By the time 4TB+ SSDs get closer to the $500 mark, 10GbE should be affordable. I'm just guessing, but 2018 might be a good year to upgrade my servers and clients.
As Supercomputing back in November, 2.5G was talked about only in a data-center sense. When asked about 2.5G coming to consumer, everyone involved said 2.5G is purely a data-center play.
Are you sure about that? The next upcoming standard is the 25G for the data-center with better signaling compared to 10G. 2.5G and 5G should be the next step for home networks which are necessary because of the increasing wireless network speeds.
2.5G and 5G are for APs, not DC core, though there is some argument to be made for lower-end access. For AP purposes, it's purely so customers don't have to rip out a ton of CAT-5 and install CAT-6/6A in it's place.
Multi-radio 3+stream 802.11ac implementations want more than 1gbit already. It's been talked about in various whitepapers and other places around the web. IIRC even AT had an article or two on it.
Yeah, I remember those articles. They confirmed my suspicion that there's no such thing as 1 Gbps wireless connection in the real world. Maybe the next gen Macbook Pro will change that, then we'll talk.
Single client, sure. multi-client on the other hand is pushing over 500Mbps (peaks over 800Mbps) on a single 80MHz wide channel for a 3x3 radio. With the forthcoming 4x4 designs and 160MHz wide channels, it should go even higher, potentially breaking the 1gbit sustained barrier.
Oh, and that's on consumer gear. Demand for 2.5 and 5gbit is coming from the likes of Cisco and their clients and competition for the most part, for their enterprise APs - expect home to remain on 1gbit or move directly up to 10gbit.
Wave 2 AC can push up to 6.8Gbps with multiple clients connected. NBase-T cable tech allows companies to keep using Cat-5e and get up to 5Gbps connection to the AP.
At near range (1 metre), I'm getting up to 60MB/s from my mac mini using 5GHz AC through my Linksys EA6900. I was quite amazed at the speed, and how close to 1Gbps I can get from a single client using a standard consumer client and router.
I'm conflicted on the idea of 2.5G. On one hand, when even the slowest disk-based network storage is bottlenecked by 1G, we really need the tech to advance - 2.5G would give a lot of breathing room for 10G to evolve and migrate into the consumer space.
On the other hand, I almost see it like the migration to IPv6 from IPv4... We're in a mess with IPv4 because NAT gave us a "good enough" solution that delayed adoption of IPv6 substantially. I'd rather wait out this with 1G ports until 10G is affordable, than have consumer adoption of 2.5G and be stuck with it for years and years because it is "good enough".
Instead 1G ports are 'good enough' and we are going to be stuck with them for years. Heck, at work we use Cisco phones and all of them only have a 100M pass-through connection because it is 'good enough' for 'most people'.
100 Mbit is good enough for voice and even video streaming because it does not need more at all. But go ahead and do a backup of a 54 TB nas to its sister backup device over 1 Gb networking.... think of that. Now it costs me several days before the backup has completed even though my lan really is almost 120 Mb/s thats the absolute maximum you can get on your 1 Gbit lan
IEEE is still formalizing the standards for 2.5GbE and 5GbE. Once approved, you'll see more NICs and switches become available.
To those confused, the goal for both 2.5GbE and 5GbE does not revolve around data center, enterprise, or consumer markets. Instead, the goal is to enable the reuse of Category 5e and Category 6 cable plants, so that the speed upgrade does not require large capital investment in cabling to deploy. No one is likely to deploy 10GbE in existing office environments or homes if all new cabling has to be deployed whilst simultaneously also deploying new NICs and new switches.
Personally, I don't think we'll see anything widespread for 2.5GbE or 5GbE until the end of 2017 at the earliest. I sincerely hope that I'm wrong and things accelerate quickly.
Yeah, I had seen some stuff back about 9-12 months ago that was talking up 2.5/5GbE as something we'd likely see in 1H2016, but that of course didn't happen. Hopefully IEEE can get around to finally ratifying it so we can see gear.
10G could be adopted in a lot of office environments and pretty much all home environments. Cat5e is rated to 100m with 1GbE, but it is rated to 45m with 10GbE. Many people think you must have Cat6a, but that is absolutely not true. Cat 6 is rated to 55m with 10GbE. Of course the issue is, those are "clean installs", not worst case scenario installs. Figure a typical install you are looking at more like 20-25m + 5m on either end of stranded for Cat5e and still likely see full Cat5e speeds and Cat6 is likely to support more like 30-35m + 5m on either end of stranded. Which likely isn't enough for most office environments, but it certainly plenty for most home environments.
2.5GbE IIRC is going to support Cat5e to 100m and 5GbE is Cat6 to 100m (which also likely means Cat5e to 60-80m).
Unless 2.5/5GbE gets completely torpedoed, I really don't think we will see 10GbE moved to a consumer standard at any point, or at least not for 5+ years and possibly 10+. We are still at least 1 if not 2 node shrinks for 10GbE silicon to be reasonable in power consumption for something like a home router, cheap desktop switch or onboard laptop NIC. IIRC the newest 10GbE silicon is looking at ~4w a port and it really needs to be drive down to more like 2w a port for those uses, otherwise heat is a big issue in consumer gear (yes, your typical high end home router might use 20w of power under heavy load, it also has lots of passive cooling and runs very hot, now try adding in an extra 12-15w if a set of 5 10GbE ports are in use, you'd absolutely have to have active cooling or a MUCH larger chassis with a big heat sink).
