7 ms·
A disquisition into the sadly slovenly takeup of 10GBASE-T (2012)
- pabs3 5y agoIs it more likely that we'll all have fibre to our desktops than 10GB Ethernet?
- rektide 5y agoadoption is still pathetic. that we're just starting to see some very faint 2.5gbit adoption is, imo, pathetic. switches have been way too expensive.
- cogman10 5y agoYup, decade later and the market for 10G consumer switches is nearly non-existent. Everything is stuck at 1G for everything. Were I to guess, I'd say it's probably due to internet speeds in the US taking forever to get up to 1Gbps. There's little reason to push out consumer switches faster than 1Gbps when the inbound internet connection only goes up 100Mbps.
- zamadatix 5y agoI'd say it's between that and the vast majority of home devices switching to Wi-Fi anyways. To add a 3rd more minor reason: for the prosumers DACs/fiber is faster, cheaper, and uses less power. The only reason to go to 10GBASE-T is for cases with existing cabling where 2.5G/5G might make a lot more sense if you don't absolutely need 10G. For everything else go 10G/25G passive DAC or fiber.
- thfuran 5y agoPoE is pretty great too.
- mattsci2 5y ago10G also isn't compatible with most of the lower-CAT cabling that's already run in the walls. Most businesses aren't going to tear it all out to start over. 802.11ax can go >10gbps without needing any fixed infrastructure. 10GBASE-T is basically abandonware now, at least for consumer applications. For servers, fiber is even more scalable (25/50/100/400G), and about as easy to handle.
- zamadatix 5y agoYeah cabling is what will usually make 2.5G/5G make a lot more sense if you don't absolutely need the full bandwidth, those speeds give you options for >1G without needing to rip your cabling plant out. Not quite >10 Gbps on 802.11ax though - standards compliant gear has a max theoretical cap of 9.61 Gbps half duplex using 8 spatial streams and 2.4 Gbps half duplex if one end is any current client chip which is limited to 2 spatial streams. Realistic numbers a little lower, I can get ~2 Gbps goodput on an AX210 in the same room as the router on an empty 160 MHz channel. Still far more than any home consumer will need but it's a bit of a ways off of obsoleting wired 10 Gbps full duplex throughput, especially with the cost of 2 8x8 APs.
- Bilal_io 5y agoI agree with your guess. But we're starting to see more than 1gbps speeds, however, not everyone will subscribe to them. Xfinity sells 1.2gbps (used to be 1gbps) and 3gbps (used to be 2gbps) to homes, but the upload speeds are horrible. At&t with its fiber offerings just announced 5gbps speeds, but they're very expensive and have horrible practices that prevent you from using anything but their router.
- giantrobot 5y agoI've got AT&T's 1Gbps service and you can bypass their router. You just have to log into the web UI and set it up there. At least I was able to do it with mine.
- Bilal_io 5y agoThat's not true bypassing, you're still required to keep their router connected. There is another bypass method I used that allowed me to disconnect the router but it was hacky and difficult to execute. The main reason we try to bypass AT&T's router is because their NAT table is capped to accept 2048 entries and starts dropping sessions after it reaches the limit. This is why I stated that the web UI method you mentioned is not a true bypass.
- csdvrx 5y agoWhich method did you use?
- Bilal_io 5y agoI followed this guide: https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt The gist is that you'll have two ethernet ports dedicated to AT&T, one for the ONT, and one for the gateway router (which needs to have the gateway's mac address). The pfSense interfaces have to be setup a specific way. There is also a script that has to run while pfSense boots. Once it boots, you can pretty much turn off the gateway and put it away. The only time you'd need to reconnect it is if your ONT loses power. I hope that helps.
- conk 5y agoThere also just aren’t many home use cases for >1gbps networks.
- yuhong 5y agoWhat I also noticed is they made both 1Gbit and 2.5Gbit Ethernet compatible with Category 5 cables from the 1990s. Even the difference between Cat5 and Cat5e are quite minor.
- hinkley 5y agoI thought part of the draw of io_uring was that, at present, having one process saturate the network was challenging if not impossible. My read is that we are in a bubble where some of the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Systems don't have all of their teeth because, while none of the Fallacies are specifically about noisy neighbors, several of them are decidedly informed by them. If I can't outshout you on the network, then you can be forgiven for ignoring the consequences of network congestion. If we figure out how to saturate a 10GB link between two threads running on different machines, then there will suddenly be a lot of remakes of old lectures.
- PaulKeeble 5y agoI would quite happily upgrade to 10GBASE-T now on my home network but alas the prices are still a bit too much for a reasonable consumer upgrade. In general I am a bit disappointed with consumer network kit, we could do with some openWRT/DDWRT/Tomato Wifi 6E capable routers able to do CAKE QoS on gbit fibre. Rather than having to hack a raspberry pi 4 together with a consumer router as an access point for the wifi. What I want is 10GBASE-T and wifi 6E and the performance to route 1gbit/s with QoS and I would like it for something more like $200 or less. $250 for a couple of 2.5gbit/s ports on a switch is just not worth it.
