Unfortunately the blog didn't link to the SFP+ module they're using, but everyone should know there's effectively 2 different generations of 10gbit sfp+ to ethernet modules. The old gen, labeled as 30 meters, draws ~3 W, and gets extremely hot (to the point it'll usually cause link flaps), and the newer gen, usually labeled as 100m or 80m, draws ~1.5 W, and runs much, much cooler.
I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.
I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.
It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.
Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...
Do you mean Cat 6 or Cat 5e? Cat 6e isn't a thing and 6a didn't exist in 2006. 6 was certainly more future-proof at the time, although arguably 5e is still fine even today. (Super-gigabit consumer equipment didn't really exist until the last five years and it's till notably more expensive and less common than gigabit, which runs on 5e just fine.)
One thing I'll add that I learnt in the process of doing my own house: It's not just the cable type but also the SFP module that can limit the distance. I used MicroTik hardware and their S+R10J modules are limited to ~30m for 10Gbps speeds.
I have 1.5/900 fibre to my house, and I bring a 2.5 line from the modem to my home office where a 2.5 switch delivers it to my workstation, laptop, and unraid NAS. But those devices are all themselves just gigE I think, and I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
More and more regular people are getting network storage appliances. More and more people have laptops with SSDs that can write at 4 or 5 GB/s. Why shouldn't they get to use all of it?
I should have said most home users. My point is that more bandwidth at this point probably won’t affect 99.999% of home users.
What’s described in the post is the tech equivalent of supe-ing up a sports car and then driving it in rush hour traffic. It’s fun to geek out doing it, but practically in everyday use the difference will be negligible. Even with large file uploads and downloads, there’s a good chance that services won’t reach those throughputs end to end.
What’s telling is that the post shows screenshots and charts from artificial speed tests. No videos of the Dropbox client chugging away with throttled uploads.
> I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
There are many things along the way that would get in the way of a home user downloading something from the internet that would hit that 5GB/s speed. It's not that people should be "banned" from it or something, more that the investment cost isn't worth it.
I regularly saturate my 1G home and 1G office connection syncing ~6GB files between the two. It's also nice to be able to download a 100G or so game quickly. Remote backups to cloud storage also benefit from fast upload speeds (and more importantly, restores).
We have a 5gbps pipe; routinely download games from Steam at >3gbps; when I had to reinitialize my cloud backup it was >4gbps. All of this without impacting anyone else on the pipe.
Yah, our P95 bandwidth is just a few megabits per second. But it's not that expensive and routinely saves me a few minutes here and there.
10gbps on the LAN is more broadly useful. Pegging it for a file share is a daily occurrence.
Also storage has gotten super expensive lately, and rather than upgrading my machines/consoles I've been offloading games and downloading them as needed and now am routinely downloading dozens of GB just to play a game.
My gaming time is limited so the faster the better.
Yeah I foolishly paid for 500 Mb/s but the only things I ever get over even 200 Mb/s for in the UK are Steam downloads (and speed tests). Everything else seems to be roughly throttled at that rate.
I wonder what the idle vs at load difference is for power draw/heat. Would really love to see this feature in reviews some!
I wonder if you could negotiate down to 1gbit until you see some level of activity, if that would help at all?
I'm still eyeing 10Gb, but if my home needs +30w for three computers, I don't feel like it's really worth it. Would love to see more details on the power consumption from folks, especially tuning for idle.
I've been running it like this in a closed comm box for the last 3 years without any issues. SFP+ modules actually do not use that much power, it's just that it's concentrated into a small package, resulting in high temps.
Cripes. When possible just do fiber and DACs. Faster and much cooler than 10Gbit. 10Gbit uses an absurd amount of power per port thus the need for all that cooling.
I was surprised that the old Cat5e in my home supports 10Gbps without any issue, so went ahead and upgraded the rest of the network with 10Gbps switches (expensive Ubiquiti gear, but worth it to talk at 10Gbps between all my machines, even though the internet is only 5Gbps Fiber).
Unfortunately the blog didn't link to the SFP+ module they're using, but everyone should know there's effectively 2 different generations of 10gbit sfp+ to ethernet modules. The old gen, labeled as 30 meters, draws ~3 W, and gets extremely hot (to the point it'll usually cause link flaps), and the newer gen, usually labeled as 100m or 80m, draws ~1.5 W, and runs much, much cooler.
Example of the new gen: https://www.amazon.com/Wiitek-Transceiver-Compatible-UF-RJ45...
Old gen: https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-SFP-10G-T-S-Compatible-10GBase...
Typically the old gen uses a Marvell AQR113C, and the new gen uses a Broadcom chip that I forget the number of off hand.
Wow, and at essentially the same price!
I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.
I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.
It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.
Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...
I know when I was doing some custom wiring in a house around 2005-6, it was clear that cat-6e was the thing to use if you wanted any future-proofing.
So I bought a reel of that even though I was only going to be using 1000-BaseT. I don't remember there being too much premium on the wire itself.