Things are advancing fast, but frankly 95% of home users networking is limited to their internet connection, which even in more advance countries, the typical user doesn't have speeds above about 100-150Mbps. So 1GbE ports are just fine. Even with 1Gbps internet connections becoming more plentiful, they are probably less than 5% of deployment world wide (just taking in to account 1st world countries) and >1Gbps is probably less than 1%. For the users who do something other than connect to the internet with their networking, probably a good half don't really know or care about having something faster than 1Gbps, or are connecting wirelessly to their router and are limited to <1Gbps speeds because of that.
So you are talking a use case of maybe 2-4% of home users who need, want or care about >1Gbps networking speeds and maybe only 5-10% of businesses who need it outside of their core network. The gov't agency I work with, frankly we just need it on our big iron. Our workstations, 99.99% of employees are just fine with a 100Mbps connection. The big iron has plenty of 10/40GbE ports.
I really want it and could use it and I'd really like to see consumer gear deploy at least 2.5GbE in the next couple of years. However, I don't really NEED it. I have dual 1GbE links from my server, to my switch and then to my desktop and I am running Win 8.1 (about to be 10) on both machines so SMB Multichannel is fully up. I get 230-235MB/sec transfers between them easily, which is relatively close to maxing out my HDD arrays (a pair of Seagate 3TB drives in RAID0 in both machines, max performance is ~368MB/sec, but that is on the outer edge, they are ~45% utilized, so I am actually maxing out around ~290MB/sec right now for new writes, so a single 2.5GbE basically maxes my HDD array). SSDs are still very far away from bulk storage and sure, there will be some users who have a laptop with a 256+GB SSD and want a super fast transfer to whatever they are transferring from/too, but in most cases, it isn't going to be another SSD on a NAS or server or a huge pipe to the internet.
I am hoping when I am ready to move beyond my 6TB array, that I'll be able to go all solid state on it in a few years, but that is still at least 3-4 years away and I am likely to pay $1000+ to drop something like 6-8TB of SSD storage in each machine (but then I can also easily just add disks to expand storage as I need to, no worries about matching the storage, because I won't need RAID as the SSD performance is high enough).
2.5GbE is going to be needed for wireless at some point soon. That or dual 1GbE links. I am kind of surprised that 802.11ac features have rolled out as slowly as they have. 160MHz doesn't surprise me because of the expense, difficulty of it and the limited spectrum that involves. However, MU:MIMO has been a MUCH slower roll out than I expected. Intel just started supporting it with the 8265, but I am surprised that Apple didn't with the 6s. Hopefully the next one will and most routers won't, except "AC2600" routers.
In theory, with the right mix of clients, an AC2600 router in a good wireless environment with the clients fairly close to the router, probably could just about hit 1Gbps over wireless. With a 4:4 bridge, it absolutely could exceed 1Gbps. In my testing, bridging newer 802.11ac routers within a reasonable distance, say 10-20ft and maybe only 1 interior wall between them, you get about 70% wireless utilization. A good client these days seems to hit low to mid 60% utilization. That means a pair of 4:4 802.11ac routers bridged could hit roughly 1200Mbps, but would be limited by port speeds.
If 160MHz actually hits, a 4:4 802.11ac router to 160MHz capable MU:MIMO clients almost certainly could exceed 1Gbps over wireless, but would be limited by port speeds if all the traffic was over one port and headed in the same direction.
802.11ax is supposed to significantly speed up 802.11ac. It has a higher MCS/QAM coding than 802.11ac, is 160Mhz for 5GHz and somewhat higher spatial efficiency from some other stuff. It is a theoretical 1201Mbps per stream, once you figure error encoding overhead and the fact that you'll need REALLY good SNR to actually enable clean 1024-QAM it'll probably be a lot like 802.11ac where the first chipsets and routers are hitting more like 50% of those maximum speeds on a good connection, but given a few years you'll likely see closer to 70% on a good connection. That still means that early 2:2 clients are likely going to be hitting or exceeding 1Gbps actual over wireless and be limited by 1GbE. Down the road a few years and a good client is likely to be hitting more like 1.5-1.8Gbps over wireless on a good connection.
There may be something after 802.11ax, but that is a LOT of years away. Right now 802.11ax is likely going to be 3-5 years away from implementation for early equipment and 6-8 before it is mature. So following that, 2.5GbE probably could support almost all consumer use cases, easily, for a decade or more. For the few users who need more, there would be 5GbE, or trunked 2.5GbE.
Unlike the 10 or 20W numbers being quoted a few years ago for then current hardware, I really don't think 2 vs 4W per port is a major concern for initial home installation. For a typical 4/8 port home router/switch the higher power consumption isn't a major concern the way it would be on a giant enterprise switch with 80 or 160 ports. On the desktop PCs/NASes that would be the primary clients an extra 2W is borderline irrelevant.
For laptops on battery it would be a more serious problem; but high end consumer laptops are rapidly dropping wired ethernet support entirely making it a moot point. They're more common on $400 boxmart laptops; but those won't see anything faster than 10gbE until it gets baked into a chipset by Intel/AMD allowing them to offer it for 'free' again making it a moot point.
You'd be surprised. Also right now, GbE is running about .4-.7w per port and 10GbE is around 4.5w per port. I'd suspect that something like 2.5GbE is likely to be in the 1-2w range.
That means a power difference of about 2.5-3.5w per port. With your typical home router, that is 5 ports times 2.5-3.5w or 12.5-17.5w per router if all ports are in use running 10GbE. That roughly doubles or more the power consumption of the typical home router. If you look at most that are running in the 10-15w range, they have a LOT of cooling vents and some pretty big heat sinks internally. Frankly, ~30w in an enclosure as small as a typical home router and you have to have active cooling. That is an issue for most home routers.
