2 ms·

It's a fair question; I suspect most of the reason for the lag is that consumer internet connections rarely offer >1gbps, consumer LAN applications requiring >1

It's a fair question; I suspect most of the reason for the lag is that consumer internet connections rarely offer >1gbps, consumer LAN applications requiring >1gbps of traffic haven't emerged (for NAS/SAN, a directly connected USB 3 is probably the way to go for 10gbps transfer, which is what you're looking for here), and WiFi - how most people are connecting their consumer devices to the network - doesn't offer more than a gigabit of goodput in almost any consumer configuration. (e.g. 802.11ac with two spatial streams and 80MHz channels gets ~700mbps at MCS8) That said, the NBASE-T and MGBASE-T efforts did consolidate to produce a 802.3bz standard that can carry up to 2.5gbps on a Cat 5e line and 5gbps on Cat 6, and we are starting to see consumer and SMB switches, APs, and NICs that support bz. Moral of the story is wire for Cat 6 and look to upgrade to bz in the next year or so.

e12e 8y ago
I see how cat6 works for economics of scale; but when I last year looked to price 10gbs switches for a lan for a school (with a meagre budget) - I was surprised at how expensive second hand 10gps gear was. In the end we stayed with 1gbps even though we had some use-cases where 10gbps would make sense; mostly budget San/nas for video edit/backup. And to a lesser degree audio editing. I think the 1gbps Cisco switches were hand-me-downs from a university - but I saw no indication of reasonably priced 10gbps switches with minimal management (we didn't need "all" of Cisco ios - but minimal remote management and steady performance would be nice). We also threw some lan parties, so budget soho stuff that'd fall over easily wasn't really an option.
walrus01 8y ago
one of the major use cases for 802.3bz is high bandwidth WAPs, specifically things that can actually pull more than 1 Gbps of data... to actually achieve that with wifi standards usually requires: 1) dual, separate 2.4 and 5.x GHz radios 2) 3x3 MIMO 3) 802.11ac wave2 (1024QAM) 4) use of really wide channel sizes, even an 80 MHz wide 802.11ac channel won't get near 1 Gbps aggregate throughput, needs to be the ridiculous 160 MHz channel size in the 5.x GHz part 15 frequencies. 5) all of the above combined, or more than two radios in an AP such as expensive high density Xirrus or Ruckus WAPs which can have two or three separate 5.x GHz radios in one physical body.
- dweekly 8y ago
  Spot on...and it is going to be a while before a typical home has those needs or capabilities. Broader FTTH could change bz and ac wave 2 adoption curves as people end up annoyed that they are paying for a gigabit but not actually receiving it.

e12e 8y ago

I see how cat6 works for economics of scale; but when I last year looked to price 10gbs switches for a lan for a school (with a meagre budget) - I was surprised at how expensive second hand 10gps gear was. In the end we stayed with 1gbps even though we had some use-cases where 10gbps would make sense; mostly budget San/nas for video edit/backup. And to a lesser degree audio editing. I think the 1gbps Cisco switches were hand-me-downs from a university - but I saw no indication of reasonably priced 10gbps switches with minimal management (we didn't need "all" of Cisco ios - but minimal remote management and steady performance would be nice). We also threw some lan parties, so budget soho stuff that'd fall over easily wasn't really an option.

walrus01 8y ago

one of the major use cases for 802.3bz is high bandwidth WAPs, specifically things that can actually pull more than 1 Gbps of data... to actually achieve that with wifi standards usually requires: 1) dual, separate 2.4 and 5.x GHz radios 2) 3x3 MIMO 3) 802.11ac wave2 (1024QAM) 4) use of really wide channel sizes, even an 80 MHz wide 802.11ac channel won't get near 1 Gbps aggregate throughput, needs to be the ridiculous 160 MHz channel size in the 5.x GHz part 15 frequencies. 5) all of the above combined, or more than two radios in an AP such as expensive high density Xirrus or Ruckus WAPs which can have two or three separate 5.x GHz radios in one physical body.

dweekly 8y ago
Spot on...and it is going to be a while before a typical home has those needs or capabilities. Broader FTTH could change bz and ac wave 2 adoption curves as people end up annoyed that they are paying for a gigabit but not actually receiving it.