crote 1 day ago

Desktop computer are barely on 2.5GBASE-T, and there's still 5G in-between. I reckon it'll be 5-10 years until we'll see widespread 10G rollout, and it'll easily last another 10 before we need something better. The bigger issue is wireless access points. High-end ones are already on 10G today, and unlike desktops PoE is quite critical here.

25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T are dead-on-arrival: the spec exists, but nobody ever bothered to actually ship it. It requires yet another cable upgrade and the maximum distance is too short to be usable. And that's before we even looked at power consumption.

The obvious answer is fiber, but that's orders of magnitude more complicated to roll out. The fiber itself is a massive pain to install when you want to make it to-length on site, the currently-popular connectors require a lot of babysitting, it can't be backwards compatible with the old RJ45 stuff, and it can't do PoE. Pulling a standard single-mode fiber pair with LC connectors to every cubicle and access point? Not exactly an attractive option.

I personally think we're probably going to see some kind of Frankensteined (think GG45-like) RJ45-with-fiber pop up, but that won't be any time soon.

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phonon 1 day ago

The Realtek RTL8127 chip for 10GbE will cost $10, draw 1.95 W and is designed for motherboards. So I think you're a bit pessimistic on timelines...

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/realteks-usd10-tiny-...

crote 1 day ago

Key word being "widespread".

10GBASE-T dates back to 2006, and we've been seeing it on the odd prosumer workstation / elite gamer motherboard for quite a while now. But those markets aren't going to lead to a full office rewiring.

The entry-level market is more interesting: when will we see it on motherboards that retail for $100? When will we see it on the average Dell Optiplex? When will your ISP router come with 10G ports?

Will some people be using 10G before that? Definitely, and I'll be one of them. Will it be something to consider for the average office environment? Nah.