This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I've seen that doesn't have a heatsink on it.
And they did it on Cat5e! I have a Cat5e “trunk” that I really don’t want to try to restring, but it’s a choke point that I’d like to upgrade from 1Ge. If only someone will build SOHO switches with it
Can we finally get some affordable 10GbE switches too?
Right?! Most affordable 10G switches are SFP+ which requires a lot more research to make sure you get the right modules and cabling.
A lot of those modules would work fine if the companies didn't fuck with their drivers.
The Linux ixgbe driver (for Intel 82598 and 82599 chipsets) was submitted with a whitelist for Intel SFP+ adapters. Linux devs added a module option to shut off the whitelist, and tons of stuff is perfectly compatible.
Cisco c3850-12x48u is about $150 on eBay.
The main problem is the idle power consumption. About 150w with nothing plugged in.
Not to mention the fans volume.
Just use DACs within the rack. Single mode fiber patches and SFP+ optics are also cheap and easy to find.
DACs are great, agreed. However try telling that to the guy next door. The reason ethernet got to be so popular was because of how familiar it was and similar it us to telephone wire. There were several other competing standards befofe ethernet won.
10GbE cards and switches help regular folk upgrade without needing to learn about DACs.
Always amazes me how few people seem to know about DACs. I use them extensively in racks. They're inexpensive and easy to use.
what is "affordable" to you? there are $100-$300 10GbE switches out there.
I'd like something that can replace my dinky little unmanaged 16-port gigabit switch for less than $300. Right now The only things I can find in that price bracket have maybe 5 ports. I'd settle for something that can just do 2.5/5Gb on all ports.
Wasn't it Realtek who made 1GbE popular as well by making the cheap 8111 IC over two decades ago?
At least it's not Marvell. But, man, can we pay another 17c and get .... I guess not Broadcom as they're waxing seriously dinkish, but who else?
Intel is probably still the gold standard. I'd pay a few bucks more to have something much more reliable.
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don't know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that's already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
Yeah, I had a bad experience with one of their other budget WiFi chips too. Maybe their hardware is getting worse, but they at least provide decent drivers.
They're apparently in talks to sell off their network division. Future there is really up in the air.
Great to (maybe) see 10GbE coming and the initial price sounds reasonable compared to currently avaipable 2.5G and 5G Realtek adapters.
Apparently Linux 6.16 will have the driver included.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Realtek-RTL8127A
Realtek itself has demonstrated its RTL8127 NIC working with an unknown switch using cheap CAT5E cables, and the company’s representatives at the booth emphasised this fact. However, we do not know which switch or router the company used. Yet, most 10GbE routers and switches are designed for CAT6 cabling.
Funny update about the cabling they used during the demo. There's really no reason Cat 5e couldn't work for short enough distances with little interference. It's more about the guaranteed minimum distance you can get, 55m with Cat 6 and the full 100m for any rating beyond that.
To make use of a 10Gb network, wouldn't I also need all of my equipment in between things to support 10Gb? Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
Last part that I need is for SSDs to come down in price to where ~80TB isn't too ridiculous (that's 40TB usable space with RAID1). Cut the price per TB in half two more times to make it there. Otherwise, spinning platters are the bottleneck with my 10Gb network.
Which probably would have happened in the next few years if not for tariffs.
modem
You don't need 10GbE WAN to make use of it on your LAN. If you have a lot of internal traffic (self hosting, for example), you really just need an internal router and some switches to support it. It's more convenient to have your modem be your main router, but that'd not necessary.
I think that these just aren't for me. I've considered upgrading my gear to 2.5Gb from 1Gb, but it just doesn't feel worth it to me. Maybe in ten years when everything's cheaper and more accessible.
If everything is constrained by your internet connection, it’s probably not worth it.
This will help within your home network, such as with a file server or vm host, large video files. Not everyone fits those use cases
I don’t fit those use cases either, but I want to
3~5Gbps fiber is readily available in a lot of places. And some of us have internal networks with network attached storage and various servers running locally.
I have a NAS and servers as well. Do you have a router separate from your modem that these pass through?
Do you have a router separate from your modem that these pass through?
