10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module | Hacker News Reader

10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module

gilesthomas.com

195 pointsgpjt170 comments

I feel like we have moved into the era now where if you were putting cabling in the walls for networking you should be choosing fibre now. Not necessarily because we are definitely at the stage where the home needs it, but because the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet at 10gbit/s and its really high consumption and heat. Switching to fibre after 2.5gbit/s seems like the thing to do now and plenty of us now have access to internet speeds that can exceed 2.5gbit/s.

I would be grateful and happy to have gigabit Ethernet with cat 6A in every room instead of this single landline phone jack and/or coaxial cable. The most important thing is a good conduit in place when the house is built.

Depending on when your landline phone jacks were put in, you might be able to reterminate with rj45 and run something-baseT, although you'll need four pair to hit gigE or better. Works better if your house was wired with home runs to somewhere useful, but even daisy chained runs can go room to room with a switch per room.

> Depending on when your landline phone jacks were put in, you might be able to reterminate with rj45 and run something-baseT, although you'll need four pair to hit gigE or better. Works better if your house was wired with home runs to somewhere useful, but even daisy chained runs can go room to room with a switch per room.

This is very useful and actionable information. At the very least I think it will be useful to plug in the mesh WiFi access point thingy if I actually have four pair in there. I will check. Thank you!

There are probably still a lot of cases where you would want PoE though right? Cameras, WAPs, etc.

Waps are next to power, some even have SFP+ ports

But why...it doesn't solve a problem we currently face. We aren't even anywhere near 10Gbps in RF. And that's assuming you are maxing all three bands.

> the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet

You should be running both.

If you are being smart about it your planning distributed switching (fiber to media boxes with power).

From a pure networking stance, fiber is the way to go. But POE continues to have more and more uses (doorbells, cameras, sensors, lighting controls).

you should be putting in conduit -- either smurf tube, emt, sch40, or similar. can pull whatever, and more importantly, if a cable is damaged by an overly zealous gorilla during installation, it can easily be fixed and replaced.

I wish conduit was a requirement for new construction.

What for? Ethernet is what you ultimately need, because that is what devices such as PCs and WiFi access points use. I experimented with SFP for a while, but ultimately concluded that it isn't worth the effort to add SFP cards to PCs now that that low-power 10G Ethernet chips like the RTL8127 are available. High-end motherboards already have 10G Ethernet and soon lower-end models will too. 2.5G is practically standard already.

Ever ran a single mode bidi fibre in a conduit? Push a wire puller, cleave and terminate ends, done. Zero effort unlike pulling a jacketed CAT7 cable, zero worries from electrical interference too, future proofing up to 40GBps. I ran double strands in my house so in case one breaks, there's another.

The floors where native fibre is not needed have a cheap ethernet media converter from fs.com, everything else (3 floor switches) are interconnected with 10Gbps SFP+ modules and 2.5G ethernet for the hosts.

All done thanks to the great https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...

(if you are reading this, I owe you several beers)

The issue with this setup is that you need an extra switch with an SFP+ uplink or media converter in each room or place where Ethernet will be used. And then you still need Ethernet cables anyway for the end devices. I can't justify this complexity for 40Gbps when I can now get 10Gbps inexpensively and conveniently.

Each floor's fiber terminates in a CRS310-8G+2S+IN except where I mentioned, there's a single 1G media converter.

Well, if you live in a multistorey house, each floor can be interconnected by bidi fiber, then you simply run ethernet to the end points.

If your walls are ripped open, then sure run some OS2 everywhere, but Cat 6A gets you 10GbE at 100m, but even 'only' Cat 5e or (plain) 6 gets you that speed up to 55m (per 802.3an):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-T

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Var...

Why the need for faffing about with media convertors, at least with-in your domicile? (Fibre outside / to the garage certainly makes sense.)

> Why the need for faffing about with media convertors, at least with-in your domicile? (Fibre outside / to the garage certainly makes sense.)

For all the benefits I mentioned above, plus no electrostatic shielding required, and all fibers end in a CRS310-8G+2S+IN.

My APs are fiber now.

I expect my APs will be the last things to convert away from copper because of the need for power. (I just deployed new WiFi 7 APs with 10G PoE++ links.)

> What for? Ethernet is what you ultimately need

Is answered in the comment you responded to:

> because the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet at 10gbit/s

As for

> because that is what devices such as PCs and WiFi access points use

We are looking to the future. If you're putting stuff in the walls, then you should try to target something that will be adequate both today, and in 10 years from now.

Increasingly, prosumer stuff is including an SFP port. High end PCs will be shipping it in the near future, as well. And, while low-power chips are coming out, the simple fact is that physics are getting in the way.

I do think that the average home won't need more than 2.5gbps, pretty much indefinitely (an 8k video at "bluray quality" is about at most 5% of that bandwidth). But if you have any desire of going past 10gbps, Ethernet is not going to cut it.

And yes, before you ask, there is a 25gbase-t standard. Maximum distance: 30m (100ft). 100ft from panel to panel in a house? Oof.

> And yes, before you ask, there is a 25gbase-t standard. Maximum distance: 30m (100ft). 100ft from panel to panel in a house? Oof

Not to mention termination and interference considerations, etc. When I looked at it, I decided anything over 2.5g just wasnt worth all the extra hassle vs running fiber instead.

> I do think that the average home won't need more than 2.5gbps, pretty much indefinitely

Yeah I'm not seeing a need for fiber or anything more than CAT6. Most household devices use WiFi and I think that will continue. People don't like wires. They're unsightly, collect dust, get tripped over, etc.

I already have coax cable and telephone wiring in my walls that's unused. One computer in my house has a wired network connection. Everything else, TVs, laptops, printers, phones, tablets, miscellaneous "things" are all WiFi.

That's fine.

In my house though, everything except printers, phones and laptops uses Ethernet. It just works and it's better.

