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I’ve upgraded to a mostly 10Gbit network at an unreasonable expense and think it’s wild that we consider 25G to be “extreme”. Personal computers came standard

I’ve upgraded to a mostly 10Gbit network at an unreasonable expense and think it’s wild that we consider 25G to be “extreme”. Personal computers came standard with 1Gb interfaces in the early 00’s. What other I/O standard has made zero progress in 20 years?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tracker1 2y ago
2.5G is pretty common on new hardware, 10G is relatively common on high-end prosumer hardware. So not exactly zero progress. I think a lot of it is down to the realities that most people are only really interacting with the internet at home, and for the most part, speeds over 1gb outside data centers was pretty rare. So very little need to upgrade. No mass movement to upgrade, means fewer component sales, lower production means economies of scale don't apply. Meaning you're stuck in relatively early adopter territory for a while. I upgraded my home lan as well last year, my main switch is now 10gb copper, my desktop and nas are the only devices with 10g nics, a few others are 2.5, and my secondary switches are all 2.5g to save money.
- gorkish 2y ago
  2.5G nics are 10gbit capable nbaseT transceivers that ship with 5gb and 10gb rates disabled to create lower end skus. It's a sick joke. The standard should have not permitted disabling the faster rates. Your average consumer cant really do much with networked data at home because the vendors are not shipping network interfaces that are useful for anything. I can have a laptop with 10/20/40gb USB ports but they can only be bothered to put a 1gbe port on it? Get real.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>Personal computers came standard with 1Gb interfaces in the early 00’s. Standard? Definitely not. Only high end prosumer gear came with gigabit as standard in the early 00's. The vast majority of affordable consumer gear still had 10/100 Fast Ethernet well into late 00's and I even saw new laptops with it even early 2010's(!).
szszrk 2y ago
Is that really a zero progress? It's not insane, but not a zero. You just said you are on 10Gbit now, right? :) 1G has wide adoption, runs on any cheap 5e cable and has low power draw. 10G may or may not run on same cables and has 4-7x the power consumption. That means more heat, more bills, stiffer cables that are harder to manage and so on. I dropped 10G/2.5G attempts at home after realizing that it will mean way to much heat in a TV cabinet somewhere. A lot of devices don't need anything faster either. If you run, for instance, monitoring setup with POE cameras, you may even use 100Mbit as it's sufficient AND some end devices will have just that (and to my surprise there are still plenty of 100Mbit devices being sold). A lot of people don't realize how many TV's still use 100Mbit. Mine does, yet it can play any 4k video I found. And it's still way above what is actually needed. A 20GB/hour video file is way to big to be reliably played with a lot of capable but slightly older smart devices, tv boxes and so on, and that is HALF of what 100Mbit can provide. Also - wireless. It's not exactly obvious to have decent wifi coverage at a home. Often it requires effort to be done right. So even when on 25G it won't matter that much if perceived performance suffers because of laptop <-> wireless access point setup. Then there is storage - getting 50-100MB/s performance is achievable using one cheap 3.5" drive. But if you need some bigger storage, redundancy, or better performance, you need a fairly large investment. It's not always needed and not always justified. 2.5G is showing up more and more, it's not a huge jump, but unlike 10G, it does show up in consumer devices randomly - SFF PCs, stock ISP routers. And it seems to have much less power draw as well. So 10G is present where it was most desired - for trunk connections to ISP/between major elements like main switch and NAS; where people work on large volumes of video and so on. And obvious in commercial/enterprise setups. But it's not worth going "let's slap 25G on all ports for this consumer device".
- gorkish 2y ago
  10GBase-T has high power draw because the original ICs that implemented it were old; modern nbaset transceivers consume much less power at 10gbit than they used to. The problem is mitigated to a great degree by economies of scale and being able to make new transciever ICs with new process nodes has good benefit. Unfortunately manufactures seem to be content to stall at the existing 2.5gbit skus, so there is not much incentive to produce power efficient 10gbase-t products; those markets are already served by SFP+ direct attach. For applications where power is actually a concern and bandwidth needs are not high, you can always simply run a lower rate. It's not necessary to completely kill the higher rates in hardware.
justinclift 2y ago
Probably RFC 2549? https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tracker1 2y ago