So, yeah, the power difference is real and considerable and a concern. The power use itself isn't a big concern, but packaging and cooling concerns make it an issue.
No, on a desktop between .5w and 4.5w isn't a big deal. On a laptop on battery it is a big concern and even with a power adapter it can be. For some of the big laptops, not a big deal, but as an example, my HP Envy 4t runs about 25w at peak power consumption under load. That includes screen, Ivy Bridge processor, memory, motherboard, wifi, NIC, etc. That would be an increase of about 15% more heat that the laptop needs to dissipate and actually a little worse since 2-4w of that is the display, which isn't dissipated through the keyboard portion of the chasis.
Yes I agree there are limited use case beyond 1Gbps. But once Wi-Fi moves beyond 1Gbps actual speed aka 802.11ax, and NAS. I see these use case to grow beyond 10 - 20% general, and significantly higher in Office environment.
1Gbps is acceptable for now, but I really want 802.11ax to come with NBase-T 5Gbps Port. And since Router is always an easier upgrade, it would be nice if computer / PC today have early launch of NBase-T Port.
The 2.5Gbps speed is required now for AP/modems but by the time that is common many of us have moved passed the 2.5Gbps (so the upgrade is then 5Gbps in 2 to 3yrs time). Once the new standards are approved the AP/modems should be moving to support the 5Gbps standard and also be compatible with 2.5Gbps to work with poorer quality cable/connection (larger distances, bends, lower spec cable, poor connections etc). Why waste time and effort to create twice the number of new products and re-testing ? Go straight to 5Gbps for switches/router/AP/modems. PC's could have the option to support the 5 or 2.5Gbps specs if there is a major cost difference but I'd prefer them to support the higher spec if possible (the usual backwards compatibility). Wireless bandwidth is going over 2Gbps, internet with 1Gbps and soon to be higher, SSD's are >5Gbps (500MBps). The 2.5Gbps could have stood alone if it came >2yrs ago but we are now so close to using 5Gbps that 2.5 only gear is less valued.
It is true that the IEEE is still writing the standards for Ethernet 2.5 Gigabit and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over Cat-5/Cat-6 twisted pair – 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T.
For datacenter/WAN style connections there are upcoming essentially complete standards and there are a number of companies with working implementations already, e.g. 802.3by due 2016, optical fiber, twinax and backplane 25 Gigabit Ethernet and going forward there is 802.3bs due ~2017 which is 400 Gbit/s Ethernet over optical fiber using multiple 25G/50G lanes.
Agreed. Even just the power and cooling requirements for present-gen 10G equipment could be difficult for consumer setups to deal with. The next couple of generations of 10G chips are probably still going to be way out of normal consumer networking budgets. Of course, one elephant in the room is the expense of putting in Cat 6A everywhere. And the need for 10G simply isn't there.
There are plenty of instances where 1G can be a bottleneck for consumers (802.11ac access points, NAS). But it's hard to think of realistic consumer use cases for more than 2.5G and very hard to think of >5G use cases.
2.5G should be vastly easier to implement than 10G. It could come down close to the price of 1G gear relatively quickly once economies of scale kick in. And of course there's no new cabling requirements.
>But it's hard to think of realistic consumer use cases for more than 2.5G and very hard to think of >5G use cases.
With SSD prices dropping, I can easily imagine a NAS or home server with SSDs, which would be bottlenecked by 2.5 or 5Gbit. (The fastest SSDs right now are bottlenecked even by 10Gbit speeds.) Of course, if we assume that NASs/home servers are irrelevant for 99% of people (which might very well be the case) then it's all pretty niche anyway.
The problem with the pricing and adoption of 10G is that for the majority of home users which make up the bulk of the users, 1Gbit (125MB/sec ideal) is plenty. Video streaming requires a few MB/sec - even at 10MB sec - your average basic server can send out 5-8 simultaneous streams making 10Gbit unnecessary.
Yes, there are edge cases where particular people might need or want 10Gbit, but the pricing and availability reflects that.
"Using 10GBase-T, over SFP or other connectivity, allows for backwards compatibility in the home which is still an important feature."
No one will ever use 10GBase-T over SFP, as 10GBase-T is the copper, twisted-pair specification. I would suggest correcting this statement from "10GBase-T" to "10 Gigabit Ethernet" or "10GbE" to avoid confusion.
Do some digging around on ebay and you'll find $300-$400 24 port 10GbE layer 3(+) switches built on broadcom ASICs (ie Trident series) running FASTPATH OS. I'm not naming names because I don't want to cause a spike in demand for them.
Yes SFP+. I'm suggesting it as an alternative to base-T. Cheaper, more flexible and less power and transceivers are very inexpensive now. Unless you've got some environment where you want to use existing cabling, SFP+ is a much better option to me. Most people either want it in the datacenter/lab or in a home lab and in both places it's very easy to replace existing cabling.
Just installed Cat7a 22AWG cabling to every room in our home (longest run ~20m), price increase compared to Cat6a 24AWG cabling is negligible. Plugs are only Cat6a 10GbE capable though and would have to be switched out to enable 100GbE.
The MSI MicroATX board is the most interest buy, for me at least.
I've been really wanting to make a semi-mobile Twitch streaming PC/Server for console streaming, in a MicroATX case.
It'd use two 1-slot PCI-e capture cards and a single RX480 (due to AMD's superior OpenCL capabilities and x.264's ability to offload some of the encoding work to GPUs, and the relative affordability of this card given that this isn't meant as a gaming PC).