I'm not them, but I do. I like that my ISP does not have any equipment on my internal network.
I have a separate switch if that's what you mean.
Also the NAS has 10Gbe already, I could have that plugged directly to my desktop for faster transfers until I get a 10Gbe switch.
Point being, 10Gbe at home isn't that far fetched. I've had Gbe for what? 20 years?
So you have NAS to switch, switch to PC? And then that switch goes to the router/modem?
Correct
Thanks, I'll have to consider this setup.
I use 10GbE for my internal network for my Ceph cluster. I’ve come about 80% of theoretical maximum for brief spikes from my NVMe drives rebalancing (mostly HDDs, few SSDs, couple NVMes).
Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
There are a few routers that have SFP+ slots so you can modulate to any laser signal your provider might require.
Otherwise if you're looking for strictly only a modem there are various available. They are usually simply called fiber to ethernet converter. Startek, Delock, Trendnet, FS
If you meant a switch, well 10G switches are abundant. Zyxel, Netgear, TP-Link all the usual suspects.
Serious question: What do you use a 10GbE adapter for? Are there ISPs which offer 10gigabit bandwidth? I suppose it would be useful on a LAN
edit:
Old meme is old. I'm in Central Wyoming with reasonably priced 2Gb/s FTTH and I could order 10Gb/s if I wanted it.
E.g., NAS on my LAN, especially for streaming high res video to devices in my house.
you're streaming over a Gb worth of video? even a full 4k blu ray rip is less than 1/10 of that.
Well, no I'm not. You're right. I miscalculated how much data was needed for video streaming. Even multiple simultaneous hi-res streams should stream fine with 1GbE.
But as an abstracted idea, you might want high throughput within your LAN for some reaosn, even if an ISP doesn't offer 10Gbps to your house.
I want it cause number is higher…
File transfers between devices is one reason. With NVME R/W speeds you can easily saturate 1Gb networking equipment. I think 10Gb is more than most people need most of the time but it would still be nice to have if it weren't so expensive. I just bought a small 2.5Gb switch to connect my server and PC together since both have 2.5Gb NICs and that seems to be a happy medium.
My gigabit connection is good enough for my NAS, as the read speeds on the hard drive itself tend to be limited to about a gigabit/s anyway. But I could see some kind of SSD NAS benefiting from a faster LAN connection.
Example of an ISP providing 10Gb/s in Portugal here and at 15 euros a month it's pretty cheap too.
That same ISP is from Romania and is also in Spain though curiously in this latter their Net Only 10Gb/s subscription costs €25 per month,
Personally I don't see the point of it for myself at home, but for a small business I can see it making sense.
LAN for sure.
There are multiple ISPs that offer 10Gbps Internet service in Japan and South Korea, I imagine other densely populated cities might have them also. There is also the Swiss ISP that offers 25Gbps Internet service since 2021.
Though I agree it is probably more used for LANs.
I connect my primary and backup servers on 10G directly via a crossover cable for transferring ZFS snapshots. No actual 10G switches or anything at the moment but if I add any more servers I need to back up I'll probably get a small 10G switch to put in between.
I’m backing up my physical media so I pretty regularly move hundreds of GB around. That would take forever on a 1G network.
I also take a ton of GoPro video(skydiving/motorcycle). An hour of 360 footage is ~50GB. So just moving that around is cumbersome.
I have a 5G fiber connection and even my wireless access point(AP) is 10G. Sure, you can’t get that to a single device(WiFi) but my phone connects at 2.4G up/down. So ~3 modern phones downloading games or whatever has the possibility to saturate my internet connection. They could saturate the AP by downloading media from my backups for offline playback for a flight or whatever.
8gbps here in USA... Quantum fiber.
I know of a few others in my area as well... Google Fiber, AT&T is offering 5gbps I think... Wyyerd is a local-ish one that's offering 8gbps...
Realtek, don’t they have issues with drivers in FreeBSD? Or am I horribly out of date.
In any case I’m excited, even if i barely tap into 1gbe capability most of the time.
Not sure if they provide official drivers for FreeBSD. Intel is usually a safer bet in that case.
