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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Too bad improvements in network technology haven't found their way to consumer level. It's probably related to the stagnant broadband speeds, last mile bandwidth improvements slowed to a crawl many years ago and concurrently device connectivity actually moved to a slower networking tech, wi-fi. Now people are happy to use wi-fi for home desktop computers since their last mile net connection is so slow anyway.

It's 10 years since motherboard integrated 1G became commonplace in regular PCs, same for 10G is nowhere in sight...

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10 gig still isn't even commonly available on server motherboards, because of power / space / cost. There also aren't many copper 10 gig top-of-rack switches, just the Cisco Nexus 3064T and Arista 7050T come to mind. Juniper doesn't even have one.

It's easier for a lot of places to use twinax with 10 gig SFP+ switches rather than going copper 10 gig. That is definitely not going to trickle down to the consumer level.

It will probably be another 1-2 years before 10 gig is ubiquitous at the server level, and another 2-3 years after that before it is commonly on consumer equipment. Or maybe it never will be, and things will go in another direction.

> There also aren't many copper 10 gig top-of-rack switches, just the Cisco Nexus 3064T and Arista 7050T come to mind. Juniper doesn't even have one.

I might be missing your definition of tor. The juniper QFX5100 series has the 48T which does 48x 10GBASE-T plus 6x QSFP. the 5100-96S does 96x SFP+ and 8x QSFP. There are plenty of other cheap merchant silicon platforms that look similar. Personlly Im happy with DAC on SFP+ ports.

Oh yeah, I always forget about the QFX series. Seems like that would do the job.

List prices are utter nonsense for switches, but the QFX does come in above the other two I mentioned. Perhaps because of its fibre-channely nature that no one (I hope) cares about.

QFX5100-48T: $24,000 Nexus 3064-T: $13,000 7050T-52: $20,000

Still, any of these would work if you get the right deal. I could see an advantage for 10g copper if I had mixed racks where not all of my hosts needed 10g on the server side, but that's a big premium to pay over 1g TOR if you aren't using lots of 10 gig ports.

For me, I just use copper on 1 gig racks and DAC on 10 gig racks. So far, so good.

Last mile speeds for end-users aren't that important, most networking interaction they require goes to the internet anyway. Internet providers in the USA trying to push 5Mbit to be classified as "broadband" should tell you enough... I'm used to full speed 100Mbit internet (actually 160, but my router only has a 100Mbit connection), but for average useage - the difference between 50 and 100Mbit is rarely noticeable - unless you download big files.

Once 4k or 8k streaming becomes more common, sure then you'd like to have full Gbit where max bitrate would be 340Mbit - but for even decent full-hd streaming - nobody needs more than 50Mbit (in real throughput that is).

Higher speed things are more important on servers that have to handle more and more connections, and the end of this horizontal expansion is not in sight. Everybody starts using the internet for more and more things, and this all has to end up on servers that have to handle connections from millions of clients.

10 gigabit over Cat6A cable is also power hungry and very tricky: It's approaching the limits of what you can do over that sort of cable. Plus the frequencies involved make the adapter design a lot more troublesome. I suppose we'll start seeing cheap 10 gig knockoff nics eventually, but it's not even everywhere in the datacenter, never mind the home.

yep. Fiber is the way to go when you need 10Gbit. I was looking in to doing my place with Cat6 or 6a. Not only is 6a incredibly thick (thus, more difficult to run and probably terminate) but you need special tools and knowledge just to make sure the wiring is correct and there are no RF issues going on. It becomes way more about RF crosstalk and science, and less about simple wire connectivity.

Maybe SR/LR is the right choice for home. In the DC/rack some sort of DAC is the way to go. DAC will save you like 5 watts per port over optics.

Here you are, motherboard integrated dual 10G from Supermicro [1]. Around £400. They should be commonplace this year I think, it is just starting.

[1] http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9S...

Yeah, they exist in a select few workstation class Xeon boards. Intel announced those (server-targeted) chips in 2012, they take time to show up even in this high end niche. As there haven't been any announcements about mass market parts, it would be a small miracle if they showed up this year.

So, a local ISP has recently released 10Gbit fiber to home (for a tiny subset of the City).

Would any consumers be able to use this, or would it only make sense with a commercial switch (probably for a shared connection for an apartment complex or similar?)?

What would I have to do at home to take advantage of it?

Yea, with the speed of SSDs increasing so quickly the speed at which a desktop computer can transfer a file and store it has greatly exceeded what gigabit can provide. At the SME level 10G is still too expensive to justify at this point for regular workstations.

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