A Cheap 2.5GbE PoE Unmanaged Switch | Hacker News Reader

A Cheap 2.5GbE PoE Unmanaged Switch

servethehome.com

149 pointsInvaderFizz139 comments

Went through this recently as AT&T Fiber began offering 5Gbps service to my apartment in San Francisco. Luckily, the apartment building (seemingly) ran CAT 6 through the walls, but the AT&T modem only has one 5GbE port, so a switch is required to distribute it (plus in any room that needs multiple ports).

I ended up ordering two TP-Link TL-SX105 10GbE switches and one TRENDnet TEG-S350 2.5GbE switch for my TV/gaming consoles. The TP-Link switches have been great and I get 4-5Gbps consistently, but they only have five ports, which is expensive for the price. I assume the TRENDnet one is fine, but it's not connected to anything that I can test with.

I also got a Sonnet SOLO10G-TB3 to connect my laptop to 10GbE.

Sincere question, what are you doing with 5 gbps to the home? Part of me thinks "hell yeah why not", but realistically I have 1 gbps service and it's probably overkill even with me being an abnormally heavy user. My internal network is 10 gig, which I find extremely useful, but I'm not sure what I'd even do with 5 gig WAN with the current state of the internet.

If you have multiple people with multiple devices updating operating systems/software or downloading/streaming videos having the headroom so that everyone can go as fast as possible at the same time is rather nice.

How many people are in your household? I really can't see a use case for >1gbps symmetrical, at least not with the internet today.

It is very, very rare that I can take full advantage of my 1gbps connection when downloading software, updates, or video games.

Streaming videos rounds down to zero -- Netflix uses <20mbps at its highest quality setting, Apple TV Plus uses ~40mbps.

So, unless a normal day is five people are downloading the latest 150gb Call of Duty, while three people download Windows 11, and another 10 are watching Netflix, it's really going to be hard to saturate your bandwidth.

I was able up upgrade from 1Gbs to 10Gbs while also paying about half as much. It was an easy decision.

Where do you live/who is your ISP? Do you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee or in certain Salt Lake City Suburbs? Residential 10 gig just isn’t super common yet and I’ve only seen a few community/coop fiber networks offer it.

Silicon Valley. My ISP is Sonic. To be fair it’s one of those “up to” situations. But I do consistently get 3+ Gb/s.

Sonic has, shall we say, "spotty" coverage. If you live in a spot they cover, good for you. Otherwise you're SOL.

These spots can be as small as individual buildings.

I don’t think there’s a single compelling reason. I personally did it because the price increase was relatively modest ($90->$180/mo), my access points already supported 5GbE, and I do a lot of security research that high bandwidth may eventually be useful for. Also, it is fun to look at the speed test!

I upgraded from 1gbe to 2.5gbe and kept the same price. I think offsite backups and even faster downloads/uploads (when I do download) are the biggest wins. Going from 1->2.5 is a roughly ~2.2 speedup for me. I doubt most servers support 5-10gbe yet though. I'm seeing fastly.com and some out-of-isp (but local to my country) speed tests not reaching max speeds yet (but close). Plus more headroom for multiplexing users.

Going to gigabit fibre was like upgrading from hdd->ssd. Going to multi-gigabit is like ssd->nvme. Most use cases really don't need it, but when you do disk (network) intensive stuff it pays off.

It sucks that 10gbe is more widely adopted though than 2.5/5gbe, probally since the latter is a more recent technology.

It's diminishing returns for sure. I can't see how my life would change going from 1gbps to 5gbps, but it sure would be cool to set up as a hobby.

Aside from that, it does let you self-host bandwidth intense applications, like a home media server, or you could use it to seed torrents for your favorite linux distribution.

I guess my point is, those bandwidth intensive applications are currently more than well covered on 1 gbps unless you have a lot of people in your house all using them simultaneously. A raw triple layer UHD Bluray absolutely tops out at 128 mbps, and are usually well under that. Seeding Linux ISOs also rarely comes anywhere close to using my 1 gbps and certainly not sustained.