I'd have a Framemeister mounted onto the side panel, with a cutout for the DC barrel plug, and use a 6-pin from the PSU to a DC barrel plug adapter to actually power the Framemeister without an additional outlet. Game consoles could be plugged into the Framemeister and I could remote desktop into the computer at a friend's house to set up a high quality console gaming stream.
Having a 10Gb NIC allows me to feel a bit more secure on using a MicroATX form-factor without feeling iffy on the lack of a 5th PCI-e port available for a multi-port NIC.
The problem is 10ge switches costing $100 per port at least when gig switches cost around $2-3 per port. Not sure why consumers would jump to 10ge when they don't need the speed.
I upgraded my home network to 10GBe earlier this year. You can find dual-port 10GBase-T cards on the auction site for $150 or so. No switch, but perfectly capable of direct connection. I'm averaging 500 MB/s from my local SSD to my RAID-6 file server.
Unless you're severely slot-constrained, it doesn't make much sense to get it as part of the motherboard. Better to buy the Intel X540 cards. They maintain a very high resale value. (Just don't buy the Chinese knockoffs; they often fail quickly.)
I would suggest looking at Mellanox Cards, they offer superior latency at a similar price point, and if you are doing direct connections you could also do 40-56GbE if you're crazy like me ;)
I so t know how many people remember this, but in the days when Apple was pushing for higher wired networking speeds, they first made 100Mbs Ethernet standard on their machines, which immediately brought the cost down by almost 90%.
Later on, they did the same thing with 1Gbs Ethernet. I remember the cards costing about $750, and right after Apple standardized them, it dropped to $150. It dropped way down a little more than a year after that.
But Apple isn't interested in improving wired network speeds anymore with their push for wireless. It's disappointing.
20$ (used enterprise) 10G SFP+ cards via ebay, 229$ new switch from Mikrotik (CRS210-8G-2S+IN) new SFP+ transceivers and fiber patch cables from fiberstore (20$ for SFP+ and <5$ for 5 meter patch)
You can have a pair of 10G connected systems including all hardware (1 switch 2 cards, 4 SFP+ transceivers, 2 fiber patch cables) for under 400 US$ it doesn't have to be expensive do start with 10G Ethernet
actually, if you are OK with a used (and a bit noisy) switch, you can get a used quanta LB4M (plus 48 gig ports) from ebay for 100-150, sometimes including a pair of SFP+ transceivers. dropping it to under 300 for a pair of systems at 10Gig
The problem is that home consumers don't want to be bothered with SFP+ and fiberoptic cable. It's more expensive than copper cabling and is much less common amongst non-PC devices, like current gen gaming consoles, smart TVs, receivers, etc.
I'm sure you might be thinking why someone would connect a smart TV or game console via 10GbE when it can't utilize that speed, but usually if someone's going to bother getting new ethernet drops throughout the house, they usually do the entire network so they don't have to go back and make more ethernet drops later. It's more cost-effective and saves time in the long run this way.
You'd think that with there being more demand for RJ45 based 10GbE as opposed to SFP+ based 10GbE that RJ45 would be cheaper to set up (as it usually has been in the past) but for whatever reason it's not that way right now.
People I think will be more willing to adopt it if 10GbE via copper was as available and (relatively) affordable as 10GbE via fiber.
I'm still waiting for that Asus Switch with the two 10GBase-T port that seems to be vaporware. I don't want to have a switch with a Fan at home and I also don't need all ports to be 10GBit/s.
How about Thunderbolt 3 for 10GbE peer to peer networking at home? If working in the same room not more than 2 meter from each other devices with Thunderbolt 3 could potentially in theory be networked. Has anyone tried networking two laptops with Thunderbolt 3 to see if it works?
Funny thing is intel sold 10 t based gbe card for 75 dollar back then, now the same toy costs 240 dollar. Instead of prices going down the prices kept going up. Guess the greed of these companies has not changed at all. I am waiting for 10 Gb T-base network for years to hit normal prices. Because this hardware already should have hit much lower prices for at least 5 years, Even though the prices slowly coming down, i still think prices are kept high for no reason other than insane greed (period)
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nathanddrews - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
By the time 4TB+ SSDs get closer to the $500 mark, 10GbE should be affordable. I'm just guessing, but 2018 might be a good year to upgrade my servers and clients.jjj - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Was kinda hoping for 2.5G to gain broader adoption. 10G at sane prices seems unlikely anytime soon.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
As Supercomputing back in November, 2.5G was talked about only in a data-center sense. When asked about 2.5G coming to consumer, everyone involved said 2.5G is purely a data-center play.TeXWiller - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Are you sure about that? The next upcoming standard is the 25G for the data-center with better signaling compared to 10G. 2.5G and 5G should be the next step for home networks which are necessary because of the increasing wireless network speeds.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
2.5G and 5G are for APs, not DC core, though there is some argument to be made for lower-end access. For AP purposes, it's purely so customers don't have to rip out a ton of CAT-5 and install CAT-6/6A in it's place.Olaf van der Spek - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Got a source for 1 gbit not being enough for WLAN?ZeDestructor - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Multi-radio 3+stream 802.11ac implementations want more than 1gbit already. It's been talked about in various whitepapers and other places around the web. IIRC even AT had an article or two on it.p1esk - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Yeah, I remember those articles. They confirmed my suspicion that there's no such thing as 1 Gbps wireless connection in the real world. Maybe the next gen Macbook Pro will change that, then we'll talk.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Single client, sure. multi-client on the other hand is pushing over 500Mbps (peaks over 800Mbps) on a single 80MHz wide channel for a 3x3 radio. With the forthcoming 4x4 designs and 160MHz wide channels, it should go even higher, potentially breaking the 1gbit sustained barrier.Oh, and that's on consumer gear. Demand for 2.5 and 5gbit is coming from the likes of Cisco and their clients and competition for the most part, for their enterprise APs - expect home to remain on 1gbit or move directly up to 10gbit.