2.5G is pretty common on new hardware, 10G is relatively common on high-end prosumer hardware. So not exactly zero progress. I think a lot of it is down to the realities that most people are only really interacting with the internet at home, and for the most part, speeds over 1gb outside data centers was pretty rare. So very little need to upgrade. No mass movement to upgrade, means fewer component sales, lower production means economies of scale don't apply. Meaning you're stuck in relatively early adopter territory for a while. I upgraded my home lan as well last year, my main switch is now 10gb copper, my desktop and nas are the only devices with 10g nics, a few others are 2.5, and my secondary switches are all 2.5g to save money.

gorkish 2y ago
2.5G nics are 10gbit capable nbaseT transceivers that ship with 5gb and 10gb rates disabled to create lower end skus. It's a sick joke. The standard should have not permitted disabling the faster rates. Your average consumer cant really do much with networked data at home because the vendors are not shipping network interfaces that are useful for anything. I can have a laptop with 10/20/40gb USB ports but they can only be bothered to put a 1gbe port on it? Get real.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>Personal computers came standard with 1Gb interfaces in the early 00’s. Standard? Definitely not. Only high end prosumer gear came with gigabit as standard in the early 00's. The vast majority of affordable consumer gear still had 10/100 Fast Ethernet well into late 00's and I even saw new laptops with it even early 2010's(!).

szszrk 2y ago

Is that really a zero progress? It's not insane, but not a zero. You just said you are on 10Gbit now, right? :) 1G has wide adoption, runs on any cheap 5e cable and has low power draw. 10G may or may not run on same cables and has 4-7x the power consumption. That means more heat, more bills, stiffer cables that are harder to manage and so on. I dropped 10G/2.5G attempts at home after realizing that it will mean way to much heat in a TV cabinet somewhere. A lot of devices don't need anything faster either. If you run, for instance, monitoring setup with POE cameras, you may even use 100Mbit as it's sufficient AND some end devices will have just that (and to my surprise there are still plenty of 100Mbit devices being sold). A lot of people don't realize how many TV's still use 100Mbit. Mine does, yet it can play any 4k video I found. And it's still way above what is actually needed. A 20GB/hour video file is way to big to be reliably played with a lot of capable but slightly older smart devices, tv boxes and so on, and that is HALF of what 100Mbit can provide. Also - wireless. It's not exactly obvious to have decent wifi coverage at a home. Often it requires effort to be done right. So even when on 25G it won't matter that much if perceived performance suffers because of laptop <-> wireless access point setup. Then there is storage - getting 50-100MB/s performance is achievable using one cheap 3.5" drive. But if you need some bigger storage, redundancy, or better performance, you need a fairly large investment. It's not always needed and not always justified. 2.5G is showing up more and more, it's not a huge jump, but unlike 10G, it does show up in consumer devices randomly - SFF PCs, stock ISP routers. And it seems to have much less power draw as well. So 10G is present where it was most desired - for trunk connections to ISP/between major elements like main switch and NAS; where people work on large volumes of video and so on. And obvious in commercial/enterprise setups. But it's not worth going "let's slap 25G on all ports for this consumer device".

gorkish 2y ago
10GBase-T has high power draw because the original ICs that implemented it were old; modern nbaset transceivers consume much less power at 10gbit than they used to. The problem is mitigated to a great degree by economies of scale and being able to make new transciever ICs with new process nodes has good benefit. Unfortunately manufactures seem to be content to stall at the existing 2.5gbit skus, so there is not much incentive to produce power efficient 10gbase-t products; those markets are already served by SFP+ direct attach. For applications where power is actually a concern and bandwidth needs are not high, you can always simply run a lower rate. It's not necessary to completely kill the higher rates in hardware.

justinclift 2y ago

Probably RFC 2549? https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549