3 ms·
It's mostly about future-proofing. If I had renovated my house 20 years ago, the "best" copper cable I would have installed was cat5e, which will never get much
by fleventynine 3y ago
It's mostly about future-proofing. If I had renovated my house 20 years ago, the "best" copper cable I would have installed was cat5e, which will never get much beyond 2.5G. But if I had installed SMF instead (which was available at the time), it would be compatible with terabit networking hardware that is available today, and the petabit networking hardware that is likely to be available 20 years from now.
When the lifetime of cables in the walls is typically more than 40 years, it makes sense to avoid limited technologies like copper or multi-mode fiber.
- pathartl 3y agoBased on the general availability of 10gbit on consumer-priced hardware, I wonder if we'll actually get past 10gbit over the next 20 years. Hell, even 2.5 is only _just_ starting to pop up and usually results in only a couple ports on consumer switches/routers.
- fleventynine 3y agoI consider these consumer-priced switches: https://www.servethehome.com/mikrotik-crs504-4xq-in-a-4x-100gbe-switch-at-under-45w/ https://www.servethehome.com/mikrotik-crs504-4xq-in-a-4x-100... https://mikrotik.com/product/crs510_8xs_2xq_in https://mikrotik.com/product/crs510_8xs_2xq_in
- Firerouge 3y agoYour average consumer is not paying $700 for a switch/router
- fleventynine 3y agoNo, but they weren't spending $1000 on a gigabit switch in 2004 either. If you're serious enough about home networking to run cables through your walls, $700 for a switch is nothing compared to the labor cost.
- pathartl 3y agoYou'd be hard pressed to find a 25 gig NIC on a consumer motherboard. This wasn't really the case for gig hardware in 2004.