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Comment by 3form | Hacker News Reader

This would be great indeed.

On that note, why does the PoE capability often add such a big proportion of the price of various items? Is the technology really costly for some reason, or is it just more there's fairly low demand and people are still willing to pay?

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PoE is not obvious to implement (take it from someone who has done it with a fair share of mistakes), uses more expensive components that normal ethernet, takes up more space on the board, makes passing emissions certification more complex, and is more prone to mistakes that ruin boards in the future, causing support/warranty issues. In other words, a bag of worms: not impossible to handle, but something you would rather avoid if possible.

And what would a better alternative look like ?

I wouldn't call it "better", but the least-effort path among hobbyists and low end gear is often 12v or 24v sent over a pair with Gnd and a forgiving voltage regulator on the other end.

There is none, I never said PoE is "bad": it's a very good solution, it's just difficult to implement.

A full-module add-on in this power class is about $7 at 1,000 unit scale [0]. It would be around $3 with your own custom PCB design in terms of BoM addon at scale. That’s power only. Add another dollar or two for 10/100 PHY.

The trick is as others have said in what adding it to your design does in terms of complicating compliance design.

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/silvertel/AG9705-...

PoE power supplies need to be isolated (except in rare exceptions) and handle much higher voltages than common USB-C or wall wart power supplies.

They have to use a transformer and a more complex control strategy, not a simple buck regulator with an inductor. PoE inputs need to tolerate voltages several times higher than the highest USB-C voltages, so more expensive parts are used everywhere.

It sounds like the PoE spec was designed before the arrival of “IoT” type things like the esp32, raspberry pi’s, etc.

How much of the complexity is a “fundamental electrical engineering problem” and how much of it is just a spec written to solve a different set of problems?

Any Ethernet (well, any RJ45 you expect in a home/office) has to have at least 1500V isolation from the RJ45 wire to anything metal that can be touched or is a connector on the device. A PoE-only device with no electrical connectors besides the RJ45 can just use a very cheap RJ45 port with integrated magnetics and PoE allowance (tiny bit bigger wires and a center pin exposed, less than 50ct more than the cheapest RJ45 with integrated magnetics) and a cheap buck from 40~80V to e.g. 5V.

Oh, and a cheap bridge rectifier and some signaling resistors to take care of input polarity and signal to the source that we in fact want the approximately 50V that could hurt a device not made for it.

> cheap buck from 40~80V to e.g. 5V.

That’s not a cheap buck lol. Order of magnitude more expensive then 12v not even mentioning capacitors that can withstand 80v is $$$ and your derating goes to shit

Ethernet is already one of the most expensive standards because you need magnetics for isolation. Adding power on top of that is genuinely expensive.

Whenever you combine two things into one, the complexity and cost go up considerably. A regular coffee machine is pretty cheap. Add high pressure so it can make espresso and it gets considerably more expensive. Add milk so it can make cappuccino, again more complex and expensive. The same holds for electronics. Isolating power when it's alone is fairly straightforward. It gets considerably more tricky and hence more expensive the moment you want to place any kind of a meaningful data signal in its vicinity.

I’m sure the other commenters are right, but I’m guessing market segmentation may play a role here too.

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