These 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps adapters look really nice, especially for laptops and other devices with USB 3.2 ports but it appears to be near impossible to affordably connect them to a more-than-trivial network.
What "non-trivial" network is blocked by using 2.5 gbps? There are transceivers that let 2.5 gbe work with 10gb ports on older/common 10Gb switches. QNAP, linksys, and trendnet have a decent number of switches in the 5-18 port range, which seem splenty for most home networks.
10G was too much of a leap, IMO, so the hardware remains expensive. 10G over regular Cat5e is also relatively power hungry.
2.5G and 5G arrived relatively recently to fill the gap with the stalled jump to 10G. You can get started with something like a $110 QNAP 2.5G 5-port switch and some cheap 2.5G adapters on the computers you care about.
I'm waiting for the price of switches to get down to a level that I will accept. They are quite expensive now.
If you want to graduate to SFP+ those adapters usually cost a little more (plus the cost of a transceiver for fiber or copper).
Cabling also means many existing installations (like my house) with 50+ ft runs need to be re-cabled if they actually want stable 10G speeds. My home network works great at 2.5G but there are a few Cat5e runs that don't give me 10 Gbps.
Switches are still quiet expensive, but 10G cards are quiet affordable nowadays. Notebooks can use a Thunderbolt 3 to 10G ethernet, but I think we will see 10G ports one consumer notebooks soon.
I wouldn't invest in a bridge technology like 2.5G since it introduces non-trivial costs an offers only 2.5x speed up instead of 10x.
Consumer notebooks are moving away from having ethernet ports in general.
10GBASE-T is relatively power hungry, requiring a couple of watts per port. I don't think we'll be seeing this in consumer notebooks any time soon.
Also, I have one of those Thuderbolt to 10G adapters. It's not small. It's only useful when I'm doing bulk file transfers.
2.5G is fine for most work. Many consumer NAS boxes can barely saturate 2.5G anyway.
I might be wrong, but I don't think that every notebook will be as slim as the height of a USB-C port and with only one or two USB-C ports as only ports. This might be true for Apple and some companies that copy Apple. But there are still consumers notebooks that don't follow that trend and build some bulkier books with more ports and better thermals.
> 10GBASE-T is relatively power hungry, requiring a couple of watts per port. I don't think we'll be seeing this in consumer notebooks any time soon.
It all depends on customers needs. I would rather have a 10GBASE-T port than a dedicated GPU in my book, and I think the latter even consumes more watts.
10G wasn't stalled, it was and is for most completely unnecessary. 10G over copper requires Cat6, most homes have Cat5e if they're lucky.
So why are 2.5G and 5G a thing? Well modern Wifi is faster than 1G, and most homes with Ethernet are Cat5e. Guess what 2.5G and 5G run over?
10G over copper works fine at medium distances (up to about 45m / 150ft) on Cat5e. You would need Cat6a if you needed to guarantee 10G performance at 100m, but for the average home it's not a big deal to use Cat5e.