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It's wild that 1gbit LAN has been "standard" for so long that the internet caught up. Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers

It's wild that 1gbit LAN has been "standard" for so long that the internet caught up. Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers on USB, HDMI, Displayport, pretty much any external port except for ethernet, and twice that many on the PCIe backbone. But 10Gbit ethernet is still priced like it's made from unicorn blood.

nijave 2y ago
2.5Gbps is becoming pretty common and fairly affordable, though My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet. When I was looking to upgrade at home, I had to get expensive PoE+ injectors and splitters to power the switch in the closet (where there's no outlet) and 10Gbps SFP+ transceivers are like $10 for fiber or $40 for Ethernet. The Ethernet transceivers hit like 40-50C
- akira2501 2y ago
  Ironically.. 2.5 Gbps is created by taking a 10GBASE-T module and effectively underclocking it. I wonder if "automatic speed selection" is around the corner with modules that automatically connect at 100Mbps to 10Gbps based on available cable quality.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    My 10G modules automatically drop down to 2.5G or 1G if the cable is not good enough. There's also 5G, but I have never seen it work better than 2.5G.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      Oh man. I've been off the IT floor for too long. Time to change my rhetoric, ya'll have been around the corner for a while. Aging has it's upsides and downsides I guess.
    - chgs 2y ago
      I don’t think my 10g coppers will drop to 10m. 100m sure, but 10m rings a bell.
- cyberax 2y ago
  40-50C? What is the brand? Mine were over 90C, resulting in thermal shutdowns. I had to add an improvised heat exchanger to lower it down to ~70C: https://pics.archie.alex.net/share/U0G1yiWzShqOGXulwe1AetDjRdfBOHilPBPNeRYQgcaWOtFOOXWrZ--Rht8WuKeLQkE https://pics.archie.alex.net/share/U0G1yiWzShqOGXulwe1AetDjR...
  - nijave 2y ago
    I think 10GTek. However there were only 2 of them in the uplink ports on a 24x1Gbps switch in a server cabinet with decent airflow. They might have been getting up to 60C but I don't think they were hitting as high as you were saying. I've since replaced with a 8x10Gbps Hasivo switch so I can't check anymore.
- crote 2y ago
  The main issue is switches, really. 5Gbps USB NICs are available for $30 on Amazon, or $20 on AliExpress. 10Gbps NICS are $60, so not exactly crazy expensive either. But switches haven't really kept up. A simple unmanaged 5-port or 8-port 2.5GigE isn't too bad, but anything beyond that gets tricky. 5GigE switches don't seem to exist, and you're already paying $500 for a budget-brand 10GigE switch with basic VLAN support. You want PoE? Forget it. The irony is that at 10Gbps fiber suddenly becomes quite attractive. A brand-new SFP+ NIC can be found for $30, with DACs only $5 (per side) and transceivers $30 or so. You can get an actually-decent switch from Mikrotik for less than $300. Heck, you can even get brand-new dualport SFP28 NICs for $100, or as little as $25 on Ebay! Switch-wise you can get 16 ports of 25Gbps out of a $800 Mikrotik switch: not exactly cheap, but definitely within range for a very enthusiastic homelabber. The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive, and you can't exactly use it to power access points either.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive What do you mean by that? My home isnt wired for ethernet. I can buy 30m of CAT6 cable for £7, or 30m of fibre for £17. For a home use, that's a decent amount of cable, and even spending £100 on cabling will likely run cables to even the biggest of houses.
    - hakfoo 2y ago
      Isn't the expensive part more the assembly aspect? For Cat 6 the plugs and keystone jacks add up to a few dollars per port, and the crimper is like $20. I understand building your own fibre cables-- if you don't want to thread them through walls without the heads pre-attached, for example-- involves more sophisticated glass-fusion tools that are fairly expensive. A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet. If you decide you only need 50 meters, that reduces both power and cable requirements by a lot. Did we decide to ignore the easy solution in favor of stagnation?
  - nijave 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you're saying. The cable length is largely fixed/determined by the building you're running cable in. I'd rather spend an extra $100 on cable than start ripping open walls/floors/ceilings to get a slightly more optimal run length. If it's new construction or you already have everything ripped open it's less of an issue.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      I'm not saying 10gig itself should have been range-limited. I'm saying if the reason it was expensive was cable limits and transmit power, both of those can be solved by cutting the range. And if cutting the range could have given us cheap fast connections 15 years ago we should have made it a variant. It could have become the default network port, and anyone that wanted full distance could have bought a card for it. Instead we waited and waited before making slower versions of 10gig, and those are still very slow to roll out. Also 2.5gig and 5gig seem especially consumer-oriented, so for those users a cheap but half range 10gig would be all upside. And 40gig can't reach 100m on any version of copper, so it's not like 100m is a sacred requirement.