Source: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router...
Rampart19 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-...Wave 2 AC can push up to 6.8Gbps with multiple clients connected. NBase-T cable tech allows companies to keep using Cat-5e and get up to 5Gbps connection to the AP.
Wardrop - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
At near range (1 metre), I'm getting up to 60MB/s from my mac mini using 5GHz AC through my Linksys EA6900. I was quite amazed at the speed, and how close to 1Gbps I can get from a single client using a standard consumer client and router.bronan - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Agreed on that 25 G is what we are talking about for backbone usageOmoronovo - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I'm conflicted on the idea of 2.5G. On one hand, when even the slowest disk-based network storage is bottlenecked by 1G, we really need the tech to advance - 2.5G would give a lot of breathing room for 10G to evolve and migrate into the consumer space.On the other hand, I almost see it like the migration to IPv6 from IPv4... We're in a mess with IPv4 because NAT gave us a "good enough" solution that delayed adoption of IPv6 substantially. I'd rather wait out this with 1G ports until 10G is affordable, than have consumer adoption of 2.5G and be stuck with it for years and years because it is "good enough".
CaedenV - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Instead 1G ports are 'good enough' and we are going to be stuck with them for years.Heck, at work we use Cisco phones and all of them only have a 100M pass-through connection because it is 'good enough' for 'most people'.
bronan - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
100 Mbit is good enough for voice and even video streaming because it does not need more at all.But go ahead and do a backup of a 54 TB nas to its sister backup device over 1 Gb networking.... think of that. Now it costs me several days before the backup has completed even though my lan really is almost 120 Mb/s thats the absolute maximum you can get on your 1 Gbit lan
roundtree - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
IEEE is still formalizing the standards for 2.5GbE and 5GbE. Once approved, you'll see more NICs and switches become available.To those confused, the goal for both 2.5GbE and 5GbE does not revolve around data center, enterprise, or consumer markets. Instead, the goal is to enable the reuse of Category 5e and Category 6 cable plants, so that the speed upgrade does not require large capital investment in cabling to deploy. No one is likely to deploy 10GbE in existing office environments or homes if all new cabling has to be deployed whilst simultaneously also deploying new NICs and new switches.
Personally, I don't think we'll see anything widespread for 2.5GbE or 5GbE until the end of 2017 at the earliest. I sincerely hope that I'm wrong and things accelerate quickly.
jjj - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I know but it feels like it's targeted mostly at wireless access points and not sure if it gains wide adoption in consumer fast. Was hoping it will.azazel1024 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Yeah, I had seen some stuff back about 9-12 months ago that was talking up 2.5/5GbE as something we'd likely see in 1H2016, but that of course didn't happen. Hopefully IEEE can get around to finally ratifying it so we can see gear.10G could be adopted in a lot of office environments and pretty much all home environments. Cat5e is rated to 100m with 1GbE, but it is rated to 45m with 10GbE. Many people think you must have Cat6a, but that is absolutely not true. Cat 6 is rated to 55m with 10GbE. Of course the issue is, those are "clean installs", not worst case scenario installs. Figure a typical install you are looking at more like 20-25m + 5m on either end of stranded for Cat5e and still likely see full Cat5e speeds and Cat6 is likely to support more like 30-35m + 5m on either end of stranded. Which likely isn't enough for most office environments, but it certainly plenty for most home environments.
2.5GbE IIRC is going to support Cat5e to 100m and 5GbE is Cat6 to 100m (which also likely means Cat5e to 60-80m).
Unless 2.5/5GbE gets completely torpedoed, I really don't think we will see 10GbE moved to a consumer standard at any point, or at least not for 5+ years and possibly 10+. We are still at least 1 if not 2 node shrinks for 10GbE silicon to be reasonable in power consumption for something like a home router, cheap desktop switch or onboard laptop NIC. IIRC the newest 10GbE silicon is looking at ~4w a port and it really needs to be drive down to more like 2w a port for those uses, otherwise heat is a big issue in consumer gear (yes, your typical high end home router might use 20w of power under heavy load, it also has lots of passive cooling and runs very hot, now try adding in an extra 12-15w if a set of 5 10GbE ports are in use, you'd absolutely have to have active cooling or a MUCH larger chassis with a big heat sink).
Things are advancing fast, but frankly 95% of home users networking is limited to their internet connection, which even in more advance countries, the typical user doesn't have speeds above about 100-150Mbps. So 1GbE ports are just fine. Even with 1Gbps internet connections becoming more plentiful, they are probably less than 5% of deployment world wide (just taking in to account 1st world countries) and >1Gbps is probably less than 1%. For the users who do something other than connect to the internet with their networking, probably a good half don't really know or care about having something faster than 1Gbps, or are connecting wirelessly to their router and are limited to <1Gbps speeds because of that.
So you are talking a use case of maybe 2-4% of home users who need, want or care about >1Gbps networking speeds and maybe only 5-10% of businesses who need it outside of their core network. The gov't agency I work with, frankly we just need it on our big iron. Our workstations, 99.99% of employees are just fine with a 100Mbps connection. The big iron has plenty of 10/40GbE ports.