Yes, but 10G really is the limit. I'll eat my boiled boots if 25GbE copper becomes anything you could remotely consider "common".

I mean.. cat8 already exists but it will never be common because most people who dont make home networking a hobby just use wifi.

Hell many many people now a days own only a tablet and phone and no desktop/laptop at all.

Someone else in this thread mentioned motherboards with SFP ports on them and I cant believe that will ever be common because people can barely handle the many flavours of cables using USB C, how are they going to manage the mishmash of transceivers that only like specific brands and the DAC cables that may or may not work depending on how they feel that day.

Server boards typically use SFP, and for typical consumers you’re 100% correct that wifi is all that matters.

For sure, I was thinking consumer desktop motherboards.

Even server boards often have their SFP in daughter boards specific to the chassis.

We are pushing multiple gigabits over 100 year old phone lines so never say never.

Not never, just not common. Why would you even want it when fibre already does better, cheaper?

640KB still enough for everyone?

25G is definitely a thing over copper, just not over Ethernet :)

What? Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol, SFP and RJ45 are both layer 1 (PHY). Ethernet runs fine over both SFP and RJ45.

I have ten gigabits throughout most of my house, and you're right: copper is not happy pushing ten gigs.

My 10 gigabit thunderbolt dongle weighs about a pound, and I think 90+% of that weight is just heatsink. If I've had it plugged in for awhile, if I accidentally touch that dongle it actually hurts because it's so hot. I cannot image that much heat is good for, well, anything.

I have another Thunderbolt dongle that has an SFP+ module, so I ran a fiber line from my switch to my computer, and that runs considerably cooler. That's what I use nowadays.

What standard of cable? When I rewired I ran Cat6a everywhere. My longest 10G run is ~70 meters and works just fine. Anytime I had a link issue it was because I did not do the best job in termination on the keystone jack.

To be clear the Cat6a is thicker than Cat6 and harder to work with. It makes termination a bit more tricky.

I use Cat 8.

The cables themselves don't get too hot, but the dongles themselves seem to get really hot. I'm assuming that's a known issue given the size of the heatsinks on them.

Unfortunately that's non-DAC copper cabling life it seems. They build them to work at the rated speed at the maximum rated distance (on the transceiver, not the spec) and none of them appear to link train to reduce the power output over shorter runs.

If you use a DAC they usually run cool, and optical is even cooler.

DAC should be the coolest but it's only for very short distances.

> I have ten gigabits throughout most of my house, and you're right: copper is not happy pushing ten gigs.

DACs are copper, and they're happy.

> I have another Thunderbolt dongle that has an SFP+ module, so I ran a fiber line from my switch to my computer, and that runs considerably cooler. That's what I use nowadays.

This is also what I am doing, and I love it. Much better and more reliable than WLAN. I want as much wired as possible.

However... recently, Realtek released several products adding cheap, affordable, low-power 10 gbit SFP+ and PCIe copper (even certain for routers/switches, too). STH did reviews: they're performing. Specific chipset are: RTL8127, RTL8127AP (servers, with management), RTL8127ATF (fiber, no 10/100 mbit)), RTL8127AT (idem, but copper), RTL8159 (USB-C), RTL8261C (SFP+ copper, and media converter). See the examples here: [1]. I've already seen various been selling since ~December on AliExpress, especially copper RTL8127 variants (back then, even one RTL 10 gbit PCIe SFP+ variant). There appears to be one caveat: macOS isn't supported, Windows and Linux are.

I get the case for PoE, but PoE is apparently not as power-friendly as using a dedicated charger. I do find it much more elegant though.

Edit: I'd like to add that I've been having good success with Aquantia AQC100S which I use in my desktop (running Linux, and using a SFP+ for 10 gbit fiber), as well as a Sonnet TB3 (to SFP+ for 10 gbit fiber, running macOS M1 MBP). Both don't get hot, don't use a lot of power, and the connections saturate. Mind you, it is important to specifically go for the AQC100S and not the AQC107 or AQC113 which are both much more common. Both use more power. Because I got good success with these, and my router is sporting a X710 4 port SFP+ NIC (which could be more efficient, to be fair, but it is what it is) I am no longer interested myself in any alternatives. I'm settled.

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/337113/realtek-to-bring-affordab...

> DACs are copper, and they're happy.

Yeah, but DACs are pretty short and tend to have much thicker cables than regular copper Ethernet.

> DACs are copper, and they're happy.

Well come on. GP really means category cable (twisted pair copper) is not happy at 10Gb distribution lengths (so-called horizontal cabling, although in a home it may span multiple floors without IDFs). That's kind of obvious context.

DACs are not category cable; they are twinax, short, and bulky.

Still, it is useful to mention.

If PoE required: use copper twisted pair.

If both sides SFP+ (preferred, but not always possible):

Physical presence: DAC (very cheap).

Not physical presence (e.g. has to go through wall, floor, or longer distance): fiber (OM3 are very cheap but apparently the color being translucent is regarded as nice).

Else: copper twisted pair.

I've applied this on my (rental) house. One server has a 10 gbit copper twisted pair NIC because it also has a PCIe switch with M.2 storage on the same physical PCIe board. Two WLAN APs are powered by switch in fusebox. The Unifi Protect appliance is also powered by twisted pair copper. But I was also able to get an OM3 fiber through the same wall hole.

And always terminate at walls. So if a cable in house goes bad, the one through the wall or the socket is unaffected. Works with both fiber and twisted pair copper.

You can already notice it in this post. DAC barely is part of the content. It is fire and forget, no caveats, lowest latency and lowest power usage. So it tends to be forgotten, but a DAC cable is useful if both devices got physical (vicinity) presence. An alternative could be networking over TB.

You still need to power things.

Often that will mean running both Cat6A and fiber.

You cannot do PoE over fiber.