Emphasis on "currently." Eventually sure. And that doesn't mean I don't want 5 gbps, half the reason I asked was to see if there was some cool use I hadn't thought of.

I have KVM disks sitting in network mounted drives. when I use those kvms the disk read/write happens over the network, and the 1gbps limit can be easily reached as you can imagine.

Over the internet, though? I use 10 gig inside my network for storage too, but not over the 'net. Doing big offsite backups is the only thing that really comes to mind for me, but even then apart from an initial push 1 gig is more than enough for routine incremental backups for my uses.

The best pitch I can think of is "if you build it, they will come." We won't see widespread uses for > 1 gig until people have it, I suppose.

No it's not over the internet by I still need it :D I have many devices connected over Ethernet to my router, a couple of those wire up my land disks as described above. it is a legit use case and tbh, anyone buying a switch most likely has an internal networking use case that goes beyond just using the internet.

Yeah, but we're specifically talking about 5 gig WAN. Like I said I use 10 gig internally too and see the use. It's a 5 gig connection to the wider internet that I am struggling to rationalize.

FYI AT&T is going it offer 25gbit to the home in a couple years

Do you have any links with more information about this?

All I could find is:

https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2022/20-gbps-symmetric-...

Somewhat of a self-congratulatory piece, but it does support your claim!

Interesting image covering the "Today 1Gb tech" versus what's coming next in the future: the aptly named "XGS-PON".

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/snr/2022/June2022/InStory/20-...

> Sincere question, what are you doing with 5 gbps to the home?

Download "Linux ISOs"?

Downloading "Linux ISOs" is one thing you definitely don't need massive peak speeds for.

To put some numbers on that, let's imagine you buy a brand new 16TB hard drive. If you use half of a gigabit connection to fill it, it'll be full in 3 days.

The very slow progress in reducing the cost of Ethernet gear >1Gb should be a reminder of how affordability depends so strongly on economies of scale. Cheap gear is made by the million. We all wish for a vibrant competitive heterogeneous computing landscape, but our competing wish for low cost marches us towards standardization onto a small handful of technologies, and when the mass market decides an incumbent tech is good enough, it’s hard to gain investment for anything different.

If there are no companies selling affordable 2.5Gb switches there’s also no incentive to drive down the price.

I cannot emphasize enough that you should not purchase some no name super cheap Chinese product and place it at the center of your home network.

It will be a little bit more expensive, but you should probably purchase from a more reputable brand.

And now you get to explain why, of course.

Why? Are these possibly unsafe because consumer safety tests are not verified? Is this more likely to fail early in its lifecycle?

I suppose I’m seeking to understand if the low prices are from cheaper manufacturing or if they’ve taken shortcuts. And as a consumer how are we supposed to become informed?

The switching ports are probably fine.

I wouldn't trust the power-over-ethernet at any distance where I couldn't still read the UL approval sticker.

(Which it does not have.)

Most networking equipment doesn’t have a UL or other NRTL listing. I don’t think any Ubiquiti product includes a UL mark. Even their power bricks and devices that take line voltage lack a listing.

Even if a product does have a listing it’s prob just for the power supply and not for the PoE circuitry.

It’s obvious: Networking equipment is responsible for transferring your personal data. Especially in home network where it might not be encrypted.

Hell, I don’t even trust most big brands. Run my own FreeBSD + pfsense + well known NICs from Intel sourced from Provantage or other data center distributor. Not eBay or Amazon.

That's... not obvious at all, no? Even if it's a rando-brand, you're going to have to dig deep to show these things actually phone home. Because so far that's been a lovely little tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that just doesn't hold up to reality.

Hilariously lawful intercept^1 is a baked-in Backdoor on many US branded devices like from Cisco. It taps ports and exfils data surreptitiously.

Not just legal but legally required.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

Only on equipment an ISP would use.

I am responding to GP's skepticism of random Chinese networking equipment in your home and their skepticism is obvious; that's what I meant. Then I proceed to explaining my own reasons at home. Now whether you agree with GP or my statements is entirely orthogonal and up for debate. There were a number of responses asking "Why?" so I took a stab at the obvious.