Do you mean Cat 6 or Cat 5e? Cat 6e isn't a thing and 6a didn't exist in 2006. 6 was certainly more future-proof at the time, although arguably 5e is still fine even today. (Super-gigabit consumer equipment didn't really exist until the last five years and it's till notably more expensive and less common than gigabit, which runs on 5e just fine.)
> The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5
FWIW, Cat 5e supplanted Cat 5 25 years ago.
One thing I'll add that I learnt in the process of doing my own house: It's not just the cable type but also the SFP module that can limit the distance. I used MicroTik hardware and their S+R10J modules are limited to ~30m for 10Gbps speeds.
That's pretty wild.
I have 1.5/900 fibre to my house, and I bring a 2.5 line from the modem to my home office where a 2.5 switch delivers it to my workstation, laptop, and unraid NAS. But those devices are all themselves just gigE I think, and I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
10Gbps is enough bandwidth for 500 concurrent Netflix streams in 4K/UHD (15Mbps) AND 500 concurrent video calls (4Mbps).
Home users don’t need more bandwidth to improve their internet experiences, they need lower latency, less congestion and less loss.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-net...
Home users only do video calls and watch Netflix?
More and more regular people are getting network storage appliances. More and more people have laptops with SSDs that can write at 4 or 5 GB/s. Why shouldn't they get to use all of it?
I should have said most home users. My point is that more bandwidth at this point probably won’t affect 99.999% of home users.
What’s described in the post is the tech equivalent of supe-ing up a sports car and then driving it in rush hour traffic. It’s fun to geek out doing it, but practically in everyday use the difference will be negligible. Even with large file uploads and downloads, there’s a good chance that services won’t reach those throughputs end to end.
What’s telling is that the post shows screenshots and charts from artificial speed tests. No videos of the Dropbox client chugging away with throttled uploads.
To quote the previous post:
> I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
There are many things along the way that would get in the way of a home user downloading something from the internet that would hit that 5GB/s speed. It's not that people should be "banned" from it or something, more that the investment cost isn't worth it.
I regularly saturate my 1G home and 1G office connection syncing ~6GB files between the two. It's also nice to be able to download a 100G or so game quickly. Remote backups to cloud storage also benefit from fast upload speeds (and more importantly, restores).
We have a 5gbps pipe; routinely download games from Steam at >3gbps; when I had to reinitialize my cloud backup it was >4gbps. All of this without impacting anyone else on the pipe.
Yah, our P95 bandwidth is just a few megabits per second. But it's not that expensive and routinely saves me a few minutes here and there.
10gbps on the LAN is more broadly useful. Pegging it for a file share is a daily occurrence.
Also storage has gotten super expensive lately, and rather than upgrading my machines/consoles I've been offloading games and downloading them as needed and now am routinely downloading dozens of GB just to play a game.
My gaming time is limited so the faster the better.
How much $ extra are you willing to pay for the extremely occasional transfer at rates higher than gigabit? 2x? 3x?
Those ssds are very likely cached and so cannot keep that pace for more than a quick burst of a few gigs.
Yeah I foolishly paid for 500 Mb/s but the only things I ever get over even 200 Mb/s for in the UK are Steam downloads (and speed tests). Everything else seems to be roughly throttled at that rate.
Both impressive and surprising that thermals were the biggest barrier!
Meanwhile I'm sat here wishing I could justify running any ethernet in my apartment, but improving wi-fi tech means I never can...
I wonder what the idle vs at load difference is for power draw/heat. Would really love to see this feature in reviews some!
I wonder if you could negotiate down to 1gbit until you see some level of activity, if that would help at all?
I'm still eyeing 10Gb, but if my home needs +30w for three computers, I don't feel like it's really worth it. Would love to see more details on the power consumption from folks, especially tuning for idle.
10g-base-T is a sick joke
high latency, high error rates, and terrifying heat output from SFPs (which the author noted for himself)
the only cat6 left in my home network is the link to verizon's ont, because in their infinite wisdom the ONLY connectivity offered was 10g-base-t
The device nomenclature alone is worth the read! (otherwise an impressive feat to see)
The Mikrotik switch is awesome, and it's still the most compact 10G switch available.
You can fix the thermal issue either by adding a small fan (Noctua is great) or by adding more radiators: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...
I've been running it like this in a closed comm box for the last 3 years without any issues. SFP+ modules actually do not use that much power, it's just that it's concentrated into a small package, resulting in high temps.
Cripes. When possible just do fiber and DACs. Faster and much cooler than 10Gbit. 10Gbit uses an absurd amount of power per port thus the need for all that cooling.
I was surprised that the old Cat5e in my home supports 10Gbps without any issue, so went ahead and upgraded the rest of the network with 10Gbps switches (expensive Ubiquiti gear, but worth it to talk at 10Gbps between all my machines, even though the internet is only 5Gbps Fiber).
What's the point?