jsheard 2y ago
Those very fast consumer interconnects are distinguished from ethernet by very limited cable lengths though, none of them are going to push 10gbps over tens of meters nevermind a hundred. DisplayPort is up to 80gbps now but in that mode it can barely even cross 1.5m of heavily shielded copper before the signal dies. In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth, but I think the standards bodies don't trust consumers with bend radiuses and dust management so instead we keep inventing new ways to torture copper wires.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Sure you need fiber for long runs at ultra bandwidth, but short runs are common and fiber is not a good reason for DAC to be expensive. Not within an order of magnitude of where it is.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    These days, passive cables that support ultra bandwidth are down to like .5 meters. For anything that wants 10Gbps lanes or less, copper is fine. For ultra bandwidth, going fiber-only is a tempting idea.
- crote 2y ago
  > In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth We are already doing this. USB-C is explicitly designed to allow for cables with active electronics, including conversion to & from fiber. You could just buy an optical USB-C cable off Amazon, if you wanted to.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    When you make the cable do the conversion, you go from two expensive transceivers to six expensive transceivers. And if the cable breaks you need to throw out four of them. It's a poor replacement for direct fiber use.
michaelt 2y ago
Agree that a widespread faster ethernet is long overdue. But bear in mind, standards like USB4 only support very short cables. It's impressive that USB4 can offer 40 Gbps - but it can only do so on 1m cables. On the other hand, 10 gigabit ethernet claims to go 100m on CAT6A.
- crote 2y ago
  USB4 does support longer distances, but those cables need active electronics to guarantee signal integrity. That's how you end up with Apple's $160 3-meter cable.
  - chgs 2y ago
    A 3m 100g dac is 1/3 the price
Aurornis 2y ago
> Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers on USB, HDMI, Displayport, pretty much any external port except for ethernet, and twice that many on the PCIe backbone. But 10Gbit ethernet is still priced like it's made from unicorn blood. You really can’t think of any major difference between 10G Ethernet and all of those other standards that might be responsible for the price difference? Look at the supported lengths and cables. 10G Ethernet over copper can go an order of magnitude farther over relatively generic cables. Your USB-C or HDMI connections cannot go nearly as far and require significantly more tightly controlled cables and shielding. That’s the difference. It’s not easy to accomplish what they did with 10G Ethernet over copper. They used a long list of tricks to squeeze every possible dB of SNR out of those cables. You pay for it with extremely complex transceivers that require significant die area and a laundry list of complex algorithms.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  There was a time when FFE, DFE, CTLE, and FEC could reasonably be considered an extremely complex bag of tricks by the standards of the competition. That time passed many years ago. They've been table stakes for a while in every other serial standard. Wifi is beating ethernet at the low end, ffs, and you can't tell me that air is a kinder channel. A low-end PC will ship with a dozen transceivers implementing all of these tricks sitting idle, while it'll be lucky to have a single 2.5Gbe port and you'll have to pay extra for the privilege. No matter, eventually USB4NET will work out of the box. The USB-IF is a clown show and they have tripped over their shoelaces every step of the way, but consumer Ethernet hasn't moved in 20 years so this horse race still has a clear favorite, lol.
- reshlo 2y ago
  You explained why 10G Ethernet cables are expensive, but why should it be so expensive to put a 10G-capable port on the computer compared to the other ports?
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    Did you completely misunderstand OP? The 10G Ethernet cables are not expensive. In a pinch, even your Cat 5e cable is capable of 10G Ethernet albeit at a shorter distance than Cat 6 cable. Even then, it can be at least a dozen times longer than a similar USB or HDMI or DisplayPort cable.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
It passed it! Here there are offers up to 3gbit residential (Vancouver). I had 1.5 bit for a while. Downgraded to 1gbit because while I love fast internet, right now nobody in the home uses it enough to affect 1gbit speed
Dalewyn 2y ago
There is an argument to be made that gigabit ethernet is "good enough" for Joe Average. Gigabit ethernet is ~100MB/s transfer speed over copper wire or ~30MB/s over wireless accounting for overhead and degradation. That is more than fast enough for most people. 10gbit is seemingly made from unicorn blood and 2.5gbit is seeing limited adoption because there simply isn't demand for them outside of enterprise who have lots of unicorn blood in their banks.