- bombcar 5y agoI got a microtik 4 port 10Gb switch and some cheap eBay cards to go with the 10Gbe port on my thunderbolt dock - works well for VMs and NAS stuff. Everything else is gigabit or wifi.
- CharlesW 5y agoIf I go to Mikrotik's Switches section and filter by "10 Gigabit combo interface: 1 - 4", there's only one $600 product (CRS312-4C+8XG-RM). Is that the one you're using?
- wl 5y agoThe CRS305-1G-4S+IN goes from $125-$150.
- sbierwagen 5y agoThat's a SFP switch, not ethernet. That requires either SFP direct attach cables or fiber transceivers.
- wl 5y agoIt's an ethernet switch with one 1Gbase-T port and 4x SFP+ ports that can be any media you want the proper transceiver. Including 10Gbase-T if you really want it for some reason.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago2.5G and 5G Ethernet are relatively cheap. I recommend them for new installs. I had a 10GBASE-T network for a while but returned to 1G and haven’t really missed it. It only made a difference during sustained reads/writes from the NAS, and my workflow almost never gets blocked on that. The switches and even Ethernet cards are power hungry and, unless you’re careful about switch selection, can be noisy. It just wasn’t worth it for me.
- jmnicolas 5y ago> 2.5G and 5G Ethernet are relatively cheap. It's not what I saw a bit more than a year ago when I changed my PC. A PCI express card was about 100€, about the same for a switch IIRC. It was about 500€ total for what I wanted to do, not worth it for me. The same hardware just Ethernet would have cost 5 or 6 times less!
- mlyle 5y agoMotherboard ports are rapidly becoming 2.5G. Adapter cards are $35. Switches about $100, depending upon what you want (getting to a managed switch with a lot of multigig ports is $400, but then you also tend to get PoE).
- jmnicolas 5y agoYou're right, I just checked on my Newegg equivalent and the local Amazon, one has PCI express cards for 35€ and the other has switches for 135€. Too bad the price for switches didn't go down, I have a hard time replacing 15€ switches for 135€ one just for faster transfers.
- HPsquared 5y agoCheap relative to 10G, I think.
- giantrobot 5y agoEvery time I've looked at upgrading to anything better than 1G Ethernet I can't justify the cost for the performance. Only my NAS can come close to saturating 1G but I rarely do that. Everything else in the house is more than happy with 1G and WiFi. I can't even get my WiFi 6 AP to get higher than about 500Mbps. Even if I wanted to upgrade it means replacing/upgrading my switch, router, and wiring in some cases. Going from Fast Ethernet to 1G was a no brainer and relatively inexpensive. For home use 10G is just too rich for my blood and won't get me much better actual network performance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nousermane 5y ago10GBASE-T has rather insane computational requirements: way more work per bit compared to predecessors. And 10x the bits. A pretty sizeable chunk of silicon is needed to do all of it. Hence high power consumption and price-tag. Even now, 15 years later. I guess standard's authors had a little bit too much faith in Moore's law. > LDPC FEC coding [2048,1723], with the parity check matrix construction based on a generalized Reed–Solomon [32,2,31] code over GF(26). > Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10GBASE-T#10GBASE-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10GBASE-T#10GBASE-T
- Spooky23 5y agoThere was a point in time circa 2014-16 where it would make sense in some datacenter scenarios. IIRC, top of rack switching and copper cable was cheaper than running fiber. Pretty sure that’s not true anymore, and with workloads moving to cloud, there’s probably no investment/scale.
- p_l 5y agoFor Tor, DAC was cheaper and more accessible. By 2016, the prices for 10Gbase-T and SFP+ switches was often close to the same, but SFP+ gave significant flexibility while 10Gbase-T meant you had to architect specifically for it. With SFP+ hardware we had coax DAC for cheap connections, precut cheap fiber with hardwired transceivers, and of course expensive transceivers for longer range connections on fiber, and we could mix and match. A 10Gbase-T device meant we had to build the entire segment for new type of wiring, ensuring right NICs and switches, because mixing 10Gbase-T with SFP+ always required expensive transceivers (they were also not trivial to acquire in 2016, speaking from experience trying to unfuck a purchase of Nexus 3k in 10Gbase-T variant when all servers had SFP+)
- Havoc 5y agoLooking at upgrading currently. Out of stock naturally. Upgrading clients to 10 ends up being quite expensive though so will have a mixed network. Plus some form factors don't have pcie slots available
- farmerstan 5y agoI upgraded to 10Gbps and for the most part the difference is practically imperceptible. For extremely large files it makes a large difference but otherwise I haven’t seen any difference at all. The network card is more expensive, it generates more heat and uses more electricity. I pretty much regret spending the money to upgrade.
- zionic 5y agoMy slowest SSD can push 4Gb/sec, it’s nice to run full-rate between machines.
- willis936 5y agoBut then if you had 10G you wouldn't be running full rate of the line so you'd need to switch to an array of SSDs but then you wouldn't be running full rate of the line so you'd need to switch to 100G ethernet but then you would be limited by CPU/RAM performance so you'd need to buy a xeon/epyc but then...