Sure for most people, it is a pain to dig into these things. I can negligible sometimes too. And it can be just a woo woo conspiracy in my brain, possible.

what personal data is transferred in plaintext nowadays?

really the whole "trusted/privileged network" thing is outdated. your life will be much easier if you don't trust any network.

SMB isn't encrypted by default

Maybe for ancient versions on out-of-support Windows OSes or the odd appliance but SMB has been encrypted by default since at least 2016.

In Windows 10 and 11 file sharing is strongly encrypted by default. I don't even know how to turn it off; only an option to degrade to 40bit DES for old devices.

Copying IP and designs from others is an unethical practice. As such, the people conducting this practice are not going to be trustworthy for creating a reliable quality product.

Then, the customers who buy this stuff: Instead of paying a share of the R&D costs and the costs of quality, customers who cheap out on this kind of cargo cult product are instead saving a few bucks short term, only to pay the price later when the unit fails to perform long term.

Reality I think is much more bad: big name players buying cheap stuff from a catalog rebranded while sacking or not replacing good engineers at home.

With the exception that the reputed brands may just be the Chinese ones but rebranded.

Iirc there was an article where someone purchased a port of some kind from multiple brands but they were all the same under the hood.

> With the exception that the reputed brands may just be the Chinese ones but rebranded.

20 years ago, I'd have said you're crazy, but the reality is this is true more often than not. However, there is one caveat I've noticed. Though this hardware tends to come from the same factories, or same ownership, often the 'namebrand' are the 'A' runs, and in some cases the cheaper so-called 'no-name' brands are the 'B' grade.

This is 100% anecdotal based on personal experiences and failure rates.

Yes, and in my experience, sometimes the off-brand version may be exactly the same in almost every way, except there may be a few components that they skimp on. Otherwise, they will look identical on the outside.

> except there may be a few components that they skimp on.

On the brand name ones or on the off-brand ones? ;)

Both probably, but the off-brand a bit more. :-)

It's absolutely a thing for a product to be made and sold below the standards of the brand name despite being effectively identical. You can find info on it if you look up third shift or ghost shift: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006...

While the hardware can be the same, reputable brands can still have different firmware/software. Maybe not for a switch like this, but definitely for a router or something like that.

Maybe this post[0]? I remember relating to this part:

> Again, I found multiple identical-looking products on Aliexpress for 10 to 15 euros. I appear to be paying a lot of money for products that I could buy for cheap on random websites is starting to piss me off a bit at this point. I don’t really care about paying too much - I’d be perfectly fine with that if the product did its job. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that.

[0] https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

As the article points out its got the same realtek chip in it as any other brand.

Yes, but firmware backdoors are a thing. The same chip does not mean the same behavior.

Let me see if I can nail down the argument here:

- Chinese brand, with Chinese manufacturing: Backdoored.

- Non-Chinese brand, with Chinese manufacturing: Safe.

I mean, do people not realize that most "made in China" electronics is taken directly from a shipping container landing in California straight to reseller's warehouses? I mean, sure, they might spot check a few units here and there for QA, but it is direct from a Chinese factory to your mailbox without often receiving a secondary check.

Even "final manufacturing in the US" is often taking the Chinese made casing and the Chinese made board and mating them in a small operation for a sticker.

> Let me see if I can nail down the argument here:

Wrong nail. My home router runs OpenWRT. While it's not a 100% guarantee to be safe, it's a lot better than any closed-sourced firmware.

That said, if the choice is limited to closed-sourced firmware options, it's best to choose a reputable brand, so that the list of people who can access your router is limited to three letter agencies (US and China), as opposed to random scammers, like with all these malware-ridden Android phones from Aliexpress: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/android-malware-that-comes-...

So, yes. Not buying network equipment on Aliexpress is a sound advice.

Why would it be better than the realtek chip found in so many devices that the odds of yours being bugged are proportional to how much you're wanted by the authorities. Consumer hardware doesn't have backdoors because the monumentous task required to keep that hidden isn't worth the non-payoff of not getting the military or state secrets that would make it worth the effort.