nijave 2y ago

2.5Gbps is becoming pretty common and fairly affordable, though My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet. When I was looking to upgrade at home, I had to get expensive PoE+ injectors and splitters to power the switch in the closet (where there's no outlet) and 10Gbps SFP+ transceivers are like $10 for fiber or $40 for Ethernet. The Ethernet transceivers hit like 40-50C

akira2501 2y ago
Ironically.. 2.5 Gbps is created by taking a 10GBASE-T module and effectively underclocking it. I wonder if "automatic speed selection" is around the corner with modules that automatically connect at 100Mbps to 10Gbps based on available cable quality.
- cyberax 2y ago
  My 10G modules automatically drop down to 2.5G or 1G if the cable is not good enough. There's also 5G, but I have never seen it work better than 2.5G.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Oh man. I've been off the IT floor for too long. Time to change my rhetoric, ya'll have been around the corner for a while. Aging has it's upsides and downsides I guess.
  - chgs 2y ago
    I don’t think my 10g coppers will drop to 10m. 100m sure, but 10m rings a bell.
cyberax 2y ago
40-50C? What is the brand? Mine were over 90C, resulting in thermal shutdowns. I had to add an improvised heat exchanger to lower it down to ~70C: https://pics.archie.alex.net/share/U0G1yiWzShqOGXulwe1AetDjRdfBOHilPBPNeRYQgcaWOtFOOXWrZ--Rht8WuKeLQkE https://pics.archie.alex.net/share/U0G1yiWzShqOGXulwe1AetDjR...
- nijave 2y ago
  I think 10GTek. However there were only 2 of them in the uplink ports on a 24x1Gbps switch in a server cabinet with decent airflow. They might have been getting up to 60C but I don't think they were hitting as high as you were saying. I've since replaced with a 8x10Gbps Hasivo switch so I can't check anymore.
crote 2y ago
The main issue is switches, really. 5Gbps USB NICs are available for $30 on Amazon, or $20 on AliExpress. 10Gbps NICS are $60, so not exactly crazy expensive either. But switches haven't really kept up. A simple unmanaged 5-port or 8-port 2.5GigE isn't too bad, but anything beyond that gets tricky. 5GigE switches don't seem to exist, and you're already paying $500 for a budget-brand 10GigE switch with basic VLAN support. You want PoE? Forget it. The irony is that at 10Gbps fiber suddenly becomes quite attractive. A brand-new SFP+ NIC can be found for $30, with DACs only $5 (per side) and transceivers $30 or so. You can get an actually-decent switch from Mikrotik for less than $300. Heck, you can even get brand-new dualport SFP28 NICs for $100, or as little as $25 on Ebay! Switch-wise you can get 16 ports of 25Gbps out of a $800 Mikrotik switch: not exactly cheap, but definitely within range for a very enthusiastic homelabber. The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive, and you can't exactly use it to power access points either.
- maccard 2y ago
  > The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive What do you mean by that? My home isnt wired for ethernet. I can buy 30m of CAT6 cable for £7, or 30m of fibre for £17. For a home use, that's a decent amount of cable, and even spending £100 on cabling will likely run cables to even the biggest of houses.
  - hakfoo 2y ago
    Isn't the expensive part more the assembly aspect? For Cat 6 the plugs and keystone jacks add up to a few dollars per port, and the crimper is like $20. I understand building your own fibre cables-- if you don't want to thread them through walls without the heads pre-attached, for example-- involves more sophisticated glass-fusion tools that are fairly expensive. A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
Dylan16807 2y ago
> My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet. If you decide you only need 50 meters, that reduces both power and cable requirements by a lot. Did we decide to ignore the easy solution in favor of stagnation?
- nijave 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying. The cable length is largely fixed/determined by the building you're running cable in. I'd rather spend an extra $100 on cable than start ripping open walls/floors/ceilings to get a slightly more optimal run length. If it's new construction or you already have everything ripped open it's less of an issue.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    I'm not saying 10gig itself should have been range-limited. I'm saying if the reason it was expensive was cable limits and transmit power, both of those can be solved by cutting the range. And if cutting the range could have given us cheap fast connections 15 years ago we should have made it a variant. It could have become the default network port, and anyone that wanted full distance could have bought a card for it. Instead we waited and waited before making slower versions of 10gig, and those are still very slow to roll out. Also 2.5gig and 5gig seem especially consumer-oriented, so for those users a cheap but half range 10gig would be all upside. And 40gig can't reach 100m on any version of copper, so it's not like 100m is a sacred requirement.