Hold my laser and watch this (with remaining eye)

> ethernet at 10gbit/s and its really high consumption and heat

Do you mean Ethernet cables get hot? Or just the networking equipment pushing that data.

I ask because I’ve never heard of Ethernet cables getting hot.

PoE++ can get warm but you wont be doing that with fibre!

Before specifying fibre everywhere I suggest you note that a CAT 6 cable can manage 10G and PoE++. Its a lot more resilient to breakage too, especially outside the data centre.

If you really want to blow some cash there is CAT6A, which is probably not indicated unless you want cable lengths of more than say 50m.

No, the transceivers get hot. This is because of plenty of small metal surfaces, so even if they do not consume too much they will immediately get warm to the touch.

I did just that relatively recently in a house we bought. OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. It's basically future proof, but also has its own well, things. You can't really plug into a duplex (I wish though), you have to put a small switch to it with SFP+ or 28 or whatever the speed you want. Higher speed switches are also a tad expensive. And then, there's the big one - PoE. That's why I also ran CAT6A next to each duplex to rooms and they're more or less for APs in the house. Overall it's definitely future proof and fantastic, but also a bit expensive if you wanna engage that fiber through the house. Pulling the cable itself isn't much of a cost at all and I recommend it.

I did this and used little $129 Zyxel SFP+ to 2.5G copper switches to get to my access points. Has been running smooth!

Finishing up the same thing. 2x OS2 pairs with 2x CAT-6A to each drop, all coming together to the network closet.

Gives me fiber for bandwidth and copper for PoE. Figured it was smarter to do both than compromise to either one, and surprisingly the fiber was cheaper than the copper to pull.

Fiber is much slimmer and takes less effort to pull.

So tell me... how much did you spend? Is fiber doable without insane money.

Fiber optic cable itself isn't that expensive. You can easily get it for less than $0.20/foot.

It shouldn't be that much different in price to run fiber verse running cat6. The expensive part is the labor, not the cable.

I think I was more referring to the switches with sfp and the transceivers themselves. I have never tried to get something "low end".

At 10g, sfp+ switches are cheaper and more available than 10gbase-T switches. Fiber transceivers seem reasonable, but I could be off; I've only looked a little at fiber prices, I already have cat5 in the wall, so I'm on DAC for nearby stuff and twisted pair for other rooms for the forseable future. I don't really need 10G, but it provides a bit of fun.

for shorter runs you might even get 10G on cat5.

802.3an officially gives you 10G on Cat5e (and plain-6) up 55m; 6A gets you to 100m.

I am using 10G over an ~15m 4 twisted pair phone cable (PTT, common in France even decades ago for ISDN, but no cat cable at all) and don't remember seeing a frame lost in quite some years.

Yes, I have 10g over cat5. I don't need it, but I have it.

Ethernet specs are for cabling in dense conduit. Most people don't have dense conduit in their house. Much cable tests better than the rating on the jacket.

I forgot to say this, but you said it. Fiber is cheaper than CAT6A, and labor is the expensive one. If you have conduits, you don't need much labor then. Ask an electrician or a buddy to help out for a hundred or two for an hour or two and you can do it yourself. It's not a big deal (IF YOU HAVE CONDUITS IN GOOD CONDITION / SHAPE).

I recently pulled OS2 fibre throughout my aparment and it was surprisingly inexpensive.

Four-fibre cable was about US$ 1.5/m (here in Switzerland, I am sure cheaper elsewhere).

I picked ONTi JT-S508CL-8S as the main 10G fibre switch (direct from Ali, for about 100 bucks).

For wired Ethernet and PoE, I have a couple of KeepLink KP-9000-9XHPML-X switches (I paid about 60 buck for each, they seem to cost around $85 now). I find that they work well and use them for 10/100/1000/2500 GbE switching and to power various devices (other switches, U7-Pro-XGS AP, Zigbee dongle, home automation server, rack fans etc).

The main splice box was about 60 bucks, 24 pigtails included.

From memory, 10G SFP+ fibre modules were about ten bucks apieces. (DAC cables are cheaper, 10G copper transceivers are more expensive.)

Plus various paraphenalia (wall face plates, keystone modules, more pigtails etc), all of which was pretty cheap.

Note that I was able to borrow a fusion splicer from a friend. Otherwise they seem to start at around 500 bucks; buying one would have been the single biggest expense.

I also run a 25G path from one point in my flat to my ISP. The cabling is exactly the same but 25G switching equipment and optics are considerably more expensive and less available than 10G.

wow! that is way cheaper than what I would have expected. thanks china...

That, plus the existence of chipsets used in those switches, such as Realtek RTL8372/RTL8373 and RTL9303. Feature rich yet dirt cheap.

I particularly like per-pert PoE power monitoring on the RTL837x. I hooked that up to my netdata to get a full history of how much each device in my rack is drawing. Don't need a fancy PDU or separate power bricks for each device -- everything is powered by the $60 switch.

(This is a home network and I'm not at all bothered about single points of failure or lack of redundancy/failover.)

You can check out FS (.com) it's quite cheap. For distribution from my attic (where all conduits converge to) to rooms I ran OS2 LC UPC duplex patch cables together with CAT6A. There I have a small rack with a patch panel and a PoE switch (to run APs) and from there I have a 48-strand trunk going to my basement where I have a bit of a larger rack with equipment. That way my APs are connected to main network via PoE switch which is connected via fiber and all the wall outlets with fibers are connected directly to main rack with equipment. Furthermore, I also ran another trunk from basement to garage where eventually I'll run everything from (with full height racks.. yeah, overkill) - with a wall patch panel I can just rewire trunk to trunk, close the panel and that's it.

