They exaggerated a little bit on the timeline. But 20+ years ago 1gbps became standard, and today there are signs of change but 1gbps is still standard.
There is not any meaningful sense in which 2.5gb ethernet is "standard". There are no TVs with 2.5gb ethernet ports. Or even 1gb ports. Yet they all have WiFi 5 or better.
2.5GbE only started gaining steam when cheap Realtek chips became available (especially since the Intel chips that were on the market earlier were buggy). Those have been adopted by almost all desktop motherboards now on the market, and most laptops that still have Ethernet. Embedded systems are lagging because they're always behind technologically and because they have longer design cycles, but it's pretty clear that most devices designed in the last year or two are moving beyond 1GbE and 2.5GbE will be the new baseline going forward.
> It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet ports on TVs though.
It's a few pennies cheaper and i'm sure they have some data showing 70%+ will just use WiFi. TCL in particular doesn't even have very good/stable drivers for their 10/100 NIC; there's a ton of people on the Home Assistant forums that have noticed that their android powered smart TV will just ... stop working / responding on the network until it's rebooted.
I’m sure you’re right, but the fact that it’s almost certainly literal pennies makes it very lame. Lack of stable drivers is also ridiculous given how long gbps Ethernet has been around.
> It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet ports on TVs though.
It's not that bizarre. About the only media one might have access to that is above 100mbps is 4k blu-ray rips which can hit peaks above 100m; but TVs don't really cater to that. They're really trying to be your conduit to commercial streaming services which do not encode at that high of a bitrate (and even if they did, would gracefully degrade to 100Mbps). And then you can save on transformers for the two pairs that are unused for 100base-tx.
Streaming services are extremely compressed. Netflix only recommendeds 15mbps for 4k, even. A naive straight quadrupling of that for 8k is only 60mbps, and in reality they'll just dial up the compression anyway and probably use a 30mbps stream.
We've gone from 100 Mbps being standard consumer level to 2.5 or 10 Gbps being standard now. That sounds substantial to me.