jsheard 2y ago

Those very fast consumer interconnects are distinguished from ethernet by very limited cable lengths though, none of them are going to push 10gbps over tens of meters nevermind a hundred. DisplayPort is up to 80gbps now but in that mode it can barely even cross 1.5m of heavily shielded copper before the signal dies. In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth, but I think the standards bodies don't trust consumers with bend radiuses and dust management so instead we keep inventing new ways to torture copper wires.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
Sure you need fiber for long runs at ultra bandwidth, but short runs are common and fiber is not a good reason for DAC to be expensive. Not within an order of magnitude of where it is.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  These days, passive cables that support ultra bandwidth are down to like .5 meters. For anything that wants 10Gbps lanes or less, copper is fine. For ultra bandwidth, going fiber-only is a tempting idea.
crote 2y ago
> In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth We are already doing this. USB-C is explicitly designed to allow for cables with active electronics, including conversion to & from fiber. You could just buy an optical USB-C cable off Amazon, if you wanted to.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  When you make the cable do the conversion, you go from two expensive transceivers to six expensive transceivers. And if the cable breaks you need to throw out four of them. It's a poor replacement for direct fiber use.

michaelt 2y ago

Agree that a widespread faster ethernet is long overdue. But bear in mind, standards like USB4 only support very short cables. It's impressive that USB4 can offer 40 Gbps - but it can only do so on 1m cables. On the other hand, 10 gigabit ethernet claims to go 100m on CAT6A.

crote 2y ago
USB4 does support longer distances, but those cables need active electronics to guarantee signal integrity. That's how you end up with Apple's $160 3-meter cable.
- chgs 2y ago
  A 3m 100g dac is 1/3 the price

Aurornis 2y ago

> Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers on USB, HDMI, Displayport, pretty much any external port except for ethernet, and twice that many on the PCIe backbone. But 10Gbit ethernet is still priced like it's made from unicorn blood. You really can’t think of any major difference between 10G Ethernet and all of those other standards that might be responsible for the price difference? Look at the supported lengths and cables. 10G Ethernet over copper can go an order of magnitude farther over relatively generic cables. Your USB-C or HDMI connections cannot go nearly as far and require significantly more tightly controlled cables and shielding. That’s the difference. It’s not easy to accomplish what they did with 10G Ethernet over copper. They used a long list of tricks to squeeze every possible dB of SNR out of those cables. You pay for it with extremely complex transceivers that require significant die area and a laundry list of complex algorithms.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
There was a time when FFE, DFE, CTLE, and FEC could reasonably be considered an extremely complex bag of tricks by the standards of the competition. That time passed many years ago. They've been table stakes for a while in every other serial standard. Wifi is beating ethernet at the low end, ffs, and you can't tell me that air is a kinder channel. A low-end PC will ship with a dozen transceivers implementing all of these tricks sitting idle, while it'll be lucky to have a single 2.5Gbe port and you'll have to pay extra for the privilege. No matter, eventually USB4NET will work out of the box. The USB-IF is a clown show and they have tripped over their shoelaces every step of the way, but consumer Ethernet hasn't moved in 20 years so this horse race still has a clear favorite, lol.
reshlo 2y ago
You explained why 10G Ethernet cables are expensive, but why should it be so expensive to put a 10G-capable port on the computer compared to the other ports?
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Did you completely misunderstand OP? The 10G Ethernet cables are not expensive. In a pinch, even your Cat 5e cable is capable of 10G Ethernet albeit at a shorter distance than Cat 6 cable. Even then, it can be at least a dozen times longer than a similar USB or HDMI or DisplayPort cable.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

It passed it! Here there are offers up to 3gbit residential (Vancouver). I had 1.5 bit for a while. Downgraded to 1gbit because while I love fast internet, right now nobody in the home uses it enough to affect 1gbit speed

Dalewyn 2y ago

There is an argument to be made that gigabit ethernet is "good enough" for Joe Average. Gigabit ethernet is ~100MB/s transfer speed over copper wire or ~30MB/s over wireless accounting for overhead and degradation. That is more than fast enough for most people. 10gbit is seemingly made from unicorn blood and 2.5gbit is seeing limited adoption because there simply isn't demand for them outside of enterprise who have lots of unicorn blood in their banks.