20 gig networking — even just a switch — is so expensive. 10 gig is already out of reach for 99% of the population, even network nerds. We’re just now in the past couple years seeing a standard of motherboards with 2.5gbps rj45. A lot of brand new nvme ssds can’t saturate 25gbps. There are just so many bottlenecks. I’m not saying I wish dearly those didn’t exist, but I know from my experience upgrading to 10 gig just how many there are.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-pro-aggregation
Personally I am more excited for high speed networking for homelabs to come down in price. At this point in my life I don’t feel the need to access my network outside of my house at super high speeds. My 100mbps up is fine for when I’m out of the house, and 10gbps is more than I need when I’m home.
Indeed. I’m getting much less than 1/10th of my provisioned 10Gbps for being cheap like that. It’s still plenty fast, though.
10Gbps is great for feeding a building
At this point I just want affordable 2.5Gb gear
Wouldn’t they provide you with a 20Gb compatible router? I was curious and cat8 LAN cables support 40Gb/s. They are 3x as expensive as Cat7, but with I’m just a few meters away from the router, so about 10-15€ and that’s the cables done.
Ah… the PCI-e ethernet card is where it gets pricey 😮 250€ for 10Gb card.
Damn…
Although, I’d be future proof for sure. That kind of speed will probably be enough for 20 years or so.
FWIW 10 gig cards can be much cheaper than 250€ as long as you’re willing to use SFP+ (I got a used pair of cards with a 10m optical cable for $90 CAD) but 25gig is where it gets stupid.
Even if they do supply a capable router, you will probably want at least a switch since most ISP supplied routers only have a few ports. Plus, it’s not uncommon for an ISP router to deliver their advertised speed over only one port, even if the router has several. At the end of the day, though, if you’re paying for >gigabit you probably want to set up your own firewall with a fancy router so you can properly configure your network.
Crazy that gigabit Ethernet is 25 years old and still the de facto standard. IMO we should all be able to afford 100gig inside our homes, finding the bottleneck inside our machines, not between them. Alas, 10gig is for the enthusiasts, and anything above that is for the elites.