If we're not accounting for switches, we're talking maybe few hundred euros at most including cables and outlets both for fiber and CAT6A, maybe 400-500 total or so where majority was CAT6A since I opted for the more _industrial one_, includes 150 I paid for help to run the cables through conduits. Fiber was all patch from distribution to walls, and trunk mainlines are _industrial_ fibers where in a single small diameter cable you have 48 strands of single mode. Actually in one I have 72 strands since guys didn't have 48 at the time and diameter is the same and price difference was small. This is for a three story house + basement and a run to the garage. I did the crimping myself, you do NOT "crimp" fiber yourself.. you get pre-made cables or for trunks you ask for pros with equipment to splice/fuse it for you.

Network equipment is a range of course. I opted for dream machine gateway for net and then the backbone is Switch pro XG Aggregation where most equipment is at with Switch Pro XG 10 PoE for APs (has dual 10GBit uplink), and a few smaller switches on the edges like Flex 2.5G for cameras etc. Yeah, I went full ubiquiti on that one and my mainline is basically 25Gb network, but it doesn't matter and that's the beauty of this setup - I could've easily gone full 1Gbit, 10, 25, 100, 400, even Nvidia/Mellanox 800Gbit OSFP with appropriate transcievers if one wants to go way overboard. Idea was to run this through to be future-proof cable-wise for another 10+ years (probably more), and for network setup to be for next 10 years (probably more) with 10/25G.

Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.

single mode are pretty cheap too (12e for 10gbit/s bidi for example)

Yes, 100G multimode transceivers are cheaper, but they don't use the same fiber.

100G on singlemode (100G-LR4 being the most common) uses the well-known two-strand ("duplex") fiber. Or you can get 100G bi-directional ("BiDi") over a single strand of singlemode (fiber-to-the-home often uses this).

100G on multimode is weird. As the name implies, one beam of light, sent down the core of a multimode fiber, results in multiple modes (search "Laser modes") being sent down the strand. As they overlap, it gets hard to get a clean signal out the other end.

To deal with this issue, 100G on multimode uses fiber cables containing multiple strands per direction of travel. MPO-8 and MPO-12 are common cables used for 100G multimode: It contains eight or twelve strands of fiber. Four strands are used to send, four to receive. And the prices for those cables are higher than standard duplex singlemode cable.

If you just want to use LC connectors everywhere, they’re the same price. Plus single mode fiber has the advantage that there’s only two kinds and we really only use one of them.

The math worked out just to move to single mode a decade ago

> Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.

OS2 transceivers are not that expensive anymore with the rise in third-party modules: sure, first-party, OEM SKUs are pricey, but a home user is not going to go that route.

Standard /r/networking advice is to go single-mode basically everywhere due to price drops over the last 10+ years.

Doing the cabling job was a weekend long project for me, I just never want to have to do that again (yes yes I should have run conduit and pull strings, but single mode just means I didn't have to even do that)

Having debugged flaky 100GE links on multimode fibre: absolutely the f*ck not. Unless forced by compatibility needs, you install single mode, end of evaluation of benefits and drawbacks. SMF just works. MMF is dead for any and all greenfield fixed installation.

The sibling posts have already pointed out the pricing has mostly equalized at this point too, especially if you're more realistic and look at 10G or 25G. (Or just buy a pile of used 100G CWDM4 transceivers off eBay.)

> OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment.

What do you mean by "trunk which is available in three locations"?

Usually cabling is home-run to a single, central patch panel. A cable (fibre, copper) would usually have one end in a room's wall outlet, with the other end at a patch panel: how would you have a cable one end at three locations? Do you have three patch panels? I.e., three hubs, with the room cables going to one hub and then you can have hub-to-hub runs?

that's exactly what I have. I have a hub in the attic with a small rack where all the wall runs end up at both rooms' fiber and CAT6A, there's a small 10G switch with PoE there for CAT6A (for APs and RJ45 outlets). There's also a fiber patch panel there where those rooms' ones connect to. Trunk starts there as well, in a fiber rack shelf which goes to the basement. In the attic I patch trunk to walls and the switch. In the basement trunk ends up in another patch panel (a cabinet on the wall) from which I run fibers to the rack with all the equipment. Thing is, that patch panel cabinet on the wall is also hosting another trunk which goes to the garage, where there's a third patch panel (in a cabinet on the wall) from which I'll soon connect to rack(s) there. Eventually, in the basement i'll just patch trunk to trunk so that way i'll just hoist all the network equipment to racks in the garage. By having three hubs like this though, I can do whatever.

In principle it sounds simple, but in practice I got lost in my own way too many times. Just glad that it's over, hahah.

Please avoid the use of the term “hub” here as it already was defined elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub

A switch differs from a hub, a patch panel differs from a hub. Hopefully you haven’t touched one since affordable fast Ethernet switches hit the consumer market.

Why can't you plug and unplug duplexes?

Totally agree, I went to fiber years ago, and the decrease in latency makes it _feel_ so much faster than 10G copper, it is not funny. Besides, if you put in the "good stuff" them moving to 40G and beyond is not a problem later on. Like others said, just add a copper line for POE devices, but for systems... its fiber all the way.

That can't be right. The old network must've had a problem somewhere. I'm running 10G copper throughout the house and my latency is ~1ms from the office upstairs to the server in the basement (across three switches). Using moonlight to game for example and it is flawless.

I wasn't aware there was a substantial latency difference between fiber and copper. Some googling suggests copper might be .4-.8c and fiber might be a more reliable .6c? But even if there was a huge difference in speed of light through the medium, inside a home aren't the distances so short that it wouldn't matter?

There's no way you could feel even a millisecond in latency difference and that would be a lot.

> I feel like we have moved into the era now where if you were putting cabling in the walls for networking you should be choosing fibre now.

How many consumer devices have an ((Q)SFP(+)) optical cage?

If you're in their pulling stuff anyway, sure, do some OS2, but for most people, for most devices, Cat 5e/6 is more useful, especially since you can do POE(+(+)) over it as well. 5e/6 gets you 10GbE to 55m, and 6A to 100m.

Personally, if I was building a house, anywhere I want significant non wifi hardware would have a switch anyway.