I really want it and could use it and I'd really like to see consumer gear deploy at least 2.5GbE in the next couple of years. However, I don't really NEED it. I have dual 1GbE links from my server, to my switch and then to my desktop and I am running Win 8.1 (about to be 10) on both machines so SMB Multichannel is fully up. I get 230-235MB/sec transfers between them easily, which is relatively close to maxing out my HDD arrays (a pair of Seagate 3TB drives in RAID0 in both machines, max performance is ~368MB/sec, but that is on the outer edge, they are ~45% utilized, so I am actually maxing out around ~290MB/sec right now for new writes, so a single 2.5GbE basically maxes my HDD array). SSDs are still very far away from bulk storage and sure, there will be some users who have a laptop with a 256+GB SSD and want a super fast transfer to whatever they are transferring from/too, but in most cases, it isn't going to be another SSD on a NAS or server or a huge pipe to the internet.
I am hoping when I am ready to move beyond my 6TB array, that I'll be able to go all solid state on it in a few years, but that is still at least 3-4 years away and I am likely to pay $1000+ to drop something like 6-8TB of SSD storage in each machine (but then I can also easily just add disks to expand storage as I need to, no worries about matching the storage, because I won't need RAID as the SSD performance is high enough).
2.5GbE is going to be needed for wireless at some point soon. That or dual 1GbE links. I am kind of surprised that 802.11ac features have rolled out as slowly as they have. 160MHz doesn't surprise me because of the expense, difficulty of it and the limited spectrum that involves. However, MU:MIMO has been a MUCH slower roll out than I expected. Intel just started supporting it with the 8265, but I am surprised that Apple didn't with the 6s. Hopefully the next one will and most routers won't, except "AC2600" routers.
In theory, with the right mix of clients, an AC2600 router in a good wireless environment with the clients fairly close to the router, probably could just about hit 1Gbps over wireless. With a 4:4 bridge, it absolutely could exceed 1Gbps. In my testing, bridging newer 802.11ac routers within a reasonable distance, say 10-20ft and maybe only 1 interior wall between them, you get about 70% wireless utilization. A good client these days seems to hit low to mid 60% utilization. That means a pair of 4:4 802.11ac routers bridged could hit roughly 1200Mbps, but would be limited by port speeds.
If 160MHz actually hits, a 4:4 802.11ac router to 160MHz capable MU:MIMO clients almost certainly could exceed 1Gbps over wireless, but would be limited by port speeds if all the traffic was over one port and headed in the same direction.
802.11ax is supposed to significantly speed up 802.11ac. It has a higher MCS/QAM coding than 802.11ac, is 160Mhz for 5GHz and somewhat higher spatial efficiency from some other stuff. It is a theoretical 1201Mbps per stream, once you figure error encoding overhead and the fact that you'll need REALLY good SNR to actually enable clean 1024-QAM it'll probably be a lot like 802.11ac where the first chipsets and routers are hitting more like 50% of those maximum speeds on a good connection, but given a few years you'll likely see closer to 70% on a good connection. That still means that early 2:2 clients are likely going to be hitting or exceeding 1Gbps actual over wireless and be limited by 1GbE. Down the road a few years and a good client is likely to be hitting more like 1.5-1.8Gbps over wireless on a good connection.
There may be something after 802.11ax, but that is a LOT of years away. Right now 802.11ax is likely going to be 3-5 years away from implementation for early equipment and 6-8 before it is mature. So following that, 2.5GbE probably could support almost all consumer use cases, easily, for a decade or more. For the few users who need more, there would be 5GbE, or trunked 2.5GbE.
DanNeely - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Unlike the 10 or 20W numbers being quoted a few years ago for then current hardware, I really don't think 2 vs 4W per port is a major concern for initial home installation. For a typical 4/8 port home router/switch the higher power consumption isn't a major concern the way it would be on a giant enterprise switch with 80 or 160 ports. On the desktop PCs/NASes that would be the primary clients an extra 2W is borderline irrelevant.For laptops on battery it would be a more serious problem; but high end consumer laptops are rapidly dropping wired ethernet support entirely making it a moot point. They're more common on $400 boxmart laptops; but those won't see anything faster than 10gbE until it gets baked into a chipset by Intel/AMD allowing them to offer it for 'free' again making it a moot point.
azazel1024 - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
You'd be surprised. Also right now, GbE is running about .4-.7w per port and 10GbE is around 4.5w per port. I'd suspect that something like 2.5GbE is likely to be in the 1-2w range.That means a power difference of about 2.5-3.5w per port. With your typical home router, that is 5 ports times 2.5-3.5w or 12.5-17.5w per router if all ports are in use running 10GbE. That roughly doubles or more the power consumption of the typical home router. If you look at most that are running in the 10-15w range, they have a LOT of cooling vents and some pretty big heat sinks internally. Frankly, ~30w in an enclosure as small as a typical home router and you have to have active cooling. That is an issue for most home routers.
So, yeah, the power difference is real and considerable and a concern. The power use itself isn't a big concern, but packaging and cooling concerns make it an issue.
No, on a desktop between .5w and 4.5w isn't a big deal. On a laptop on battery it is a big concern and even with a power adapter it can be. For some of the big laptops, not a big deal, but as an example, my HP Envy 4t runs about 25w at peak power consumption under load. That includes screen, Ivy Bridge processor, memory, motherboard, wifi, NIC, etc. That would be an increase of about 15% more heat that the laptop needs to dissipate and actually a little worse since 2-4w of that is the display, which isn't dissipated through the keyboard portion of the chasis.
