Ethernet is pretty self-explanatory. Plug it in, and voila, you have internet without having to worry about Wi-Fi dead zones. But there are a lot more uses for Ethernet than the simple internet access angle. Here are some ways you might not have thought of—let me know how many of these surprised you.

Use an Ethernet cable as a long USB extension

Some much-needed flexibility

One of the more surprising things you can do with an Ethernet cable is use it as a long USB extension. To be clear, that doesn’t mean plugging a USB device into your router and expecting miracles. Instead, you use a dedicated USB-over-Ethernet extender, often with one box near your PC and another near the device.

The Ethernet cable in this scenario simply becomes the long, convenient run between them. This can be useful if you want to put a printer, scanner, keyboard, or other low-to-moderate bandwidth USB device somewhere your normal USB cable won’t comfortably reach. It’s also handy if your PC is noisy or difficult to move, but the device itself belongs to a specific room.

Is it the ideal solution? No way. Does it work? Yup.

Ethernet can help you send HDMI across the house

HDBaseT turns one cable into an AV highway

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek 

Ethernet cables can also carry video, which can be useful if you want to keep your PC, console, media box, or receiver in one place while the display lives happily ever after somewhere else.

This is usually done with HDMI-over-Ethernet or HDBaseT extenders, where you plug HDMI into one box, run a Cat5e or Cat6 cable across the room or through the wall, and then turn it back into HDMI at the other end. Again, this is more of a workaround: the Ethernet cable is the long, convenient bridge between two dedicated adapters. Just pay attention to the specs before buying anything, because resolution, refresh rate, HDR, HDCP support, and latency all matter here.

Build a wired video production setup with NDI

Ethernet can carry camera feeds, not just internet traffic

Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek

If you’ve ever tried to connect more than one camera or screen to a single recording setup, you know how quickly the cable situation gets annoying. This is where NDI comes in.

Instead of running HDMI from every camera, laptop, PC, etc. into one capture card, you can send video and audio over the local network. That means you put your devices wherever it suits you best, and all of them can become part of the same setup. Ethernet is the secret sauce here because video traffic can get heavy fast, and Wi-Fi can be unstable. For streaming, podcasting, presentations, or recording a multi-camera setup at home, Ethernet can be a legit option.

Route studio audio through Ethernet

Networked audio is not just for concert halls anymore

Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek

This one is even more niche, but Ethernet can also be used to move audio around. I don’t just mean playing Spotify through a smart speaker, either.

With networked audio systems like Dante or AES67, you can send clean, multi-channel audio between compatible devices over a wired network. For most people, this is overkill, but it can be useful if you’re building a small recording setup, podcast space, streaming station, or music room where not every device can sit right next to each other.

The big advantage is that you can avoid long, messy analog cable runs and route audio more flexibly instead. The catch, of course, is that this isn’t as simple as plugging in a random Ethernet cable and calling it a day: You need compatible hardware or software, and latency still matters, especially if you’re monitoring your own voice or playing an instrument live.

Turn a NAS into a block storage device with iSCSI

Your network can act more like a storage cable

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

A NAS is typically used as a place to dump files, but Ethernet can also make network storage behave a little more like a direct storage connection.

With iSCSI, a NAS or storage server can present part of its storage to a PC as a block device, which means the computer treats it more like a dedicated drive than a normal shared folder. This can be useful for homelabs, VMs, scratch disks, or any setup where you want a specific machine to have its own chunk of storage across the network. But Gigabit Ethernet can become a bottleneck super quickly here, and if the connection drops, that drive can get cranky in ways a simple shared folder usually won’t. For regular file sharing, SMB or NFS still makes more sense.

Create a dedicated appliance lane for small network services

It all works better when wired

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

The more small network devices you run at home, the more Ethernet starts to feel like a necessity rather than a nice extra. A Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, old laptop, or thin client can become a surprisingly useful little appliance for things like Pi-hole, Home Assistant, local DNS, file sync, uptime monitoring, a VPN endpoint, or a simple dashboard.

Sure, some of that can work over Wi-Fi, but do you really want your DNS server or smart home hub randomly disappearing because the wireless signal had a moment? I thought not.

A wired connection is exactly what these little always-on boxes need.

Ethernet is more useful when you stop treating it as just internet

Ethernet is still great for the obvious stuff, and I took many devices off Wi-Fi because a wired connection is just better. But once you start looking at Ethernet as infrastructure instead of just the internet cable, it becomes a lot more flexible.