Although slowly, 2.5gbps ethernet is starting to land. I have a few devices in my house now with 2.5gbps interfaces, my hangup has been that I currently have a

Although slowly, 2.5gbps ethernet is starting to land. I have a few devices in my house now with 2.5gbps interfaces, my hangup has been that I currently have a commercial GbE switch that was moderately expensive and I'm not feeling the need to replace it with a 2.5gbps switch that will be quite expensive (and if I really wanted to I could get full speed on some ports with SFP). But not feeling the need, I think, kind of makes the point... WiFi has to continuously push to higher and higher speeds in large part because for various fundamental reasons WiFi is not able to deliver speed with consistency. Packet loss, jitter, contention, and periodic serious disruptions in connectivity are the norm for WiFi, and very high speeds offer more overhead to tolerate these problems. Unlike Ethernet, WiFi is also fundamentally half-duplex and contentious between multiple devices, so very high speeds and MIMO techniques (as well as beam steering and other more cutting-edge technology) are used to mitigate this. All of these enhancements are aimed towards allowing WiFi to consistently and reliably achieve 100mbps and more in practice - something which even the latest WiFi standards still struggle with in much of the "real world." By contrast, GbE can consistently deliver gigabit performance, full duplex, non-collision with only slight overhead, and a very high degree of consistency. Gigabit ethernet already allows saturation of most storage devices in consumer use, so from a practical perspective, there aren't many reasons anyone would want more--going to 2.5, 5, or 10GbE in a home network is not likely to allow you to actually do anything faster because at that volume of data you're probably reading from or writing to storage, and consumer storage devices cannot reach even gigabit speeds. Likewise there are few or no consumer devices capable of generating instantaneous/real-time data volumes over GbE, the ones that are are moving uncompressed video, e.g. HDMI at 10-20gbps, which is both beyond what "faster" ethernet specs currently readily available can do, and it's just something that few people seem to want - there aren't many situations where you're moving video over a distance longer than an HDMI cable and you aren't willing to compress it. I actually have an unusually demanding situation as I have a project that involves moving multiple high-rate IQ streams from large-bandwidth SDRs over the network. Even here, CPU and I/O issues on the sending devices are consistently a bigger problem for me than the actual network. There are SDRs with highly optimized network support that allow them to achieve real-time rates in the Gbps range, but they cost so much that owners of such devices aren't going to have a problem investing in commercial network equipment. It feels a bit lame to say that "GbE is fast enough," but for consumer cases I think this is largely true. The only thing I can see changing it is moving full-rate video around, but video streaming has already been captured for consumers by vendor-specific systems that use compression, and "works fine" within an ecosystem even over WiFi.