Just some thoughts on the matter.
iwod - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Yes I agree there are limited use case beyond 1Gbps. But once Wi-Fi moves beyond 1Gbps actual speed aka 802.11ax, and NAS. I see these use case to grow beyond 10 - 20% general, and significantly higher in Office environment.1Gbps is acceptable for now, but I really want 802.11ax to come with NBase-T 5Gbps Port. And since Router is always an easier upgrade, it would be nice if computer / PC today have early launch of NBase-T Port.
tygrus - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
The 2.5Gbps speed is required now for AP/modems but by the time that is common many of us have moved passed the 2.5Gbps (so the upgrade is then 5Gbps in 2 to 3yrs time).Once the new standards are approved the AP/modems should be moving to support the 5Gbps standard and also be compatible with 2.5Gbps to work with poorer quality cable/connection (larger distances, bends, lower spec cable, poor connections etc). Why waste time and effort to create twice the number of new products and re-testing ? Go straight to 5Gbps for switches/router/AP/modems.
PC's could have the option to support the 5 or 2.5Gbps specs if there is a major cost difference but I'd prefer them to support the higher spec if possible (the usual backwards compatibility). Wireless bandwidth is going over 2Gbps, internet with 1Gbps and soon to be higher, SSD's are >5Gbps (500MBps). The 2.5Gbps could have stood alone if it came >2yrs ago but we are now so close to using 5Gbps that 2.5 only gear is less valued.
jab701 - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
It is true that the IEEE is still writing the standards for Ethernet 2.5 Gigabit and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over Cat-5/Cat-6 twisted pair – 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T.For datacenter/WAN style connections there are upcoming essentially complete standards and there are a number of companies with working implementations already, e.g.
802.3by due 2016, optical fiber, twinax and backplane 25 Gigabit Ethernet and going forward there is 802.3bs due ~2017 which is 400 Gbit/s Ethernet over optical fiber using multiple 25G/50G lanes.
jensend - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Agreed. Even just the power and cooling requirements for present-gen 10G equipment could be difficult for consumer setups to deal with. The next couple of generations of 10G chips are probably still going to be way out of normal consumer networking budgets. Of course, one elephant in the room is the expense of putting in Cat 6A everywhere. And the need for 10G simply isn't there.There are plenty of instances where 1G can be a bottleneck for consumers (802.11ac access points, NAS). But it's hard to think of realistic consumer use cases for more than 2.5G and very hard to think of >5G use cases.
2.5G should be vastly easier to implement than 10G. It could come down close to the price of 1G gear relatively quickly once economies of scale kick in. And of course there's no new cabling requirements.
thewhat - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
>But it's hard to think of realistic consumer use cases for more than 2.5G and very hard to think of >5G use cases.With SSD prices dropping, I can easily imagine a NAS or home server with SSDs, which would be bottlenecked by 2.5 or 5Gbit. (The fastest SSDs right now are bottlenecked even by 10Gbit speeds.)
Of course, if we assume that NASs/home servers are irrelevant for 99% of people (which might very well be the case) then it's all pretty niche anyway.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
2.5-5Gb would have more sense consumer side (excellent for sata SSD reads/copy)bill.rookard - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The problem with the pricing and adoption of 10G is that for the majority of home users which make up the bulk of the users, 1Gbit (125MB/sec ideal) is plenty. Video streaming requires a few MB/sec - even at 10MB sec - your average basic server can send out 5-8 simultaneous streams making 10Gbit unnecessary.Yes, there are edge cases where particular people might need or want 10Gbit, but the pricing and availability reflects that.
roundtree - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
"Using 10GBase-T, over SFP or other connectivity, allows for backwards compatibility in the home which is still an important feature."No one will ever use 10GBase-T over SFP, as 10GBase-T is the copper, twisted-pair specification. I would suggest correcting this statement from "10GBase-T" to "10 Gigabit Ethernet" or "10GbE" to avoid confusion.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
You've misinterpreted the comment. Over in the sense of 'choosing one over the other', or 'going with one rather than the other.Taracta - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Finally, 10GBase-T on relatively affordable motherboards! Now to just get the switches to an affordable price.vanilla_gorilla - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Do some digging around on ebay and you'll find $300-$400 24 port 10GbE layer 3(+) switches built on broadcom ASICs (ie Trident series) running FASTPATH OS. I'm not naming names because I don't want to cause a spike in demand for them.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I've seen SFP+ switches at that level, but not 10GBase-T ?vanilla_gorilla - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Yes SFP+. I'm suggesting it as an alternative to base-T. Cheaper, more flexible and less power and transceivers are very inexpensive now. Unless you've got some environment where you want to use existing cabling, SFP+ is a much better option to me. Most people either want it in the datacenter/lab or in a home lab and in both places it's very easy to replace existing cabling.sheh - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
You can find on eBay used 10Gb PCIe cards for less than 20$:http://www.ebay.com/itm/391459428428
But there's still the cost of cabling.
And yet, most home routers still come with just 100Mbps switches...
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
That's SFP+, not 10GBase-T.sheh - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Also a valid option at that speed.Olaf van der Spek - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
What's this "Promoted Stories" non-link text doing there?bernstein - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Just installed Cat7a 22AWG cabling to every room in our home (longest run ~20m), price increase compared to Cat6a 24AWG cabling is negligible. Plugs are only Cat6a 10GbE capable though and would have to be switched out to enable 100GbE.naris - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Does the ASUS X99 E-WS/10G with support for U.2 drives come with "Songs of Innocence”?jardows2 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
How about some cool sunglasses we can wear anywhere, even inside?JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The MSI MicroATX board is the most interest buy, for me at least.I've been really wanting to make a semi-mobile Twitch streaming PC/Server for console streaming, in a MicroATX case.
