Appreciate your thoughts and insight, it’s good to both challenge your own preconceptions and to be challenged by others to act as the basis of a more informed perspective.
Experimentation plays a key part in that, especially for an area like audio reproduction. The question of, “what can I add, remove or change to improve on my listening enjoyment” and in the case of data networking, it’s fair to say that where consumers are concerned they typically end up in a “best effort” bucket whilst specific commercial verticals will have refinements defined and standardised that further optimise the performance, serviceability and operational life of the equipment installed and relied upon, usually with high availability and multiple levels of failover and redundancy.
The underlying standards and specific physical layers tend to focus on improvements in capacity, reduced installation costs, extended reach and other protocol and application enhancements to reduce latency and provide more robust error handling.
There is a recognition now of the needs of consumers to have more resiliency, more control and better reliability in the networking equipment that is focused at those markets, a need to have a wired backbone that can scale to 10Gb, a Wi-Fi infrastructure that can adapt to the environment and extend service without loss of throughput and mechanisms to ensure devices can both negotiate and share resources at a device agnostic level, using protocols like Matter as one example.
There are also initiatives to enable more intelligence at the network edge using edge compute and machine learning ideally in the residential gateway such that a home network can adapt to the needs of the clients both autonomously and with end user input to provide further refinements.
Today it remains mostly best effort and requires an end user to adapt themselves to their needs, either by using more capable enterprise/industrial solutions or making other changes to mitigate the inherent limitations of consumer grade equipment.
The standards don’t really accommodate and factor in the needs of a service category like high end audio, most of the focus there being on higher resolution files which in itself is just a mitigation of limitations elsewhere in the service delivery pipeline to an extent.
I still think there’s a case for a specific service class defined around Single Pair Ethernet, a compromise between existing copper Ethernet implementations and the more experimental optical based solutions.
I’m exploring the potential for what could be refined as part of my regular interactions with Wi-Fi Alliance and Broadband Forum to that extent, partly out of my own curiosity to experiment and to help promote improvements at a Standards level that all may benefit from at some point downstream.