In my house, I've got a switch at tvs with multiple devices.

One place with two desktops has a switch, although when I finish up some stuff, I'm going to reterminate the phone line that's there as rj45 so both desktops can get 2.5G to my 2.5G switch. Could be sfp+, but they're mini-itx.

The kitchen desktop has its own 2.5G port; the printer next to it is on wifi because I don't want to buy a 2.5g capable switch for them to share. Mini-itx again

My work desktop has 10g-baseT.

Fiber would work for all of that, I guess.

But then I have a tv with just one device on 100base-TX. And the access points don't have spf, and aren't near other equipment.

Fiber makes a lot of sense for data but you still need a lot of copper for PoE and iot devices.

I don’t think we’ll ever see fiber ports in consumer devices. If we ever get beyond 10g connections in consumer devices, we’ll figure out how to run it over cat5e. I’ve got 10g running just fine over an 80 foot run of 20 year old cat5e that goes from my bedroom, up to the attic, across the house, down three floors to the basement, and across the house in the other direction. I bet you could get 25G over cat5e at these distances using FEC and some superhero-level codings that’ll be feasible by the time we need it.

I just don't see the average consumer ever needing more than 10gbit. In fact, I can tell you right away most consumers wouldn't notice if they were running 500mbit vs 1gbit.

4G has been enough for a decade, 5G was mostly just an infrastructure and capacity improvement and most consumers could never tell you they notice a difference between the two. The human eye can only see so much resolution, we don't need 8k video. I don't think consumers will need more than what they already have. At least until some new novel media format that gulps down bandwidth comes around.

This isn't necessarily all bad news. There is still a push for higher bandwidth for datacenters etc, which will keep pushing technology forward, hopefully making consumer and ISP grade equipment cheaper.

If I built a house I'd probably run ethernet. Maybe play around with a 10gbe core network. But it wouldn't really give me any benefit, it's not like disks are that fast anyways.

That is what I did[1] and also I used single-mode, not multi-mode.

[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

"High power consumption" is debatable, since even these hot transceivers are consuming about 3W, and the replacement ones are closer to 1W. At 1W per port, the switch you'll put them in likely has higher overhead...

It is difficult, but possible, to find a SFP+-capable switch where idle consumption scales at around 1W/port, but less than that I have not found.

Yes, definitely you should run fiber through the walls. And leave more in the walls in case you need to route it somewhere else in the future.

The upside of this is that you can increase bandwidth as the technology evolves without needing to rerun cables anytime a new specification is created for high-speed copper. OM5 fiber can do up to 400Gbps for short distances. Maybe in the future you can bundle a few pairs up and have a remote GPU sitting somewhere.

The downside is that you may need MCs, but they are small and can be hidden in wall outlets.

I'd settle for 1 Gbps with a real IP address (UK)

I believe BT Fibre (FTTP) provides a real address (as in not CGNAT).

For may be specific professionals? For Prosumers I don't see the need even if I have access to 25Gbps Internet.

For majority of home usage it will all be WiFi. WiFi 7 has gotten to the point where prosumers are happy with its performance. WiFi 8 and 9 will further improve in that direction for reliability and speed.

With PoE, router and everything else Ethernet is still clearly the easiest choice. And as mentioned we now have sub 2W 10Gbps Ethernet. What will likely happen is that 10Gbps becomes like 1Gbps Ethernet, it will stay here for 10-20 years until something happen in the future that needs extra bandwidth.

May be in 10 years time 10Gbps could be done under 1W.

PoE is extremely useful though. You can stick PoE wifi access points straight to the wall, no wires visible.

Speaking of modules that lie about themselves, unifi has an interesting little device called the "SFP Wizard" that can reprogram sfp modules.

https://www.ui.com/us/en/integrations/accessory-tech/sfp-wiz...

Previously seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732874

fiberstore has them as well, plus you can buy modules, DACS and everything programmed to the vendor of choice, including different vendors on each end

Especially handy for specific Intel NICs where they refuse to link up if the module isn't in the driver-allowed list and those modules are hard to come by

You can also use a BananaPi BPI-R3 for reprogramming. And you can “upgrade“ 10 Gbit/s DACs to 25 Gb/s. Details here https://kohlschuetter.github.io/blog/posts/2026/03/22/unlock...

I tend to use fs.com optics, but I’ve heard in high rates (100g plus) that flex optic tend to be more reliable

FS has a reprogrammer, called the FS Box. Works well.

If you are implementing 10 GBE at distances less than 5-7 m, I highly recommend standardizing on DAC cabling. It removes the need for these kinds of conversions that create these kinds of heat signatures.

Wish apartments would come with those

So much this. The rule of thumb is: avoid SFP-RJ45 converters at all costs, you'll be burned by them (literally and figuratively).

They all are little snowflakes. Compatibility is hit-or-miss. They run hot. They eat more power. They're finnicky. Heck, they plain out lie about what they are (I've got some that pretend to be fibre with 3m of copper, sure).

So yeah, DAC it is for patch, fibre for anything more.

I would also add that the high-quality ones are quite expensive, and that I found incorporating an RJ45 switch with an SFP uplink was more economical for the cases that needed RJ45 (or gigabit) connectivity.

OP here -- yes, 100%! Within my study it's DACs all the way. I only use 10GBASE-T where it's the only option: through the wall cabling, and from the connector on my ISP's crappy router to the mini-PC that acts as the real router.

I think this is the first time one of my comments has ever gotten mentioned in a subsequent post, so that's cool :)

Glad it was helpful and not me being an idiot. That's a shame about the temp read out. I just checked my MikroTik and can see the same thing. In fact, the only SFP module reporting a temperature at all is the real fiber one, all of the DACs/converters report nothing. No voltage either.

Thanks for making the comment! It saved me having to bolt a USB fan over the old, misbehaving SFP+ module or something similarly silly...

