Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

The cost of 2.5G chipsets is so low it really shouldn't matter especially for a 'premium' product like this.

Exactly my thought. Why not just spend the little extra and do 2.5G ports.

There is one potential hurdle though: they specifically mention that it can handle 1G of traffic even if you enable a bunch of features. They would have had to upgrade the processors to be able to make the same claim at 2.5

That's with all the features on though right? I'm sure a lot of folks wouldn't be using VPN, deep packet inspection, ad blocking, a large number of routes and vlans, IDS, caching etc all at once, it hardly takes any CPU processing to simply route 2.5G (or hell, even 10G) through a firewall.

Solid points, but there’s a little bit of history (the details are fuzzy for me so apologies to anything I get wrong): When 1Gbps internet connections were starting to be widely available Unifi put out some “1Gbps” products that could only route 1Gbps with nothing turned on. It quickly dropped to 300Mbps if someone wanted to use any of the Unifi features and people called them out.

If they are making it a point to address that in this current product I feel like they want to make sure that type of call out doesn’t happen again.

This is surprisingly common, SonicWall devices are kind of market segmented by how much they can process with security services enabled. We installed 50/50 fiber at a customer location and their SonicWall had a gig WAN, but with the device set to "Maximum Security" it only got about 30-35 meg download speed. "Performance Optimized" let it hit the 50/50 lmao

It’s called market segmentation. Their other machines do 2.5-10g but this isn’t those products.

This thing is listed at $150. That's not exactly a "premium" product. Linksys sells routers for more money than this.

I dont think a $149 Mesh router is exactly in the premium segment.

I guess they could always do a Tri-Band, WiFI 6E with 2 2.5xGbps Ethernet for $199. ( That would be awesome )

It's not the cost of ports, but doing all the traffic processing for +500% of bandwith.

2.5G is absolutely nothing for modern chipsets and processors.

And do they cost the same?

I also wouldn't call it nothing, 2.5g switches have much higher consumption and get hotter, let alone 10g.

I’ve got 2.5G switches at home and they easily run off 12V 0.8A power adapters (8 port 2.5G 1x 10g)

Switching packets in hardware is trivial (assuming you have a chip). If you want to process them in software you need something more beefy.

I don’t know if you mean managed switches, but unmanaged switch processing is way less complex than routing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com