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This technology isn't designed to compete with 10gbit in the datacenter. 10GBASE-T has very strict requirements that can't be met by most installed cable plant
by luma 10y ago
This technology isn't designed to compete with 10gbit in the datacenter. 10GBASE-T has very strict requirements that can't be met by most installed cable plants except for very short runs, and as a result is almost exclusively used within a single room/datacenter. The Netgear switch they call out near the beginning of the article hints towards the source of the problem: 802.11ac Wave 2 now allows for just over 2gbps of throughput for current-generation APs.
Access layer switches are generally already backhauled with 10gbit where necessary, and even if they aren't running a fiber pair into the IDF doesn't cost a lot. There is little call for 10gbit to the desktop for most fixed-station users. APs on the other hand are getting swamped and they are widely distributed and are almost universally connected into the access layer with cat5-class cabling. Existing Wave 2 devices on the market solve this by aggregating two cat5 cables but this isn't ideal and often times still requires running new cables.
The goal then is to provide a swap-out replacement for existing APs and switches over existing cable plants. Cisco, et al want there to be no friction to finally talking their customers into an upgrade for their existing gigabit switches, and Wave 2 provides a nice incentive to do so, but only if you can get that bandwidth to the APs when nobody is interested in running new cables across the entire building.
Hence, NBase-T.
- walrus01 10y agoAnecdotally, from the perspective of an ISP, I almost never see 10GBaseT. Even in the datacenter. I see a great deal of singlemode, and some special multimode cables for 100GbE intra-building links. And of course cat5e/cat6 for stuff like 1000BaseT top of rack switches to ordinary dedicated servers in colocation. If you tried to run cat6a or cat7 cable in some facilities here (or order your technicians to do it) you'd be laughed at and shamed by your peers for being wasteful of overhead cable tray space, and lacking the foresight to predict low cost 100GbE optical in a few years.
- mcpherrinm 10y agoI've mostly seen 10GbaseT from top-of-rack to the server. Sure, you could go twin-ax copper too, but if your servers have 10GbaseT as an option, no need to go to SFP+. That's great if you're doing rolling upgrades of networking gear ahead of server refreshes so you need to support 1GbaseT at the same time, too.
- luma 10y agoI work as a datacenter consultant and I can count on one finger the number of customers I've seen deploy 10GBASE-T at any scale (and they aren't a customer I would hold out as an example for how to do anything right). As others have mentioned, 10gbit is almost exclusively deployed using optics or direct-attach twinax. Your point about upcoming fiber technologies is well taken and I hadn't considered the situation in that light.