This is just a switch but similiar 2.5gbe routers can run pfsense or opnsense with i225/i226 chips and intel/amd cpus. Servethehome covers quite a few of them.

OpenWRT does not replace the firmware on any of the actual controllers inside the device, which is where a backdoor would likely reside.

Safer indeed.

I do not worry about people spying on me, I worry about empowering China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or any such country that would happily eat our lunch if given the opportunity.

Do not empower people who would happily screw you over.

Keeping as much distance as possible from Chinese influence in all of the products you use in your home is essential to having a home that remains functional should we ever go to war.

I would be surprised if this device had any firmware at all. It's an unmanaged switch; most of the device's behavior is embedded in the switch IC.

So the backdoor is in the switch IC? :)

Yes they do. I have an ZyXEL XGS1010-12 (unmanaged) and it also runs Linux. The switch chip must be initialized, and the realtek SDK is based on Linux.

You could do it with just an eeprom afaik, but seems to be actually more effort (and not possible on all of realtek's switch chips).

It's so cheap because it comes with a power supply that doesn't have a UL or ETL certification, and as such could not be legally sold in North America. A decent quality power supply that could output 125 W would be around $50-70. You get what you pay for.

I got a ceiling fan a few months back. The wireless remote had no FCC id on it. The box in the fan did. I opened the remote and the plastic was oddly formed, and there was only one nonsense word printed on the pcb, and "v1.0". The microcontroller didn't even have anything printed on it. I listened to it with an sdr and it was in the 434MHz band, and not overly noisy. It probably would have passed if someone had payed for it to be tested... If I'd purchased it on AliExpress or even ebay I wouldn't have been surprised, but it was a front page prime-day deal. I knew Amazon was iffy, but this was a straight up illegal product.

Amazon doesn't care, much of what is offered is ordered on Alibaba, shipped direct to an Amazon warehouse for Fulfilled by Amazon then resold at a notable markup.

Policing this is very hard for brands that have skus they would like to defend from fakes, nevermind a much broader range of consumer goods with little oversight.

So what is the law that requires UL, ETL or other NRTL for power supplies in network equipment?

If such a law exists then how does Ubiquiti get away with selling unlisted product in North America?

It depends on your jurisdiction. Some products fall under the Consumer Product Safety Act, others falls under different regulations. In Canada marks are required, in the US it depends on where you are and where you're installing it e.g. is it for home use or a hospital's internal network?

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/10639/is-ul-...

If your house burns down using an uncertified product, your insurance company may not also cover the claim. Personally I prefer to run electronics that I know are tested to not burn down my house or electrocute my children when they fail.

The article says the power supply is certified, but not the device.

It's CE certified which is something that Chinese companies print on everything, since it's a self-certification process. UL/ETL require you to do failure mode testing and provide detailed schematics of your equipment for review, and costs quite a bit of cash to get done.

I made the mistake of buying a very cheap “mercusys” router. Works well but i caught it sending data to a chinese server. I threw it away but if someone out there working in security has the time to dig into what mercusys routers do and publish their findings that would be awesome.

This Celeron based system has been reported to be able to support up to 64GB RAM [1]. It's an excellent low cost multi-port 2.5GbE switch, router and firewall platform for small networks [2].

[1]Two Fanless Intel Celeron N5105 4x 2.5GbE Options Reviewed:

https://www.servethehome.com/two-fanless-intel-celeron-n5105...

[2]Cybersecurity for Small Networks:

https://nostarch.com/cybersecurity-small-networks

Running opnsense on one of these that I got for ~$150. Really happy with it.

Interesting, a few questions:

1. Are you running opnsense in a VM or bare metal? 2.Do you know how much throughput it can handle? 3. Is it fanless? How hot does it get?

1. Baremetal. 2. It can handle 1gbps over the wan port (that's as fast as my internet goes, unable to test faster). 3. yes - not sure how hot, hasn't been a problem yet though.

