In a comment on my entry about how sometimes it's the network that's the problem , I was asked what networking workstations typically have on our networks (and if we still use 100 MBit for low speed things). The simple answer is that it's somewhat mixed but mostly 1G Ethernet, often with 1G uplinks from the switches that the office network jacks are connected to. But there's some stories involved.

As a university department, we have been in our current buildings for what is mostly multiple decades, and in some cases since the early 1980s ( cf ). In the oldest building ( with our old machine room ), the department's presence predates twisted pair network wiring entirely (there is still disconnected thicknet wiring around our offices); our other most used building predates Cat-6 cabling . As a result, all of this older space is wired with Cat-5 twisted pair and is only good for 1G Ethernet .

We started out using all of this wiring at 100 MBit ( including our connection to the university backbone ), and even as time went by we had a mixture of 100 MBit and 1G switches and connections . Due to cost reasons and sometimes wiring density problems , we only slowly migrated people's office network jacks from 100 MBit to 1G as we progressively replaced switches in our multi-switch setup . However, we did eventually move everything to 1G, including in our machine rooms (partly because our old 100 MBit switches were getting unreliable). I think most of our '1G' switches in wiring closets and so on are purely 1G, with no 10G uplink, so wired workstations on those 1G network jacks are sharing the uplink bandwidth.

Areas in buildings do get renovated from time to time, including parts of the department's space. For years, these renovations have typically included running new Cat-6 (or Cat-6A) wiring that is properly certified and tested for 10G-T (it's hard to significantly renovate space without needing to tear out the old wiring and then put in replacement wiring). Sometimes the people who are funding the space renovation really do want their desktops to have 10G connections available, and in that case the renovation funding will also include a collection of 10G-T switches for the other end of the office network jacks to plug in to (however many switches needed for however many true 10G office ports, which is often all of them). Otherwise, while we have 10G-T capable wiring in the walls, we only plug our end of the wires (in wiring closets and machine rooms) into 1G switches and everyone gets 1G.

(Newly built out space in new buildings is all wired with Cat-6A, of course, and we try to get funding for 10G-T switches to go with it. There's been some of this over the recent enough past, as the university does acquire a certain amount of new space over time.)

All of this is the theoretical answer. The practical answer is that a lot of people are using laptops (possibly with docking stations) or desktops with wireless built in, and many people default to using the wireless connection even if there's a network jack or three in their office. Typically, the only people who use actual wired connections are those that need their machines on one of our special research group private networks , instead of on our general 'random desktops and laptops' network. In some areas of the department, there's almost no use of wired network jacks because almost everyone is using laptops and the wireless.

( This makes wireless into critical network infrastructure .)

Here in 2026, I wouldn't try to use 100 MBit for anything, even things that don't need 1G, because I wouldn't trust it. In theory your 1G network interfaces and switches still support it (and maybe your 10G ones too, but don't count on it). In practice, it's been a fairly long time since 100 MBit hardware was in common use. Any switches or the like that you still have lying around are old, and these code paths and physical capabilities in network ports aren't likely to be heavily tested. You want to be running your networks in common and well supported setups, and today that means 1G is the minimum speed you should target.

(And if you have cabling that seems to only support 100 MBit, it's probably broken. Network cables do go bad over time .)