Some time ago I was playing around with 10GbE using a Macbook Pro. At the time that meant a Thunderbolt adapter (and still does). Thing is, the one I got was essentially just a giant heatsink [1]. It was a beast and belied just how much of a problem heat distribution was. I'm not an EE so I'm not really sure why, other than by looking at what high bandwidth cables have done since.

10baseT (!0Mbps) came out in 1990 (there were non-twisted pair earlier versions). "Fast Ethernet" (100Mbps) came out in 1995. Copper 1GbE came out in 1999. Copper 10GbE came out in 2006. Ethernet seemed addicted to 10x'ing every version and 10GbE is really where everything fell apart. Or at least, it's where it got hard. We never really got mass market 10GbE. The controllers were too expensive. The cable requirements were quite high. And heat was an issue.

1GbE really was fast enough and 10GbE was a massive jump that I even remember thinking at the time that there should've been intermediate steps, which is what happened in 2016 with 2.5GbE and 5GbE.

Now compare to Thunderbolt, introduced in 2011, which has completely surpassed Ethernet bandwidth, in part by putting chips in the cables, but of course the big difference is cable length. A copper cat 6/7 cable can get to ~100 meters, which is also why the power is so high: attenuation.

but I guess my point is that 10GbE over copper was a mistake. We'd reached the point where you really had to swap over to fiber.

[1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/127178476193

I don't think that's quite true. Unifi 10GbE switches are cheap enough I have a 24 port PoE+++ one in my house and my 3 main WiFi APs are 10GbE connected. My MBP uses a 5Gbps Thunderbolt adapter that runs relatively cool as well. All of this is over the existing Cat5e wiring.

I'd say 10GbE has arrived. It is relatively cheap, most of the time works over existing 1GbE cabling, and gracefully degrades to 5/2.5/1Gb based on conditions when it can't reach 10Gb.

Yes to be 100% guaranteed of getting 10Gb even in bundles of 100 cables running over noisy fluorescent ballasts to a full 100m you need Cat6A but in many environments Cat5e or Cat6 is more than sufficient. It works so well if you fail to get the full 10Gb I humbly suggest you re-do the terminations on both ends before considering replacing the cable.

We never really got mass market 10GbE. The controllers were too expensive. The cable requirements were quite high. And heat was an issue.

It's coming sooner than you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967

Man, I sure hope so. The implementation timeline is slower than it was in prior evolutions.

After stepping up in networks periodically (coax, then twisted pair with hubs, then 100mbps dual-speed switching hubs, then finally non-blocking 100mbps switches), I finally upgraded to gigabit ethernet at home because that had became cheap enough.

That last upgrade was 18 years ago, in 2008, and by that point I wasn't even an close to an early-adopter.

And now, 18 years hence: It seems absurd that the next 10x improvement is still not quite ready yet.

I know everyone is going to say I’m crazy

But for cabling, OS2 clear bend rated cable … pre-terminated is like the same price and currently have 25gb optics but I’m able to run over 100gb in my house without having to drill holes etc. (runs along the baseboards)

The cables are super thin… and clear/transparent

And I never have to replace the cable again I’m pretty sure haha

The bidi sfp28s $25 are awesome :)

And worst case if your service loop just … loops …. Eh haha

Gonna try using it for other things like hdmi etc too with a cassette :)

Cheap, low-heat 10G copper is already here. RTL8127 NIC is under $50, $200 nets you a quality 4x switch (CRS304-4XG-IN).

I have a RTL8127 NIC from Aliexpress that uses 1 PCIE 4.0 lane, finally a use for those 1x slots and it does pretty good on 10G speeds.

I've got a mix of both running here and definitely prefer the SFP+ part of the world. Couple of neat tricks it enables like the new "invisible" fiber - looks the same like fishing line basically. Unless you're 30cm away and actively looking you can't see it.

Replaced a wifi bridge that way...30m run across multiple rooms & hallway...zero drilling.

I wish multiple-port 10G PCIe cards with this chip were available. I would immediately upgrade by Debian router from 2.5G to 10G. At the very least I would need a dual NIC.

I've been eyeing the "10G PCI-E Network Card with 10Gbps Dual RJ45" on Amazon. Does that not cover what you're asking for?

and the QSW-L3208-2C6T-US is a cheap 8port switch

What about performance and driver support for Linux? Any issues with suspending to memory or disk?

I tried some 10GBase-T 10GTek SFP+ modules about three years ago and they had a serious overheating problem, to the point where they just were not usable.

Within the past year, I've tried a number of Chinese 10GBase-T SFP+ modules with the Broadcom chipset and they've all been great. The one's I've got now are WTTOGTEC and WTSFOPTC, which seem to be the same company. They're dirt cheap at less than $30 each, and they're solid. I've tried both the 30m and 80m variants, and have not had any problems at all.

I've got six of them here that have been running fine full-time for several months. Two of those are in a garage with no climate controls, and summer temperatures lately often over 100℉.

The six modules I'm using are installed in three Ubiquti USW Pro XG 8 PoE switches.

Comparative power consumption:

https://www.moduletek.com/en/application_notes/an_00196.html

Does anyone have any recs for GPON/XGS-PON SFP/SFP+ ONTs-on-a-stick that run cooler than average (say 50-65 °C)?

I'm also using the WAS groupon stick with a huge fan on it. I really wish they would build a proper fan and cooling duct into the stick and power it with the stick itself. It very much seems like a half-assed solution.

I'm considering that and the Nokia G-010S-A on my Uni-Fi Dream Router 7 (my area is serviced by multiple wholesale network access providers who operate either over GPON or XGS-PON, hence the need for both). However, I've heard enough horror stories that I'm a bit concerned about temperature issues...

all XGS models I've tried run super hot. I don't know the standard for your area but here 99% of the time here you just get a 'media converter' style layer 2 ONT which I would just keep.