I have the Kingnovy 2.5gbe one (4 i226 ports and n6005 cpu), on baremetal (128gb nvme and 16gb ram) and not using vm yet but I think you could without problems (~<25% cpu usage during speedtests -- and hardware offloading is disabled by default on opnsense), it does ~2.3gbe download/upload on a 2.5gbe plan (maybe overhead?) and 10ms bufferbloat on download/upload which is pretty good and gets an 'A' rating on waveform buffer bloat test.

It is fanless heatsink design but has fan pin for an addable fan. Hot to touch, we'll see if there's any issues.

The power difference is huge, but it's also different classes of devices i.e. router vs switch. This N5105 seems to be rather power hungry.

Here's the thing though: this device is $139, from ali express, excluding import duties and fees. For comparison, a QSW-1108-8T-US is $169, from Amazon. Sure, that doesn't give you PoE, but realistically, you're going to be putting it pretty much near an outlet anyway so why did you think you needed PoE?

At the end of the day, these things cost the same for the features you do want, but one is QNAP and the other is "...who?"

PoE is to power the devices at the other end of the cables, not to power the switch.

Practically speaking, your devices are almost certainly going to be near a power outlet, too.

Not in my situation. Just bought a 1950s house with just a single socket in every room. I am fixing that though.

Not at all. Wireless access points are often high up on the wall or roof. Security cameras too. PoE is a huge advantage.

As others have said, that's not always the case.

I live in a small, 30 m2 (333 sqft) studio and I specifically looked for a PoE access point because otherwise, the AP would have had to be in a closet behind a fridge and an oven. Sure, I could have bought an injector or have set a second cable, but that would've been too much of a hassle.

> you're going to be putting it pretty much near an outlet anyway so why did you think you needed PoE?

I think the idea is to use PoE to power devices plugged into the router. These may or may not be nearby (think a PoE camera).

if I'm wiring up for surveillance, those cameras are going to have wires running into the walls anyway. Whether that's ethernet or ethernet + DC, practically speaking, makes no difference =/

And where do you put the PSU for the devices? Remember you might need to replace them, so "in the wall" is bad idea.

Practically speaking you'll also need a larger duct for Ethernet+DC (if you need/use them; we have stone walls, and need them) and pull twice the number of lines. Even pulling Ethernet and DC at once adds some overhead.

Now for a single device it's not a lot of difference (but then just use a single PoE injector instead of a PoE switch), but you'll easily add 4 to 8 cameras to a house and 3 or 4 APs. And with a big PoE switch, you can casually get the PoE variant of other devices, so even less PSUs (for us: VoIP-to-Dect gateway [the SO insisted on a "landline"], Modbus-to-TCP gateway [energy meter], video doorbell and a 5 port switch). Our switch also reports power usage and allows to use schedules (we're not using that, but might be interesting for larger installations).

In an electrical box in the electrical closet, with the breakers. Like any sane setup.

Although if you live in North America and you're used to "wired get stapled onto studs and then we put drywall directly on that" the idea that you can have actual cable routes in the wall that you can just run multiple cables through so you can can take them out and put new ones back in as needed is a surprisingly unknown concept.

I want POE because my cameras and access points are POE and buying POE injectors is annoying, and also I don’t want to be constrained to placement of cameras or APs by where I have available outlets.

PoE is more than half of the BoM for such a switch, a non-Poe switch with this speed and number of ports is expected to cost less than $70, with the potential for $40 with better availability.

A 1Gbps switch is $30 or less, tax included. Going to 2.5Gbps does not add much to the BoM.

Great to see price competition in 2.5GbE equipment. Seems like a lot of folks are getting AT&T fiber lately and discovering that anything that deals with anything over 1 Gbps is much pricier or even impossible to find even in prosumer spaces.

The uptake on switching gear > 1 gbps in the home/office/smb space has been really slow. Prices don't seem to want to come down. Compared to when gigabit became available everyone switched basically overnight.

My recollection is that gigabit Ethernet was common on commodity PCs for several years before switching gear was accessible.

