Re: Is it important?
<quote>As longs as the final run is short enough</quote>
Maybe not for you, but with anything but a fiber connection at your premises, you are stuck with the realities of copper. And that is throughput, both to yourself, and anyone else sharing your "connection"
With phone lines there are the limitations of DSL and its variants; your connection usually ends up at a DSLAM along with anyone else served by the cabinet. And you have to deal with the telco's backhaul.
With coax, DOCSIS has limitations on the number of upload and download channels. Subscribers on a single cable run share the available upload and download frequencies. Somewhere, those data channels get pulled out, and routed in a functional equivalent to a DSLAM. Where that is done is up to the cable operator. If you are on a strictly cale plant, then it is most likely done at the cable operator's head end. If you have a HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) network, then it is out at some cabinet, and at the end of a fiber line coming from the operators head.
Even with satellite there are speed limitations.
The beauty of FTTP (fiber to the premises) is that those limitations are much higher, and in the right circumstances, your link may go all of the way back to the operator's head. How many home users have the traffic to saturate a 1Gps link?