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Comment by lousken | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, but I am more curious about what happens to all the cat 6a cabling in offices, where do we go after 10GBASE-T

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Desktop computer are barely on 2.5GBASE-T, and there's still 5G in-between. I reckon it'll be 5-10 years until we'll see widespread 10G rollout, and it'll easily last another 10 before we need something better. The bigger issue is wireless access points. High-end ones are already on 10G today, and unlike desktops PoE is quite critical here.

25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T are dead-on-arrival: the spec exists, but nobody ever bothered to actually ship it. It requires yet another cable upgrade and the maximum distance is too short to be usable. And that's before we even looked at power consumption.

The obvious answer is fiber, but that's orders of magnitude more complicated to roll out. The fiber itself is a massive pain to install when you want to make it to-length on site, the currently-popular connectors require a lot of babysitting, it can't be backwards compatible with the old RJ45 stuff, and it can't do PoE. Pulling a standard single-mode fiber pair with LC connectors to every cubicle and access point? Not exactly an attractive option.

I personally think we're probably going to see some kind of Frankensteined (think GG45-like) RJ45-with-fiber pop up, but that won't be any time soon.

The Realtek RTL8127 chip for 10GbE will cost $10, draw 1.95 W and is designed for motherboards. So I think you're a bit pessimistic on timelines...

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/realteks-usd10-tiny-...

Key word being "widespread".

10GBASE-T dates back to 2006, and we've been seeing it on the odd prosumer workstation / elite gamer motherboard for quite a while now. But those markets aren't going to lead to a full office rewiring.

The entry-level market is more interesting: when will we see it on motherboards that retail for $100? When will we see it on the average Dell Optiplex? When will your ISP router come with 10G ports?

Will some people be using 10G before that? Definitely, and I'll be one of them. Will it be something to consider for the average office environment? Nah.

Agreed.

Change is coming! I feel like 5Gbit is mostly useful for switches, that a lot of other products are gonna jump direct to 10GBase-T.

25GBase-T or 40GBase-T is probably going to be a bit more energy intensive for a while, and 30m is ok but not great range if you're trying to span an office.

Ideally I'd really like to see optics costs fall, for consumers to start picking it up. Maybe the future is SFP everywhere and perhaps that makes sense (swap out transciever if one fails! Direct Attach Copper maybe or Base-T for convenience). But I really hope we see some real inroads, some of this separation between consumer & commercial go away.

I got a 150' 40Gbps fiber optic display port cable for ~$50, over half a decade ago. Unidirectional (I believe) but still just totally reset my expectations of what stuff really has to cost! Seemed too good to be true but still using it! We're spending more and more energy and effort trying to squeeze bits down a difficult copper channel, but optics right there, getting easier and easier.

I wish Intel hadn't given up on on-package interconnects (available on package on Xeon & Phi, 2016-2019). High end at the time. But now PCIe, USB, and DisplayPort all have optical capable specs, and the energy cost and distance of copper keeps making less and less sense. We gotta go forward, and the break from scant tiny consumer bandwidth to something much different feels like a potential dam burst.

I hope Intel's still doing some optical stuff with the recent shake ups. Loved their embarrassingly parallel RISC-V beast with 16 optical links. And it was a year ago they demoed a new all optical switch (rip Intel/Barefoot Tofino, you wonderful p4 programmable beast) with copious 4Tb/s PCIe switching. https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/01/intel_graph_analytics... https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-unv...

as someone with a homelab i disagree, i dont want to throw away my cat 6a cabling here, however i would like to see a bit more than i currently have with my 10Gbps, so maybe a middleground?

I would assume that max distance wouldn't be 100meters, but even if 30, that's more than plenty for lots of use cases

And as you mentioned, poe devices will be a huge pain that will have to be resolved

10g is going to remain sufficient for office use for a long time.

Ultra Ethernet will be primarily for cluster/AI/Super computing, trading, server, and backplane scenarios where high speed low-latency throughput turns into money or bang for your buck.

Debbie in accounting will practically never need more than 10g networking to do her job.

> Debbie in accounting will practically never need more than 10g networking to do her job.

And 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anyone. Who knows, perhaps in 2050 Edward will be mailing Debbie iterations of their 500GB AI fraud model for local inference?

The question isn't if 10G will need to be replaced with something better, but when.

Unless there are sea changes in the global infrastructure of computing in the next 25 years, that 500gb AI fraud model would be hosted on a server and made available to debbie through a web connection.

Further, almost every person on an internal network still uses 1g, which has been going strong for 25 years so far and will likely only cease being the standard when it's no longer economical for manufacturers to produce 1g hardware.

There's already 25G BASE-T over CAT6 available. I worked on and taped out a 25G PHY in 2019. Cable reach is 30m instead of 100m though. There's work going on 40G for 10m reach.

If by "available" you mean that there's a standard. There may be PHY designs that exist but they're not available for purchase, probably because there's no identifiable market. Any potential customer who for some reason wanted to build an AP1000 reactor unit for their datacenter and a second unit for that datacenter's PHYs would need to design their own networking equipment. Which might use 40G but at this point it's questionable — that's the sort of slow equipment you might see in a rack-scale on-premises installation.

The engineering samples are available and if a network equipment manufacturer or a hyperscaler chooses to use it, it can be in production quite fast.

It's a bad idea though. This is the reason it's not adopted in any product.

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