Mult-gig is now only becoming available on devices and access points. This time around it does seem to be perceived by the ISPs offering faster speeds, whereas with gigabit, 100 Mbps was more than adequate for home speeds at the time gigabit came on the scene.

I think 2.5gbe has been standard on all higher end consumer motherboards, gaming boards, and workstation boards for 5 years now. I haven’t seen them on lower end boards but really haven’t been paying attention.

I would be so paranoid putting a fanless cheapo PoE switch with no certifications anywhere. Is it really worth a fire? What would your liability be like?

Same. I cannot imagine who buys these things. You have business-class problems like high PoE current on the same wire as > 1GE traffic, but you're buying no-name, no-support whitebox gear? It just doesn't make any sense.

They sell a non-PoE version.

What kind of support do you think you're going to get with cheap unmanaged switches? We couldn't get meaningful support from one of the big name vendors with their top of the line routers with millions of dollars spent on hardware purchases and support contracts.

You're not really selling the idea of spending more on the big name there. I mean, if the big name is Cisco, then at least the CLI commands come back to my fingers like playing an old piano song, and there's likely to be some documentation from them or a rando's blog, but this is an unmanaged switch - there's nothing to configure.

That said, I'd probably look at TP-Link products; I suppose you could call them the name brand of cheap network gear.

Yep, I got the TP-Link TL-SG1008D recommended by a network guy who works at Eero. $20 for 8 ports, unmanaged, works fine. Not 2.5GbE though, just gigabit.

Ubiquiti for all their faults has a neat 5 port, PoE powered semi-managed switch [0] for 30$ - if you’re looking just at gigabit.

[0] - https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-switching/pro...

Yeah, that was my point :-)

2.5 Gb is becoming the new 1 Gb. 10 Gb networking gear is still often a significant premium over 1 Gb gear but 2.5 Gb is approaching the point where a smart future proofing move would be to avoid buy 1 gig networking gear going forward even if you don’t have a use for more than 1 Gb network speeds right now.

Then it’s a question of why is someone looking for a small, inexpensive PoE switch and PoE cameras are the most likely use I can think of.

My understanding is that PoE is typically 48V and 10g Ethernet is something under 4V.

I'm not up on the latest NFPA codes, but how much of a hazard is 52V? I'm also guessing the quality of the cable is a factor.

You can start a fire with a 24v car battery (and dry tinder, and skill). However, PoE switches only supply power after successful negotiation with the client. You would have to be _seriously_ unlucky to get a cable intact enough to support a connection but damaged enough to start a fire - I don't think I could do it on purpose, even if I had a few days and a stack of spare cables to try.

I'd be more concerned about the power supply (between the wall and the router) than the 48V lines. Would definitely want to be sure that was good quality.

Or a 9 volt some steel wool and not much skill

I feel like that's cheating; steel wool will burn if you so much as look at it funny.

The normal way to do this is to get a dodgy CCA cable with insulation that is not riser rated, and run a bundle of them together into a wall.

One might also consider the quality of the power supply itself, and how much of a fire risk it is.

Here is an (unrelated) PoE injector catching fire: https://community.ui.com/questions/Litebeam-5ac-gen2-poe-ada...

It's a different type of device, but my point here is about mains voltages.

IMO it’s less about the voltage and more about the wattage. A modern PoE spec supporting wattages ~100W is more than enough to start a fire. Currently there is a gap in the electric code (NFPA70) as it doesn’t really address this risk in the (vague) section on low voltage wiring. But building codes are written in blood. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time till some PoE cable starts a fire and then the code will get amended.

especially with TP-Link switches being roughly the same cost and from Amazon.

Servethehome once again doing extremely high value review. We'd make better tech, have better stuff, if we had such practical & value minded reviews.

Powered by 52V 2.5A brick. TBH, the rise of e-mobility has been great here. All kinds of devices that want somethin under 60V, all kinds of great bulk power providers at this low-medium voltage. And all manners of suoer efficient low cost buck adapters from there.

