Definitely agree that it’s generally not needed (>1Gbps) but game updates these days run 100GiB+ in some cases (particularly for AAA titles) and it’s nice to have a little more speed sometimes. Individual clients are usually 80MHz 2x2 so best case will get ~1.2Gbps [2], but the radio can handle a couple clients doing things at once (MU-MIMO).
For external connectivity, Comcast is now selling 1.2Gbps services in many US markets (they also overprovision the profile so speedtest.net will often see 1.4Gbps), and consequently cable modems have had 2.5GE ports for a couple years now. When combined with APs that have >1Gbps uplinks this can actually get used! Some markers can now get Comcast with 2000/200 (down/up) [3], which is a huge improvement over 1200/35 — the previous maximum.
So, it’s nice to have APs with more uplink, and it’s nice to have >1Gbps Comcast, but I’d definitely not call it mainstream yet.
[1] https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_AP550Series.pdf
[3] https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-increas...
Edit: Just checked and for 10 G it would be about 10 euros and for 2.5 G - 9 euros, that's a very good upgrade, probably they assume that most users won't take advantage of the full bandwidth.
I definitely don't have any way to take advantage of 10g, that's for sure. I guess WiFi 6 might be able to make some use of 2.5G. I'd upgrade for 1 euro more if I was you.
https://www.purexbox.com/news/2022/11/modern-warfare-2s-late...
Lots of prebuilt PC systems are coming with 2.5GE NICs - “build your own” and it feels like most motherboards are now 2.5GE? Upgrading existing to 2.5GE is pretty cheap (~$30 USD), even via USB adapters [3].
To me, I think it’s fine with NBase-T that the switches be 10GE and the clients negotiate at 2.5GE or 5GE, although I’d note that both Mac Mini, iMac and Mac Studio can now be OEM specified with 10GE NIC for I think $100 additional.
[1] https://dl.ubnt.com/ds/usw-flex-xg_ds
[2] https://dl.ubnt.com/ds/us-xg-6poe_ds
[3] Plugable 2.5G -https://a.co/d/hjV8LTd
€300 for 5 is a fortune for me :(
There are significant tradeoffs that you may not tolerate:
(1) They are very noisy (vs. the Flex XG which is fanless) so if your "Tech" is anywhere near your living space, this may be unworkable;
(2) They consume lots of power and also don't do 802.3{af,at,bt} for PoE either, you can solve PoE using an injector (for a few ports), a midspan (for more ports) but note that injectors/midspans usually don't support NBase-T and if you want the combination of 2.5/5/10GE and PoE you might be back to buying a specific switch which can do that;
(3) Learning curve is steeper than unmanaged or most semi-managed switches and you likely need to be comfortable with serial consoles to get them configured.
With all those and likely more tradeoffs considered, they are ~$10/port!
If you're not going to get direct-attach cables, then check out the stuff that 10gtek sells. In the 6->8+ months that I've been using them, I've not had any trouble with their short-range multi-mode SFP+ modules. Also, you can buy them for a little more than 10USD per module if you buy them in 2->10-packs from Newegg.
(And yeah, 10gtek is totally one of those "Direct from Shenzhen" companies that one might worry about buying from. I figured that 10gbit transceivers have been around for quite a while now, so there's no reason they should cost 80USD per, rolled the dice on two separate cheapo 10g transceiver manufacturers, and got lucky when the second (10gtek) turned out to ship a solid product that, like, actually worked and seems to work well.)
A 1GbE WiFi signal only needs to have 1GbE throughput.
What home users need is a 10GbE hub. 10GbE connections between devices but really only one at a time.
Switches are overbuilt for home user purposes. I don't think anyone will notice that Alice takes up the channel and that Bob has to wait his turn.
In fact, that's how WiFi works and most people don't even notice.
It needs 16 Gb switching capacity; it is duplex.
> What home users need is a 10GbE hub. 10GbE connections between devices but really only one at a time. Switches are overbuilt for home user purposes.
Not really. While it is true, that most users do not have active multiple devices at the same time, they would pay for this in energy usage. Ethernet, which is what most people would end up with, has pretty high consumption at 10 GbE, to the tune 3-5W per port (times 2, because you need two ends for each cable). It is better to keep them idle when possible; that means switching.
I don't think this is the correct terminology. "Switching capacity", as far as I can tell, is the simple addition of the speeds of all the ports. So 16 Gbps switching capacity isn't something it needs, it's something it has simply from the nature of having those 8x 1 GbE full-duplex ports.
What we're talking about here that we'd need to not bottleneck, would be called either "non-blocking throughput" or "backplane bandwidth".
And even on higher end switches, the switching capacity and backplane bandwidth are usually not equal. I'd be surprised if the same wasn't true for consumer switches (though maybe it is since there's far fewer ports on consumer switches than enterprise switches).
(There's also a packets per second metric that determines how much the switch can handle, but I'm assuming that's only going to be a bottleneck if your packet sizes are too low)
Most enterprise gear on the switching side is also non blocking, but there are exceptions of course (Cisco sucks).
Perhaps so.
Still, how to switch? If the "switch internals" is just a token-ring + ARP table (IE: each port remembers the mac addresses its serving, and token-rings the data around), the switch will have ~10GbE for all-ports, but only a max bandwidth of 10GbE before it starts losing packets. (Ex: Alice <-> Bob <-> Charlie <-> Dave with only 10GbE each link. If Alice talks to Charlie and Bob talks to Dave, then the Bob -> Charlie needs 20GbE, so half the packets will get dropped)
This isn't a full switch classic.
Maybe a "Hub classic" isn't enough, since that keeps the ports needlessly active as you noted. But I don't think the full 80Gbps bidirectional is needed for an 8-port home-consumer (or even many prosumer) environments.
The full 10Gbps switches all get quite hot, probably due to drawing a ton of power. I'm thinking that some simplified architecture is needed to reduce power (by trading off and reducing bandwidth)
Is it noisy?
Will say, as far as I'm concerned not seeing a need to upgrade any time soon for my own needs. Short of another project where I regularly have to xfer a couple hundred gigs of files, where my internet provider is 1gb down, 40mb up.