What horror stories have you heard? Just hot temperatures or smoke and fire?

fs.com displays wattage ratings on all of their products, pick low watts.

https://www.fs.com/c/gpon-xgspon-sticks-5607 (I think this is what you're looking for?)

I am in the market for an SFP+ module and was looking at this exact model! The serendipity made me smile. Cheers mate.

I've bought a good bit of 10Gtek stuff over the years. Not sure to what extent they actually are designing their products vs. just acting as a reseller (I think the latter), but either way everything I've bought from them has been quality kit that lasted for years, at a great price.

If you want a 10GBASE-T SFP+ module that doesn't run hot, look for one with 802.3bz support. Any module that supports 2.5G and 5G speeds has newer silicon which runs cooler.

There is an old but still good list of transceivers with this feature here: https://www.servethehome.com/sfp-to-10gbase-t-adapter-module...

To make it less hot, just use fiber optics.

My lessons on 10G networking at home is here: https://ben3d.ca/blog/home-network-lessons

i have gfiber 8gb put in my house. a cost-effective high performance setup im using is unifi cloud gateway fiber + 2x microtik CRS305 SFP+ (for all my other 10G devices) + 2x unifi flex 2.5G. this setup gives me a lot of 10G ports for little cost. copper DAC cables are great (optical transceivers and cables also work for longer runs). another great hack for older houses is using goCoax MoCA 2.5 Adapter to run 2.5G around the house via coax cables to your wifi access points.

Homelabbers, please look past twisted pair. 10 GBit is way past the point of diminishing returns, it's why your NICs are so easily overheating.

Fiber is affordable, and for short distances you can use direct attach copper cables. Basically two SFPs hardwired together. You can order a 3 meter 10 GBit DAC cable for like 20 bucks. And they can be had in lengths up to 10+ meters.

tangentially related but useful: A while back I vibed up a script that can bit bang i2c on an x520 to reprogram SFP modules without a dedicated flasher. Hopefully this helps save someone a few $$ if they need to reflash something.

https://github.com/dcmc/x520-sfp-flash

That's pretty nifty. Another affordable option I found was this "SFP Buddy" [0] for $50, which at least at the time seemed like it was about 10x less expensive than other market options. No affiliation, just bricked an ONT-on-a-stick once and had to figure out a way to reset it without breaking the bank.

[0]: https://oopselectronics.com/product/SFPB

Recommendations for 25Gbit next please!

Definitely DAC or fiber. There is a 25GBASE-T standard, but no actual products exist.

OP here -- yes indeed. I ever do a new series of posts on upgrading my network to anything faster, the first one will probably be titled something like "25Gb/s Ethernet: how much it costs to rip out your CAT-6A and replace it with fibre".

It's crazy to me to think that I was hoping to move my home network to 10GbE in the next few years, around 2006-2007... Twenty years after most home networking is still at the 2005 level of a 30€Netgear GS108

The future is here. https://www.balticnetworks.com/products/mikrotik-crs304-4x-1...

Wifi got insane upgrades over that time. Wifi 7 is usually faster than most ethernet setups now.

In throughput but not in latency, and especially not in variability

To calibrate the discussion, you can get 10GB/s Wifi 7 these days spending less than $200 on a router. No need to drill a single hole in your house/apartment.

Ethernet is dead for home usage. I wish companies gave a damn, but no, for the past 25 years we are stuck at 1GB/s. Only recently some laptops and motherboards started shipping with 2.5GB/s ethernet options.

> Ethernet is dead for home usage.

If you need internet for work related audio/video conferencing, and you share your screen, wired is the way to go. Over time you can tell which colleagues are on wireless and those that are wired in.

Perhaps you're making the case that wifi7 is as good or better than wired but I would argue that depends on your physical setup and possible interference issues.

Please tell me what your ISP is. I don't even have 300mb upload in the San Francisco Bay area.

lol, I have 40 megabit upload

You aren’t getting consistent 10gb out of wifi unless you’re sitting 2ft from the router and have nothing else on the network.

You couldn’t pay me to rip out my fiber and run strictly on wifi.

The correct solution to future proof has and probably always will be running some single mode fiber runs. The same cable would have taken you from 10mbit to 400gbit+.

The wireless standards you are using are ethernet my friend, ethernet is very alive :) and then there is backhaul, POE (30, 60, 90)

10gbps in wifi7 is great in theory but client hardware is normally 2 spacial streams, channel widths of 320 are impractical and cause me CCI even at home. Then a load of my stuff still uses 2.4. OT is a bit like that and isn't going to change. I have to share air time with my family other devicew, there are sometimes hidden nodes, DFS from the local airport.

500Mbps is more realistic.

I strongly approve of the naming convention. Reggie and Nigel are _excellent_ names.

why not use fiber directly and use whatever sfp for much cheaper without worry of heat

For a lot of people, because they already have copper in the walls.

You are correct that 10GBASE-T really shouldn't be the default choice, fiber and DAC both have advantages over it. But compatibility is important, and there are a lot of situations where 10GBASE-T is just more convenient.

>because they already have copper in the walls.

Makes a decent draw wire.

If the cabling was installed before the drywall, good chance it's stapled.

Thats hideous.

IIRC it's code :( Very silly IMO.

I think the code probably allows for conduit.

Even if it isn't stapled: Good chance that it has turns inside of walls, floors, and/or ceilings that are impossible to successfully pull new wire through without creating new access for someone to get their hands in there.

Residential low-voltage cable plants are almost never implemented in a way that makes upgrades simple.

DAC cables can get expensive, and nobody knows what to buy when it comes to fiber, unless you're running entire spools of the stuff inside buildings... OM3/OM4/OM5? Single mode/Multi mode? LC/SC? Regular people don't know this stuff...

> Regular people don't know this stuff...

Regular people also are not buying DACs.

