Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.

But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.

Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.

1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.

I believe this to be a utility issue. In the average home network, having greater than a gig networking provides little value for the center of the bell curve of users.

Maybe its different outside of America but most people in America have less than 1gbps internet connections, and have little need to transfer data in-house from one location to another that the time saved by having a 5, 10, or 25gbps connection would benefit them in any measurable way.

Even for those people who run NAS systems for extra storage will only saturate gigabit connections occasionally, and being able to save a few hours a year waiting for transfers to complete is likely not worth the initial setup effort and costs for them.

I'm a bit of a techie, and my house is wired for 10gbps internally, but no isp in my area offers more than 1gbps, and I live in a well-to-do and densely populated area near to many tech companies.

So, in short, 1gbps is not obsolete. It probably should be, but it still meets the needs of the great majority of people that use it.

As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.

At home, I have 10G only between machines that actually do transfer between each other. The rest is either 1G or Wi-Fi 7 (which in my use case is faster than 1G and cheaper than 10G)

I think about 80-90% of the UK can order >1G broadband, fairly similar in most of europe, though some countries do lag behind. Realistically the number of homes with more than 20metres of cat5 structured cabling is very very low (much less than 1%). Typical new builds might give you a CAT5 from the utility cupboard to the TV and study if you're lucky. As such for now it's fine as 10G is 'OK' and even in the case the cabling doesn't support 10G, it should at least do 5Gbase-T.

Most providers are topping out at 2.5Gbps and big part of that is that you can't actually use even that much over Wi-Fi and anything >2.5Gbe consumer side is comparatively expensive/rare and no hard wired cabling in most houses anyway. So as such most ISP routers are 2.5Gbe LAN with only a few exceptions (https://www.choose.co.uk/broadband/sky/reviews/sky-gigafast-...).

I dunno, I'd like to see faster options taking off but last time I checked they were just starting to get cost-effective. I'm not paying a factor more for 10GbaseT when I don't actually need that kind of speed.

1 Gbps is perfectly adequate for things such as Apple TV's, smart home controllers/gateways (heck even 10 Mbps is fine for them), networked printers, UPSes (also would be fine with as low as 10 Mbps), KVMs, etc etc etc

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

No, this is more like "we have multi-megabyte machines, and yet a surprising amount of home and small business software is happy in 640K or less".

> there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture

because dealing with fiber is easier than cat8 copper. unless you want poe there is very little reason to use base-t.

I think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.

Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.

but why bother? basic fiber is dirt-cheap and optics are not that expensive either.

POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.

I'm a bit irked that there aren't more, less expensive 10gb 10baseT ethernet switches available. I have one that I have as my main connection in the wiring closet (need to get my NAS back in there), and a few 2.5gb switches off of that (one in my office)... mostly because I just didn't want to shell out the dramatically more expensive option.

Faster is only needed when you need the speed. 2.5G and 10G NICs eat power - all the ones I seen have heatsinks.

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