Are you sure that's a e-mobility thing? There are all kinds of hyper-efficient 48V DC distribution designs for racks now, and in datacenters the operational costs are overwhelmingly driven by power consumption (and the resulting heat).

Those are either cost effective (at scale) but not well packaged & unobtainable hyperscaler designs or ultra expensive data center gear.

Yes im sure.

There's now a ton of 54v power bricks at a variety of amps (a lot of 4a, 5a) for under $50. Adding poe is much more pedestrian now that these things are common consumer goods.

I'd like to see power consumption numbers.

Something with vents is probably wasting 10-15 watts all the time. And over the decade you'll probably have this, it will cost far more electricity than the purchase price.

But without power consumption figures in typical usage, It's kinda pointless to talk about the price at all.

From the second page of the article:

> We tested the switch without any devices attached. It settled in at around 6.5W.

> Adding each successive 2.5GbE link also included an additional 1.5-1.7W or so of incremental power consumption.

Article says 6.5W with nothing attached, or 18W with all ports connected. That seems in line with current 2.5gbit tech. Was the same with 1gbit 10-15 years ago.

A number of people are currently working on support for multiple Realtek based switches, including some 2.5G models.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/support-for-rtl838x-based-manage...

https://gitlab.com/bkoblitz/openwrt-rtl838x

https://biot.com/switches/

Note that biot.com link above is now dead, but they previously had a nice big table of devices and info. Might want to check wayback machine for that.

Why not go with 10G?

I think 2.5G is a weird use case. You already can get 10G internet in various places, because such connections go over fiber so the ISP could deliver even 100G if it really wanted to. So if the ISP is already delivering >1G, you can expect things to get to at least 10G eventually, probably sooner than you'll want to rebuild your network.

Mikrotik has a whole range of affordable 10G hardware. It's also managed. A lot of it also takes PoE.

You can do 2.5G on a single lane of PCIe 3 (maybe also 2?). That makes it way easier to implement electrically.

Also, 2.5Gbit uses a lot less power (and generates less heat) than 10Gbit.

That one lane will do 8Gbps, so it's not the reason we're using ethernet ports slower than 5Gbps.

I agree that 2.5/5 are weird use cases, but after a cursory look over this space (so my conclusion may be wrong) I've found that:

1. End devices with 10 Gb ports seem uncommon. The copper variety of adapters seem to run hot, so they're either huge or noisy. This makes them somewhat impractical for the current tendency of "lean" / quiet builds. Whereas most MB seem to have at least a copper 2.5 Gb port, when it's not 5. I've seen USB dongles which are the same size as a Gb one and barely more expensive.

2. The intermediary speeds being "weird", they're not always supported by 10 Gb switches. My Brocade has 10 Gb SFP ports, but they only do either 1 or 10 Gb. I didn't look very hard, but I've never seen any copper module do anything else. Also, 10 Gb copper modules are quite expensive. I've seen managed Netgear switches specifically advertise 2.5/5 Gb copper ports. They're quite cheaper than equivalent 10 Gb switches.

Personally, I don't have a use for anything more than 1 Gb (yet) so I've only looked over these things out of a little curiosity. But I can see why people who want to have higher speeds would be interested in these intermediary switches.

A lot of the 10G copper modules will do 2.5G and 5G, even if the switch only does 10G.

That's good to know. Since they're usually advertised as the usual 100/1000/10000 I figured they wouldn't be able to negotiate at intermediary rates.

ServeTheHome actually has a summary [0] - I used this to pick one from Amazon.

[0] - https://www.servethehome.com/sfp-to-10gbase-t-adapter-module...

10G over fiber or DAC is cheap if you get used enterprise equipment, but 10G-BaseT is still expensive.

For mikrotik, you can get 8x sfp+ ports for about twice the cost of this switch, then you've got to pay for the tranceivers you want.

There's also the question of if existing cabling will work for 10G vs 2.5G, recabling is not realistic for most.

If you only need a couple 10G-BaseT ports you can get 10G SFP+ modules which in my experience work well enough. They do get quite hot, but I only needed 10G-BaseT for my desktop whilst everything else at 10G is DAC.

