I guess there really isn't much demand for faster than gigabit speeds even now (outside of servers?)
1. Consumer broadband speeds rarely exceed 1Gbps
2. 1Gbps Local network transfers are seldom slowed by the network (as large file work typically involves HDD still)
3. Where local network transfers are impeded by the network speed the transferring itself isn't a frequent enough and blocking thing that people feel they need to fix it... they just go make a cup of tea once or twice a day
4. There are a lot of old network devices and cables out there, some built into the fabric of buildings (wall network sockets and cable runs)
5. WiFi is very very convenient, so much so that 250Mbps is good enough for almost anything and most people would rather be wireless at that speed than wired at a much higher speed (gamers and video professionals being an exception)
And ultimately, the cost and effort of investing in it doesn't produce an overwhelming benefit to people.
Even in quite large offices, it's hard to argue that this is worth it when the vast majority of people are just using web applications and very lossy audio and video meetings across the internet.
10GBASE-T exists, but it turns out pushing 10gbit/s over 100m of twisted pair requires chips that are hot and power hungry. Again, not great for desktops or laptops. And because it’s not used in data centres, there are no economies of scale or trickle down effects.
Gigabit Ethernet and wifi being “good enough” combined with 10gig over twisted pair being expensive and power hungry means that the consumer space has been stuck for a long time.
It's easy enough to get G.657.B3/G.657.A3 cables, and you can wrap them repeatedly around a pencil and they are fine.
Also, most consumers would not notice the bend attenuation anymore becuase they aren't trying to get 10km out of them :)
I suppose forwards compatibility is good, but unfortunatel unlike 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps is practically unusable on existing CAT5e cables.
Maybe this used to be the case long ago, but I don’t think it’s true today. Personally I’m pretty rough with fiber (having slammed cabinet doors on fiber, looped fiber around posts with a low bend radius, left the ends exposed to dust, etc) and had no issues within a data center. Can’t say the same for copper. Even the cheapest 10km optics have more margin when your link is only 50m.
Oh and bend insensitive fiber is dirt cheap and works just fine when it’s tied into knots.
i buy armored multimode patch cables for, i dunno, 10 or 20% more per unit length, and they seem indestructible in my residential short-distance use cases.
> Gigabit Ethernet and wifi being “good enough”
i think this explains it all. when the average user prefers wireless to wired gigabit, we know how much bandwidth they actually need, and it isn't >=gigabit.
i don't know what you're using, but the LC/LC connectors i use seem pretty durable, and the springy bit that wears out can be replaced. the SFP+ modules are all metal; i am unwilling to believe they can wear out.
> and cables left disconnected with out the risk of an accidental laser eye surgery
single mode, which isn't human-visible, is of concern but the multimode (which i mentioned using) isn't any worse than a cheap laser pointer. it isn't strong, and you can see it.
Maybe a laser in your eye is an acceptable risk in your home but I doubt it is an acceptable hazard in a work place.
That is finally improving. The technology improvement meant we get less than 5W per port on 10Gbps. Cost will need to come down though.
> (gamers and video professionals being an exception)
I play Stadia, 4K HDR 60FPS, just fine on a gigabit ethernet connection and 150MBit internet connection. Any games not streaming the entire video are fine with just kilobits/s of data, as long as the latency is good.
So the case for home 10GE is even weaker ;)
[1] https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm
[2] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-sc...
[3] https://www.synergisticresearch.com/cables/srx-cables/srx-ac...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
Why not compare the insane prices of thermal paste and compounds per volume/weight with the stuff that is used industrially?
Not always, but often used for results which could be called statistic noise. Very diminishing returns.
All for pushing reviews with many bar graphs over two dozen pages, and so much more page impressions. Like the rest of gamermedia, too.
Woo!
So we have the very few audiophiles which totally ignore the thin copper layer on cheap PCBs, versus the whole market segment of twitchy gamers going for Bling, Bling, Bling without function on their RAM, coolers, vs. the equivalent stuff installed in laptops and servers which lacks that :-)
Which is what rules out wifi :)
I think what's new is the prevalence now of 2.5 and 5GBaseT ethernet chips that are cheap enough companies are starting to build them into any $125+ ATX motherboard. At short lengths even old crappy cat5e has a good chance of working at 2.5 or 5.0 speeds.
100Gb links do take some thought and work to saturate, but that's improving at a good rate lately so I expect it'll become more common rather soon.
The main downside to 25Gb and 100Gb links still seems to be hardware pricing. At these speeds, PCIe network adapters and switches get rather expensive rather quick and will make you really evaluate if your situation really demands those speeds. 10Gb SFP+ and copper network adapters and switches are quite inexpensive now in 2022.
But that's tweaking the setup already, it requires changes, testing and verification, and can cause problems in downstream equipment. And for a lot of applications, a 9K MTU will not be enough to saturate the link because they'll need NUMA awareness, or the NIC queues will need tweaking to avoid imbalances, or the application is not ready to send at that speed...
I'm not saying it can't be done, of course it can. But it isn't "plug a bigger card and it'll go faster".
That doesn't seem right. When I got my first 10G server, it was running dual Xeon E5-2690 (either v1 or v2), and I don't recall needing to tweak much of anything. That was mostly a single large file downloaded over http, so not super hard to tweak anyway, but server chips are a lot better now than sandy/ivy bridge. It could only get 9gbps out with https, but the 2690v4 could do 2x10G with https because aes acceleration.
