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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I can't make heads or tails of your comment. What is scammy about Ethernet and what 'stupid margins' does Ethernet have? It's a networking standard, not a company.

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2.5G or even 10G is not that much more expensive and companies making consumer electronics sell it as a considerable premium for what is essentially the same cost difference as making a 8gb vs 16 gb flash drive. Of course, regular internet users don't need more than 2.5G (and couldn't use it in most of the world due to ISP monopolies) so anything faster than gigabit is a target for segmentation.

But that has nothing to do with Ethernet as such, which isn't a 'company making consumer electronics'.

Rant aside, I think there is an argument to be made that 2.5gbps switches "should" be cheaper now that 2.5gbps NICs have become fairly commonplace in the mainstream market.

Case in point, I have a few recent-purchase machines with 2.5gbps networking but no 2.5gbps switch to connect them to because I personally can't justify their cost yet.

I suppose I could bond two 1gbps ports together, or something, but I like to think I have other yaks to shave right now.

You can get some basic switches that do 2.5gb but it's like $100, a bit more for a brand you might recognize.

https://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Multi-Gigabit-Unmanaged-Entert...

Personally I went with Mikrotik's 10gb switch but that needed SPF port thingies (which was fine for me, as I was connecting one old enterprise switch via fiber, direct copperering two servers, and using cabled cat7 or whatever for the Mac).

2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.

> 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.

I think 2.5g is going to make it in the marketplace, because 2.5g switches are finally starting to come down in price, and 10g switches are roughly twice the price, and that might be for sfp+, so you'll likely need transceivers, unless you're close enough for DAC. (NIC prices are also pretty good now, as siblings noted. But if you go with used 10G, you can get good prices there too, I've got 4 dual 10G cards and paid between $25 and $35 shipped for each)

Yeah, it's that cost that is the problem. If I'm paying over a hundred bucks for a switch I might as well go higher and consider 10gbps options.

2.5gbps hardware need to come down to at least the $30 to $40 dollar range if they want to make any sense. Otherwise, they'll stay as niche hardware specifically for diehard enthusiasts or specific professionals only.

The NICs can be had for $20 (pretty sure I saw a $11 one the other day but can't find it right now on mobile).

The NICs are reasonable now, yes. The issue is the thing on the other side of the cable; 2.5gbps switches and routers need to come down in price.

The problem with 2.5G is that it's not enough of an upgrade over 1G to warrant buying all new switches and NICs to get it. For that matter few home users push around enough data for 10G to be a big win.

IMHO this is why Ethernet has stalled out at 1G. People still don't have large enough data needs to make it worthwhile. See also: the average storage capacity of new personal computers. It has been stuck around 1TB for ages. Hell, it went down for several years during the SSD transition.

2.5gbps is literally 2.5x times the speed of gigabit ethernet, so that's going to be very noticable even for most home users if they do any amount of LAN file sharing.

It's really just the cost that's the problem, because paying 4x to 5x or even 6x times the cost of gigabit hardware for a 2.5x times performance boost doesn't make a lot of sense.

If 2.5gbps peripheral hardware costs would come down I will happily bet they will take off.

This assumes that the LAN is the bottleneck. Gigabit ethernet tops out at 120MB/s, which is about the speed of spinning rust on a NAS.

Yeah, but you probably have more than one drive RAID'd in that NAS so you will almost certainly get faster transfers (granted: sequential) if ethernet wasn't the bottleneck.

2.5gbps ethernet translates to roughly 250MB/s in real world transfer speeds, that's a lot. Literally over double real world gigabit transfer speeds, and far less likely to bottleneck you.

The market at work. There is just no real demand for anything beyond 1G.

The HN crowd is not representative of what would be needed to drive the price tags down on 2.5G stuff.

If you have a gigabit internet connection, then most of the value of 10G comes from data sharing within the intranet, which just never caught on outside of hobbyists. And a 1G switch can still handle a lot of that, You don’t even need 10G for LAN parties, and whether backups can go faster depends on the storage speed and whether you actually care. Background backups hide a lot of sins.

I’m hoping a swing back to on-prem servers will justify higher throughput, but that still may not be the case. You need something big to get people to upgrade aging infrastructure. What would be enough to get people to pay for new cable runs? 20Gb? 40?

You are may actually be right, sorry, my rant may have been misguided. "networking standard" doesnt make it free of royalties though, dont/didn't companies pay to use the Wifi protocol?

What does that have to do with Ethernet?

See:

https://www.iol.unh.edu/sites/default/files/knowledgebase/et...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet

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