I am on 10 Gbps is parts of my house for a while, 10G on UTP consumes a lot of power and you cannot realistically fill a SFP+ switch with RJ45 transceivers because of that; they are also very expensive for what they provide. At the same time, a SFP+ NIC and a DAC or AOC cable is a lot cheaper and low power.

In most cases existing cabling is CAT 5e, you can run 2.5 Gbps with no problem, while 10 G requires re-cabling. This is practically the reason 2.5 Gbps exists: it is the limit of existing Cat 5e infrastructure, just put a switch and you're done.

_looks_ a lot like a Netgear FS116P (c. 2007) albeit with modern specs. I had a lot of experience installing ~200 of those at customer sites and the combination of fanless, compact, PoE and external DC input (which needed regulating or converting perhaps?) was a recipe for loud pops and funny smelling smoke during summer months.

Fun times. I’ve got a video of a colleague and me tipping out a box of 50 or so of them into the e-waste bin at the local dump.

Not cheap and not needed for most people. Most people don't need PoE, a simple 2.5 Gbps switch with no PoE should cost 25% of that. Fine device for special people with special needs, but that's that. Servethehome is a very misleading name as most of what they write about, at least in networking, is not home equipment, like 100 Gbps switches that cost as much as a new car.

this got me looking at 2.5gbe pfsense hardware and it looks like most of that is based on Intel I225V stuff (some is specifically b3 stepping), not sure if any of that ever got fixed for realsies?

you can get a pcie card with quad 2.5gbe with some realtek chipset in it, which I assume is basically what the pfsense hardware does...

getting a tremont- or tigerlake-based pfsense router would be super cool tho

I'm just not at a point where I need 2.5Gbps yet, and it's too small of an increase from 1Gbps.

It is just right for a small NAS. Need? Maybe not, but when practically any quality desktop motherboard already has 2.5Gbps and same for any NAS, why not? Drop the PoE requirement and pay $10 more than a 1Gbps switch, it's a deal.

Been a member of the STH forums for years and years and it’s really nice to see STH at the top of HN!

They lost me at unmanaged. For fun but also practical. When you have a workload with more than 1GB throughput, planning your network is a thing. And then having an unmanaged thingy is just not appealing.

The thing is, these switches can be running full-blown OpenWRT :)

First the disclaimer, very much work in progress (WIP)! Don't YET expect everything to work! 10/100Mbit is not working, SFP+ is experimental and the code base is a bit of a mess (but far better then the SDK).

Anyway, https://forum.openwrt.org/t/support-for-rtl838x-based-manage... is the forum thread talking about these switches, https://svanheule.net/switches/ is the wiki.

Lots of help is still needed, even if it is just doing teardowns with photo's and help in learning stuff. Full GPL source is available though.

What would be a fair non-PoE unmanaged 10GbE switch?

So far I can only see TP-Link and Netgear options, both are expensive for Australia.

Is there anything in the pipe that will see these devices coming down in price?

MikroTik, you shouldn't limit your choice to only unmanaged

Though they have some good gear at low prices, my earlier experience with them has always been troublesome autonegotiation on ethernet ports, even using premade ethernet cables. So YMMV.

What's advantage of a switch compared to normal router?

Having extra Ethernet ports on your single network

You could reuse a router but a switch will generally have better perf and theres less to configure or go wrong

Switches switch, routers route. More seriously, a switch connects multiple endpoints to form a network, while a router connects switches to create a network of networks, and it routes packets between nodes in the most efficient way so one side of a network can communicate with the other side of another network.

At home, some use additional switches to get more ethernet ports.

Most consumer routers are switches that with vlans for lan and wan, with a linux machine that does NAT wired to a trunk port.

It's normally a switch and the question is reversed: what's the advantage of a router compared to a normal switch.

Routers extend switching capabilities for extra cost and some performance impact. It's a balance.

These terms aren't exact. A "layer 3" switch is a router.

Mostly the name is an indication of the intended purpose. Switches are nex to the edges of a network.

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