It'd use two 1-slot PCI-e capture cards and a single RX480 (due to AMD's superior OpenCL capabilities and x.264's ability to offload some of the encoding work to GPUs, and the relative affordability of this card given that this isn't meant as a gaming PC).
I'd have a Framemeister mounted onto the side panel, with a cutout for the DC barrel plug, and use a 6-pin from the PSU to a DC barrel plug adapter to actually power the Framemeister without an additional outlet. Game consoles could be plugged into the Framemeister and I could remote desktop into the computer at a friend's house to set up a high quality console gaming stream.
Having a 10Gb NIC allows me to feel a bit more secure on using a MicroATX form-factor without feeling iffy on the lack of a 5th PCI-e port available for a multi-port NIC.
nils_ - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Maybe look at Server boards like Supermicro X10SRM-TF, it's micro ATX with 2x10GbE on board (Intel X550), 2x PCIe x8 and 1 PCIe x16.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
10GBe could be cheap now but, as is usually the case, they want to keep it there in order to max the $$$$ out of people. It's all about the $$$.pugster - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The problem is 10ge switches costing $100 per port at least when gig switches cost around $2-3 per port. Not sure why consumers would jump to 10ge when they don't need the speed.alexdi - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I upgraded my home network to 10GBe earlier this year. You can find dual-port 10GBase-T cards on the auction site for $150 or so. No switch, but perfectly capable of direct connection. I'm averaging 500 MB/s from my local SSD to my RAID-6 file server.Unless you're severely slot-constrained, it doesn't make much sense to get it as part of the motherboard. Better to buy the Intel X540 cards. They maintain a very high resale value. (Just don't buy the Chinese knockoffs; they often fail quickly.)
JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Basically this, and this is why the 10GbE port on the MSI MicroATX is a big plus, as opposed to the ~$700 ATX boards.nils_ - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
I would suggest looking at Mellanox Cards, they offer superior latency at a similar price point, and if you are doing direct connections you could also do 40-56GbE if you're crazy like me ;)pixelstuff - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
They just need to start putting these on every motherboard and be done with it. Go ahead and get that economy of scale to kick in.DParadoxx - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
No one wants something as expensive as 10GbE built into a motherboard they'll have to toss out at some point.melgross - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I so t know how many people remember this, but in the days when Apple was pushing for higher wired networking speeds, they first made 100Mbs Ethernet standard on their machines, which immediately brought the cost down by almost 90%.Later on, they did the same thing with 1Gbs Ethernet. I remember the cards costing about $750, and right after Apple standardized them, it dropped to $150. It dropped way down a little more than a year after that.
But Apple isn't interested in improving wired network speeds anymore with their push for wireless. It's disappointing.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I don't get it. At minimum these things should have 2 ports.1 regular 1Gbit for your internet and the 10G for your private in-house network.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Can't we connect PC's in a network (say 2) using USB 3.0-3.1g2?mervincm - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
20$ (used enterprise) 10G SFP+ cards via ebay, 229$ new switch from Mikrotik (CRS210-8G-2S+IN) new SFP+ transceivers and fiber patch cables from fiberstore (20$ for SFP+ and <5$ for 5 meter patch)You can have a pair of 10G connected systems including all hardware (1 switch 2 cards, 4 SFP+ transceivers, 2 fiber patch cables) for under 400 US$ it doesn't have to be expensive do start with 10G Ethernet
mervincm - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
actually, if you are OK with a used (and a bit noisy) switch, you can get a used quanta LB4M (plus 48 gig ports) from ebay for 100-150, sometimes including a pair of SFP+ transceivers. dropping it to under 300 for a pair of systems at 10GigJoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The problem is that home consumers don't want to be bothered with SFP+ and fiberoptic cable. It's more expensive than copper cabling and is much less common amongst non-PC devices, like current gen gaming consoles, smart TVs, receivers, etc.I'm sure you might be thinking why someone would connect a smart TV or game console via 10GbE when it can't utilize that speed, but usually if someone's going to bother getting new ethernet drops throughout the house, they usually do the entire network so they don't have to go back and make more ethernet drops later. It's more cost-effective and saves time in the long run this way.
You'd think that with there being more demand for RJ45 based 10GbE as opposed to SFP+ based 10GbE that RJ45 would be cheaper to set up (as it usually has been in the past) but for whatever reason it's not that way right now.
People I think will be more willing to adopt it if 10GbE via copper was as available and (relatively) affordable as 10GbE via fiber.
nils_ - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
I'm still waiting for that Asus Switch with the two 10GBase-T port that seems to be vaporware. I don't want to have a switch with a Fan at home and I also don't need all ports to be 10GBit/s.KimGitz - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
How about Thunderbolt 3 for 10GbE peer to peer networking at home? If working in the same room not more than 2 meter from each other devices with Thunderbolt 3 could potentially in theory be networked. Has anyone tried networking two laptops with Thunderbolt 3 to see if it works?nils_ - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
It works with Apple hardware and Thunderbolt 2. There is a Linux driver in development.zodiacfml - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Still ahead of its time in the consumer world, too many reasons why.bronan - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Funny thing is intel sold 10 t based gbe card for 75 dollar back then, now the same toy costs 240 dollar. Instead of prices going down the prices kept going up. Guess the greed of these companies has not changed at all. I am waiting for 10 Gb T-base network for years to hit normal prices.Because this hardware already should have hit much lower prices for at least 5 years, Even though the prices slowly coming down, i still think prices are kept high for no reason other than insane greed (period)