5 Gbps fiber connections just became available in my area but they're basically unusable because internal home networking just isn't there yet.
2.5 Gbps switches only recently became cheap enough for consumer purchasing, and the NICs are still mostly on the higher end mobos. Would be great to see 5GbE available at a good price point.
I still don't know what I'd use it for though. Looks like at home we've downloaded about 1TB in the last week, 7TB over the last 30 days. Upload is 0.25TB and 1TB for that period, so not enough sustained usage, and peak bandwidth used seems to be 260Mbps. No need for it, but I still want it.
ChatGPT reckons -
- 2Gbps connection can handle up to 80 4K streams or 666 Xbox gaming sessions.
- 5Gbps connection can handle up to 200 4K streams or 1666 Xbox gaming sessions.
Netgear's first wifi 7 router purports to be capable of up to 19Gb/s. Yeah, real world will see less, but it's likely it'll be able to make use of a 5Gbit internet connection, especially sharing that connectivity across a home or business with existing MU-MIMO & OFDMA, and new Multi-Link Operations (MLO).
It does definitely occur to me that the future of home connectivity might not be based on wires. (In fact it seems likely: eventually optical will eat the data-center market almost whole as it's power efficiency/bit scales & as signal integrity challenges ges bloom. And then it will probably down-market itself.) The wifi available today is much faster than most home networks, and is often easier to deploy.
The case for why we want faster speeds is less clear. First, I take issue with fixating on internet service speeds. I don't intend to upgrade past the affordable 300Mbit fiber I have now, for cost reasons. But I love faster home networks! For a while I was running 40Gb infiniband!
Personally I really enjoy being able to do really fast backups, or having sizable RAW photos that load at near-local speeds. If connectivity is good enough, we can consider downscaling the storage on individual systems & relying more on network. I also really dig game-streaming (via moonlight+sunshine) around the home; more throughout translates to lower latency & lets me raise settings.
You rated a 4k stream as 25Mbps, but for a 144Hz 36-bit color game, I definitely want much much much more than that. For watching even a 24fps movie, I still want much more than that (although that seems to be what many steaming services offer).
Yeah, at some point soon I'll have to go upgrade my APs at home with Wifi 7 ones, currently running a Unifi mix, with them all backhauled through Cat6 and PoE.
It's interesting to see wireless moving faster than ethernet now although it'll be hard to ditch the need for physically connecting APs for reliability and performance guarantees vs meshing them.
Internally I do have everyone's MacBooks backup with TimeMachine to a local Samba share. That's on a 2.5Gbps NIC and on NVMes, so theoretically all pushing performance limits. In reality we're just not pushing that much data between machines though, at least compared to streaming and gaming.
The bandwidth estimates were copied straight from ChatGPT, and over time will obviously improve. Things like GForceNow also present interesting opportunities to use the lowest latency and highest bandwidth connections upstream to ISPs, and then like you said, Steamboxes or Moonlight within the house. Ultimately though, I hate supporting IT at home, so would rather just buy an Xbox for the kids than build and support a gaming PC and moonlight.
Arista 7050 gearis pretty cheap on ebay and isnt too bad to configure w*th minicom. Needs 10 gig cards in the computers thoigh which are also not terrible on ebay
I moved to mini-pcs for home servers a while ago. They're silent, very powerful these days, and pretty affordable. I gave away my rack-mounts and haven't looked back. Pis for smaller/dedicated workloads.
All the other family's items are laptops, iPads, etc of various flavors.
Think, typical home usage, rather than anything that would benefit from a 10Gbps NIC.
Definitely my personal situation, but probably closer to the majority of the population than than the average HNer with a more dedicated pro gear.
I have an 8 node proxmox cluster (4 md-01 and 4 ser7) they rack mount in almost no space with beehive 3d printed mounts. You would be surprised what can benefit from 10 gig with all the super fast nvme drives these days
I wonder if RJ45 would still win over SFP in home networks after all. 2.5G is pretty widely present already and I see more and more 5/10Gb solutions, the only remaining problem is the price, while SFP remains with enthusiasts. Habits and backwards compatibility wins yet again on the long run.
I hope that the sub-$100 price tag translates well into the end product. Nowadays I can find Chinese-resold X540 (2x10 Gbps) cards cheaper than 2.5 Gbps units. I think the second-hand market is really killing these not-quite-10G network products for anything that isn't low-power.
2.5 Gbps switches only recently became cheap enough for consumer purchasing, and the NICs are still mostly on the higher end mobos. Would be great to see 5GbE available at a good price point.
I still don't know what I'd use it for though. Looks like at home we've downloaded about 1TB in the last week, 7TB over the last 30 days. Upload is 0.25TB and 1TB for that period, so not enough sustained usage, and peak bandwidth used seems to be 260Mbps. No need for it, but I still want it.
ChatGPT reckons -
- 2Gbps connection can handle up to 80 4K streams or 666 Xbox gaming sessions.
- 5Gbps connection can handle up to 200 4K streams or 1666 Xbox gaming sessions.
So, I guess I need to buy more Xboxes.