Well, my point is that most servers don't just download single large files over HTTP. Even if you only look at storage servers, going into multiple files and connections you can easily find issues and have downgraded performance if you don't prepare the system for the workload.
Unfortunately, I'm finding switches with 2.5 to still be overpriced.
Instead we run 10G signaling at half or quarter clock rates and get something that works on the majority of existing wiring.
AFAIK the IEEE was initially resisting supporting this, but enough vendors were just doing it anyways that it was better to standardize.
I'd rather have a 100Mbps home DIA circuit that was symmetric and seriously reliable, than the typical Comcast circuit.
I would also very much rather have a symmetric connection than what I have now. We are within range of a fiber tap for Comcast's 3Gbps symmetric ftth service but construction costs are too high right now for them to do it. I keep asking every six months regardless. There's no other game in town as far as I can tell.
Comcast Business will run a 100Mbps symmetric fiber for ~$750/mo, maybe that would be a thing to do to get fiber in the door and then switch back to residential after the contract earns out.
https://www.cablinginstall.com/sponsored/berk-tek/article/16...
... points out that 5GBASE-T needs 200 MHz channel bandwidth which is past what Cat 5e is specified for. So perhaps for runs approaching 100 meters or in noisy environments, Cat 5e won't be reliable for 5GBASE-T after all.
But I guess most people don't transfer files in their local networks anymore and use their network purely for internet access.
I think this is clearly the case. Most new laptops don't even bother with a wired network port. I've got a new "pro" HP laptop the other day, and it only comes with some cheap Wi-Fi card. And it's not an "entry-level" laptop, and it's thick enough for an RJ-45 plug to physically fit.
I also see more and more desktop motherboards come with integrated Wi-Fi. The desktops at Work (HP) also have had integrated Wi-Fi for a while, and it's not something we look for (they all use wired Ethernet).
Some people just don't care.
I'm busy retrofitting Ethernet in my house by pulling cat6 through the walls and pulling out the old cat3 phone cabling. It's much harder work doing two cables (not least because none of the phone cables were in conduit, so it just starts off harder already) for each pair of ports, but it's very much worth the effort.
They didn't care, they just laid some sort of cable because that's all they had to.
there are a variety of ways to screw that up. i've seen a house that has a bunch of cat 5e run, but the installer stapled it down, and most of the cables have a staple through them somewhere along the run, killing a pair or two.
Cat6a is probably the sweet spot for home/office/etc structural cabling. It's not much more expensive than Cat6 (or Cat5e in case people are still putting that up), and has more than enough legroom.
If each run is <55m then Cat6 can still do 10Gbps.
Most people don’t have anywhere in their local network to transfer things to. I still laugh when people see my home server and assume that’s “your work thing”. I do use it for work, but 99.99% of what’s contained in there are family pictures and photos.
What you need for the transition is for premium brands to start pushing 10G ports as a feature, e.g. Apple needs to add it to Macbooks and the Mini and start using it to bludgeon competitors who don't have it. Then once their customers have several 10G devices around, they buy a 10G switch and start demanding that every new device have it. At which point the volume gets high enough for the price to come down.
I really want to start seeing 2.5gb/s becoming standard on Desktop motherboards asap.
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
> Gigabit Ethernet port (configurable to 10Gb Ethernet)
You don’t need to go fully 10G, though, I mainly prioritized my workstation for example, and if you don’t want to splash out for switches, you can do a direct connection on 10G to a computer that needs it, and use the 1G links to the rest of the LAN.
- An 8x cdrom narrowly beats 10meg ethernet.
- 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet.
- ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.
that doesn't fit with my recollection of reading/transferring DVDs, or with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_storage_media_writing_...
> - ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.
the electrical interface/protocol, sure. i don't think any ATA133 drive made could actually saturate its interface, or a gigabit link.
That being said, I generally agree that it has been moving too slow in consumer electronics and 2.5G is a pretty long overdue step-up for a moore-adjacent technology. Another factor is the humble reality that infrastructure (physical cables installed in walls) is the (s)lowest common denominator in this advancement.
Flash drive writing speeds are my biggest bottleneck, wish someone would tackle that at a reasonable cost.
Also, the main competition is WiFi which is significantly slower than 1GbE in most cases.
If you are talking about only two drives than no. Multiple drives can give you more throughput, but at that point it is RAID-10.
Also SSD are not 100 EUR / TB. A 4 TB SSD is like 300 EUR.
People who notice mine in the corner mostly don't even know what it is.
The simple spinning hard-drive was already faster than gigabit ethernet, and the NAS access speed was 90-95% of ethernet. So I am prerty sure that NAS is the bottleneck here. And this is on a WD-red 5400RPM harddrive, nothing special.
The cabling starts to become an issue otherwise. It's also hot and power hungry over copper.
Having gotten into the home fiber side of it for various reasons, it's clear on the fiber side there is plenty of innovation/cost lowering/etc.
20 bucks over MMF, 27 bucks over SMF doesn't seem expensive.
If you want to do it over single fiber rather than duplex, it's 40 bucks: https://www.fs.com/c/bidi-sfp-plus-64
25Gbps is 39 bucks over MMF, 59 bucks over SMF. 40Gbps is also 39 bucks on MMF (more expensive on SMF)
I don't think any of these are very expensive.
The cards are also ~same price between SFP+ and 10GBaseT from places like startech (outside of that, the 10gbaset ones are actually often much more expensive)