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Comment by uri4 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what is use case for this network. At my home I only use optics for long run, more for galvanic isolation, as electric charge could destroy electronics. All servers are concentrated in single room. Clients use miniPCs. Rest of the house is wired with 2.5Gb ethernet and wifi6, anything faster and expenses grow exponentially.

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It's very likely "because he can".

25Gbps would be hard to saturate with an NVME SSD. Even if you like to mirror hard disks to remote locations all the time, you can just RSYNC, and then your needs are limited to the rate of change.

I'm getting a 10Gbps from the same provider, and even that is not likely to saturate, and I'll only have 1Gbps CAT6 links. The main benefit is that the clients are absolutely independent, i.e. downloading a Linux image can't affect someone's video conference, since each client can only pull 1Gbps of 10Gbps total.

Well that multiple client fairness gets solved by using something like CAKE. There are youtube demos doing exactly this even with links limited to like a few meg.

The author's ISP delivers up to 25/25Gbps connections (and 10gbps connections for the same price as 1gbps connections, about $65 dollars per month converted) so if he is planning on using such a high bandwidth uplink, I don't think ethernet makes a lot of sense.

If I had a 10gbps uplink for that price, I'd certainly look into getting more out of my network than just standard ethernet. 10gbit ethernet at least, though fiber may be easier to install depending on the size and layout of the house.

I have 1gbps fiber and it's extremely rare for me to come across a server that supports anything close to that bandwidth. At 10gbps you're able to upload 500GB/hour. For home use this seems extremely unlikely, even if you're using this as part of your job. Even my 4K surveillence cameras only require 20mbps each, that's 50 4k cameras to saturate a 1gbps line.

Have to think about the future though when you’re dealing with running stuff in walls. Think about what would’ve been acceptable throughput 10 years ago. If you built your home network around that, you’d probably be kicking yourself today.

Even CAT5e supports 10gbps in your typical house (you'll want CAT6 for longer distances though), and 10gbps is likely future proof for the next 25 years (which is crazy because CAT5e came out in 1999).

And ipv6 came out a year before that.

I think of >1 GBps speeds as something that serves burst rather than streaming needs.

The use case isn't "I need it to watch youtube", but "I want to be able to restore from backup in hours rather than days", or "I want to play the latest Doom today and not tomorrow".

Eg, say you're backing up your data to a remote site. Great idea, but what if you need a restore, how long will that take? Downloading say, 100 TB on a 1 Gbps connection will take you more than a week.

That would only works if the other end can push 25gbps as well. I wonder what's the maximum throughput of various cloud storage services commonly used for off site backups (S3, B2, etc). Would they artificially limit the max bandwidth or allow you to go as fast as possible?

I've had trouble saturating my 1 Gbps connection in Sweden. I did tests with B2 and Wasabi roughly every quarter for a couple of years trying to see if it was feasible to move some data hoarding activities there, and never got more than ≈100 Mbps when downloading from them.

Don't know if it's still the case, or if my ISP was to blame (or just being in EU/Sweden).

On the other hand, I don't have a problem maxing out 1 Gbps when downloading both metaphorical and actual linux iso's. A lot of the microsoft stuff is really fast as well, wouldn't be surprised if they could saturate ≈ 10 Gbps.

Is this for a single request or concurrent? With concurrent requests I've saturated 5 gigabit symmetric with S3 and B2.

I think one major use case in this particular scenario is that the author has one 25 Gbit/s and one 10 Gbit/s internet service. If you want to make the most use of this fibre is the only way to go.

I do data processing and can saturate similar bandwidth. But 10Gbps goes to my home server room.

There is no need to have 10Gb in bedroom, such tech produces a lot of noise and heat. Maybe Stadia or similar video streaming could use such bandwidth. But this looks more like wiring for residential building with multiple flats, or office building. Or like some sort of tech flex.

> There is no need to have 10Gb in bedroom

…until later in the home’s life when that bedroom is no longer a bedroom, for whatever reason. If you’re gonna do a project like this you might as well take it to its logical conclusion.

It’s the same kind of advice I’d give to anyone who buys e.g. an iPad Pro - you might not think you need a cellular model right now, but that one time you do need it two years from now you’re gonna be very glad that you paid the extra ~$100.

That’s some very hypothetical talk. The master bedroom in a typical home is likely and forever going to remain a bedroom, at least if there is sufficient other space available in the home. If you buy a couple of iPads (you and your spouse or kids or whatever) and upgrade them every x years, springing for an extra $100 on each one every time adds up. You never need the cellular module, though it might be nice to have since there are always other, less convenient options (hotspot on phone, standalone hotspot, public Wi-Fi, etc).

You cannot take your mantra to its logical conclusion and apply it to everything, everywhere, at least not unless cost is absolutely a non-issue for you.

> there are always other, less convenient options (hotspot on phone, standalone hotspot, public Wi-Fi…

Until you’re driving, hypothetically, through rural Arkansas, where there's no Starbucks and your iPhone has juuuuuust enough signal strength to receive the WhatsApp telling you that you need to turn around a couple of slides but not enough bandwidth to download the deck.

Your iPad, though, for reasons known only to the black magic gods of RF design does have a stable-enough LTE connection and it saves your bacon with the large corporate client that dragged you to razorback country in the first place.

Hypothetically.

> You cannot take your mantra to its logical conclusion and apply it to everything, everywhere

There’s a reason I wrote iPad Pro. It’s not my mantra - it’s advice that applies to specific kinds of people in specific kinds of situations. The kind of people who have the means and motivation to run fiber throughout their house, for example.

Hindsight is 20/20. There’s a reason why insurance policies exist. You can (and should) save money skipping comprehensive insurance on a beater. Unless you are going to get into a car accident found to be your fault in the first year of the policy, in which case it would have made more financial sense to get that comprehensive coverage. But that logic doesn’t hold.

10Gb normal CAT whatever Ethernet works but the SPF adapters get quite hot.

I have a 10Gb backbone for my “servers” and then a single 10Gb Ethernet cable to my main Mac- works well enough for now and probably not worth upgrading until I have internet beyond 10Gb.

I second this. ~$1375 vs under $200 for an Ethernet run. Expensive project just to be able to say "I did it".

Not every hobby has to be cost optimized. I’ve spent thousands on climbing equipment that I never took full advantage of.

Sometimes people have money to burn and want to do something for the fun of it.

Hobbies are almost by definition not cost optimized!

Some are, like growing your own food or backpacking.

You'd earn more money by working overtime and buying food from the supermarket instead of spending time growing it yourself.

That depends on the food. My parents mostly grew fruit, and berries especially are very expensive at the supermarket.

The other things they grew were also equal or better to the most expensive produce at the most luxury supermarket, like tomatoes that tasted of tomato rather than the watery, red golf balls they sell in Asda.

> "Ability to utilize 25gbit internet connection"

There are other benefits of fiber, such as transmitting non-Ethernet signals such as USB, DisplayPort, HDMI, etc. You can run these things over Ethernet, but they are really shoddy and unreliable.

It allows you to centralize more things. For example, you could just have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a hub in a room for a computer, where the computer is actually somewhere else (such as a server room).

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