why haven't ethernet connectors changed?

Thu Dec 20 20:13:32 UTC 2012

On 12/20/2012 12:01 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On the other hand, I wonder if it would be worth asking the 802.3 committee look at defining a single-pair ethernet standard that would interoperate with a normal 4-pair switch. So, you'd have two conductors into some kind of 2P2C micro-RJ connector on one end of the cable but into a full RJ45 connector on the other. A single-pair pair cable would run at best at a quarter of the speed of a four pair cable but for something like the Raspberry Pi that's really not a problem. Regards, Bill Herrin 

Yeah, that's kind of along the lines I'm thinking too. In the home of the future,
say, I probably would like to have power/network for little sensors, etc, where
you already have a gratuitous digital controller now, and then some. Do these
things need to have gig-e speeds? Probably not... for a lot even Bluetooth speeds
are probably fine. But they do want to be really small and really inexpensive.

(Yes, I know about zigbee, but there's room for a variety of solutions depending
on the situation.)

Mike