- lazide 5y agoOr just buy a modern NAS, which will already have multiple NVMe drives, arrays of SSDs, and a decent number of spinny drives. outside of low end consumer kit, saturating 10G is easy with any modern equipment. Even 5G is easy with my 8 year old NAS.
- bhouston 5y agoI upgraded my home to 10Gbps networking once I got 2Gbps fibre. I use fiber or DAC for most links unless I have to run through my existing Ethernet wiring. My primary switch is just a bunch of SPF+ ports into which I can stick a bunch of different type of connections in.
- archi42 5y agoOne decade later: 1 GbE means hosts are capped at 4 to 6 simultaneous 4k bluray streams, or loading a single 400GB game per hour. Still fast enough for most consumers. Outside of a home lab, only maybe a NAS and one or two hosts transferring lots of bulk data there need bigger pipes, and even then 10GbE usually means "throttled by disk speeds or computational protocol overhead" (e.g. Samba on a slow CPU; anecdata: I see about 200MB/s over SMB on my 10GbE fiber link, but invested zero time in optimizing things). And in professional environments I'd be surprised to see 10GBASE-T instead of an equivalent fiber (less power draw = less heat, also better scaling; only drawback might be when replacing legacy copper cabling).
- jayd16 5y agoAre games regularly in the 400GBs now?
- RamRodification 5y agoNo. Maybe 200. Usually less.
- rickosborne 5y agoLooking at the storage on my PS5, the largest game on it is the preload for "Horizon: Forbidden West" which goes live next Friday. It's 88GB. It's an open world RPG with several dozen hours of gameplay. "Returnal", about a year older and a much shorter game, is the next largest at 60 GB. Toward the bottom of the list are "Maneater" and "Life Is Strange: True Colors", both clocking in at about 15GB and as many hours of gameplay. Having said that, your net connect isn't going to help with games. I have Starlink, which generally sits in the 150-250Mbit range. That should have taken about an hour to download 88GB. It took 7. The CDNs for game delivery aren't exactly speedy. (And that's pretty common, in my experience. Even in my last place when I had gigabit fiber, I generally left the console downloading overnight.)
- fathyb 5y agoWorth noting PS5 games are compressed using Kraken and decompressed via an hardware decoder. Same games can be twice as big on PC or Xbox.
- fmajid 5y agoFiber SFP+ are much less energy-intensive, the cables are thinner and more manageable, and have longer distance as well as better reliability. It's time to bite the bullet and go optical.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y agoIt depends on what you are doing. For office/lab space, twisted-pair (Cat6 or better) is really compelling. You can wire an office/lab space and support both 1- and 10-Gigabit connection. That being said, it's a good idea to do one of two things: 1. Run some fiber to a centrally-located faceplate in each space, with MT-RJ jacks (or something else, like LC). 2. Run a conduit (an inner duct) to each office/lab space, with a pull tape, so that fiber can be easily pulled through in the future. I personally prefer #2, for reasons like this: We have a few buildings with fiber run into offices/labs, but the fiber run was multimode. That's fine if you want to connect to a switch in the floor or building network closet, but it's not going to be compatible with the inter-building fiber, which is all singlemode.
- fmajid 5y agoAnd don’t forget to pull a new pull-tape along with the new wiring :-)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- musicale 5y agoSo... Apple shipped a gigabit Ethernet desktop in 2000 and a gigabit Ethernet laptop in 2001. 20+ years later, laptops have 40Gb Thunderbolt and 10Gb USB, but Thunderbolt or USB to 10Gb Ethernet interfaces are still expensive, though 5Gb and 2.5Gb seem to be becoming cheaper and more common. And even a basic, unmanaged 5-port (e.g. TP-Link) 10G/5G/2.5Gb Ethernet switch is still something like $300.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mysterydip 5y agoI feel like the faster our computational capacities increase, the quicker we will consume them. Why make an app/service efficiently use 10Mbps if everyone has 1Gbps, for example?
- nine_k 5y agoBecause mobile. Also, in the cloud, you're often not given sustained 10 Gbps, because e.g. the box with your VM runs 32 guests and only has a 40 Gbps link.
- mysterydip 5y agoThat was an example, which remains so for the reasons you outlined. My point was, if we designed things to fit within smaller constraints than we actually have, we would be able to do more with the same resources. We wouldn't need 8GB to run two instances of an app if it was designed to fit in 2GB instead of 4.
- lazide 5y agoStill takes awhile to process 10TB over Gig, and it’s easy to end up with that quickly for everything from surveillance footage, 4K video, any sizable number of high resolution photos, etc.
- latchkey 5y agoJust a side note, even 1 gige switches in quantity are almost impossible to find right now due to supply issues.
- ksec 5y agoAs 5Gbps Ethernet is somehow only included in 10Gbps products. I wish as bare minimum that 2.5Gbps Ethernet to completely replace 1Gbps Ethernet. But with current chip supply issue it will be another few years before we see wide adoption. It is strange when some Nordic countries are already getting affordable 2.5 to 10Gbps Internet.