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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.

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100BASE-T marked the transition from Cat 3 to Cat 5, and a lot of sites were actually still making use of coax. That was necessary but was an impediment because it meant a high cost of adoption. This coincided with the fact that, at the time, it was largely unnecessary for the broader market of users: these were the days of IDE/ATA-1 disks, acoustic modems and 300 DPI black and white printers. You watched video with VCR.

I recall using a business desktop back in the day with a common IDE disk, and also attached to a NetWare share. The NetWare share was much faster than the local drive although the network was only 10BASE-T. Around that time meetings began: how much was it going to cost to replace all the cable (half of which was still coax) and buy 100BASE-T switches? (Answer: a couple hundred dollars per drop.) That process took two years and another six months to do the work: a quarter of a decade.

1000BASE-T was specified for Cat 5: the floorboards didn't have to be torn up to replace all that cable everyone just paid for. The cost of PHY/SERDES components fell greatly during that time and made 1000BASE-T hardware affordable. Moving from 100BASE-T to 1000BASE-T was, therefore, cheap and easy and took correspondingly less time.

10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot.

When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper.

My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.

The really crazy thing is that the consumer space is still stuck on 1gbps nearly twenty years after 10G base-t.

Is it really that crazy? 1 gig is overkill for the vast majority of people as it is.

You (well, perhaps not specifically you, depending on your address) can easily get a consumer internet package that'd fully saturate 1gbps. You can buy consumer wireless access points that can serve over 1gbps. You can buy consumer network drives which are physically capable of saturating 10gbps. Modern USB already has transfer rates higher than 10gbps. It's far less outlandishly fast than 1gbps was when that was rolling out.

Yes, the things it's connected to can saturate a 1 Gbps link. But few people feel any pain points that would lead them to want to upgrade. I've only ever saturated mine with speed test sites.

I have gigabit internet and the only time it even remotely comes close to saturation is when Steam kicks off a large update. And then it's done, in minutes at a most.

Unless you are copying large media files around all day, gigabit is complete overkill for the vast majority of people.

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