods_ does the cable company
wire up in your locality each year?
Regards,
Bill Herrin
For residential builds' TV, in many regards there is still nothing that has all of coax's advantages.
Very cheap to buy cable
Cable can survive a good bit of mishandling, pulling on ends, being stepped on etc.
Cheap / simple to install and repair (outside of edge cases)
Massive base of existing & new compatible hardware, both COTS and providers'
No range / interference / load issues (for any standard house)
Can be "split" anywhere in the system for up to a few additional drops without electronics (one amp at the panel can cover all the gain needed for the house)
Even with broadcast, the need for coax (vs network) is going away. People that use broadcast still want “cable type” services, mainly dvr and channel guides. With so many options out there, TiVo, HDHomeRun, MythTV, many others, all of them only need coax to the unit, then distribute via IP from there. Still only need ethernet (or gasp, wifi) to most of the tv’s.
Coaxial cable runs from the street to my house at my most recent purchase. All the “cable boxes” in the house are wireless. They are essentially whitelisted Android TV boxes.