If you are in the line of work where you need to know what SFP is and the difference between DAC and Optical, a quick "what's OM3 vs OM5 and when do I use either?" to your favorite LLM/Search engine will get you sorted.

> Regular people don't know this stuff...

Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7. So... yeah.

> ...OM3/OM4/OM5? Single mode/Multi mode? LC/SC?...

My answer is OM4, Multi-mode [0], LC. OM3, 4, and 5 will all work at 10gbit for any run you'd expect to make in most houses. I chose cable grade based on what was in stock at the local store. I chose connector type based on what fit into my NICs. I went with multi-mode because it was cheaper than single-mode and I wasn't going to be making multi-km runs.

[0] That's what the "M" in in the cable designation means.

Go with single mode only for new installs.

Biggest install cost is labour. The cable and optics are cheap now, and with the future (200Gbps+) being multiple wavelengths in parallel[1], we’ve pretty much hit the end of the road for MMF.

[1] https://www.tiafotc.org/ieee-802-3-ethernet-standards-update...

> Biggest install cost is labour.

Okay? If I had to run cabling through a wall, I'd make sure the guy sets it up so that I can use the cable he installs to pull new later. My time's free when I'm doing something that I don't mind doing, and I don't mind easy cable pulls.

> ...(200Gbps+)...

Don't you need 16x PCIe 4.0 for those guys? With everything other than workstation and server boards having exactly one 16x slot, you're "never" hooking that up to a gaming PC.

MMF cable is quite a bit more expensive than SMF. The cost savings used to be in optics, but that distinction has fallen away.

Everyone needs a hobby, so if you want to replace the cable later on nobody’s going to stop you.

There was a time when we couldn’t buy a PC that could saturate 1Gbps ethernet, and that time wasn’t that long ago. Your cabling plant will outlive any hardware you buy today.

> The cost savings used to be in optics, but that distinction has fallen away.

So, it has... and fairly recently, too. If only I'd decided to do my home buildout six years later than I did!

It makes me wonder if transceiver longevity or reliability have been compromised, but I suppose that's only a thing you find out after a decade or so.

You can get boards with pci-e 5.0 x8/x8, which might bottleneck your gpu enough to see on benchmarks, but wouldn't bottleneck your nic, if you have a pci-e 5 nic (which might actually be a 400Gbs nic, whoops)

Anyway, priorities. Nic in the cpu slot, gpu in the chipset slot :p

This is the correct answer, always single mode. It's been the most future proof to date, people just keep figuring out how to cram more and more wavelengths into it.

> Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7.

What are you talking about. It's right in the manual for some switches like the TP-Link TL-SX105 V4 [1]. It's not even an expensive or fancy one.

    Network Media (Cable)
    100BASE-TX: 2-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5 or above (maximum 100 m)
    1000BASE-T: 4-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5e or above (maximum 100 m)
    2.5GBASE-T: 4-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5e or above (maximum 100 m)
      5GBASE-T: 4-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5e or above (maximum 100 m)
     10GBASE-T: 4-pair UTP of Cat 6 (maximum 55 m) or STP of Cat 6, 6a, 7 (maximum 100 m)

If you're too lazy to read the manual you could probably ask chatgpt, gemini whatever. Or you could ask the guy from a store. A run of the mill store, not some crazy hobbyist store.

In the worst case you'll buy some overboard Cat 7 cable, but at least things are simple unlike with fiber optics last time I've asked [2]. With cable all you need to know is the speed. You don't have to ask yourself what kind of module you have or maybe you don't even have one. All you need to know is the speed and perhaps the length although I think only "the 1%" will need more than 55 meters :-)

[1]: https://static.tp-link.com/upload/manual/2025/202501/2025012...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901136

   Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7.

> What are you talking about. ... If you're too lazy to read the [rare] manual [that contains advice on the topic] you could probably ask chatgpt, gemini whatever. Or you could ask the guy from a store. A run of the mill store, not some crazy hobbyist store.

I can query Google, an LLM, or a run of the mill cancer doctor for information on how to treat my stage 1 melanoma. That I can learn how to treat stage 1 melanoma doesn't mean that I know how to treat stage 1 melanoma.

> [Fiber optics are so complicated.] [With copper, all] you need to know is the speed and perhaps the length although I think only "the 1%" will need more than 55 meters :-)

For a 55 meter run, all you need to know is "Buy the cheapest multimode two-strand fiber your vendor has in stock. It's going to have LC ends, so get LC multimode optics.". You don't even have to worry about the speed of the transceivers to use this advice.

As an aside: Wow. That's [0] pricey for a dumbswitch that you also can't ever switch over to fiber. You can get a managed switch with four 10gbit cages, five 1gbit cages, and one 1gbit port for fifty bucks less [1], or a (physically much smaller) managed switch with four 10gbit cages and one 1gbit port for about the same price as that five-port TP-Link dumbswitch. [2]

TP-Link is absolutely raking in the dough on that unit.

[0] <https://www.newegg.com/tp-link-tl-sx105/p/0XP-001U-007G7> (apparent MSRP of 280->300 USD)

[1] <https://www.newegg.com/p/0XP-002R-000Y8?Item=9SIAEFKHB37914> (MSRP 200 USD)

[2] <https://www.newegg.com/p/0XP-002R-00108?Item=9SIB7VEJJD1334> (MSRP 150 USD)

The difference between cat5 and cat 6 for installation is quite marked. well it used to be, it might have improved recently.

Because 6 has the plastic separator its much more of a bastard to pull through things. I imagine that 7 is also a dick in that regard because the shielding stops it from bending as readily.

I gotta say this is the kind of stuff that LLMs make trivial to answer these days.

For connecting via say a Macbook Pro, there used to not be Thunderbolt 4 SFP+ interfaces. So, you were pretty limited to some ethernet SFP+ module that you hope would actually work.

Also personally, if you can get away with a copper DAC, I would rather use that instead of fiber because you don't need any special modules.

Access points, for example, expect PoE.

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