> Your explanation is "market forces", or in other words, it's cheaper to deploy 2.5GBE than 10GBE because you (may) need to upgrade your cabling when you switch to 10GBE.
I never talked about the price of Ethernet cable, or whether people would need to upgrade it. It’s honestly irrelevant, and a strawman.
10gig is expensive because 10gig is expensive… the switching hardware, the chipsets, the PHYs, everything but the cable. Device manufacturers and customers don’t care about the cost of the cables, especially when 10gig hardware is backwards compatible with lower speeds. They can keep using 1gig if they don’t want to upgrade, just like people continued using 100Mbps networks for quite awhile after gigabit Ethernet became a thing.
My argument is that everyone got tired of waiting for 10gig to be affordable. They waited decades, hoping the price drop was just around the corner so they could jump straight from 1gig to 10gig, and it never happened. After literally 20 years since 10gig was standardized, I’m extremely glad that we’re seeing an abundance of Ethernet hardware that is faster than 1gig. That stagnation had to come to an end.
You can start your own company providing affordable 10gig hardware and prove that the industry players are wrong. For the same price, everyone would snap up 10gig hardware in a heartbeat.
Your argument would have made sense 20 years ago when it seemed like Ethernet standards were rapidly evolving and 10gig adoption was just around the corner. 10gig will be affordable eventually… but 20 years was too long to wait for it, and it still didn’t happen.
If you want 10gig, it has been attainable for years… for the right price. But there’s no need to come in and bother other people who are benefiting from the low cost rollout of better-than-1gig technology.
I would love to have a 10gig or 25gig network, if someone wants to pay for it. Datacenter-class networking hardware (like ConnectX-7) operates at 400+ Gbps today. The sky is the limit, so why bother stopping at 10gig?
> Zero availability of PoE on the few 10GBE products that do exist despite the PoE standard being in place for nearly two decades.
This is incorrect. 10GBASE-T only gained support for PoE in 2018 with the IEEE 802.3bt-2018 standard.