Ub3rslay3r:

I'm not sure I follow what you mean regarding the tolerances. Most people buy pre-terminated cables for their networks, so they don't have to deal with the tight tolerances themselves. Fiber has also dropped in price significantly, so I wouldn't be too surprised to see that become more common in the home for those who want very high bandwidth.

I was referring to stuff like signal quality. As pointed out earlier, a lot of existing infrastructure is limited to stuff like Cat5, which isn't great for 10Gbps. Since Ethernet is exposed to the average person and the average person knows nothing about the different categories, you can't rely on people getting proper cables for a proper signal.

You should! Most of the equipment is not plug-and-play, but if you have a decent amount of networking knowledge and persistence you can achieve excellent results. You can find 10Gbps dual-port SFP+ enterprise cards on eBay in the $20-$30 USD range. I also found you can get some dual-port Broadcom 10G copper cards for around $30-$40 USD. However, if you do go that route, be sure you research the specific card's you're looking at to ensure you can get them working with your computer and OS. Some of the HP cards specifically use a port that looks identical to standard PCI Express and even uses PCI Express signalling, but the pinout was adjusted to force vendor lock-in. Those cards cannot be made to work in a normal PC.

I might some day. I've seen some pretty cheap ones out there, but, it's a lot for me to invest in. Not because of the cost of going to fiber (that's cheap) but everything else. There's a lot I'd have to overhaul with my home server to make it worthwhile. I'm not even unhappy with 1Gbps, so I don't think upgrading to 10 is a smart investment for me. Sure, I could probably take advantage of it if I had such a thing, but I already have waaaay too many ambitious side projects at home. I definitely won't be upgrading my network until I get SSDs in my server. Right now, I'm using laptop HDDs in RAID1. But, good to know about the HP cards though - I wasn't aware of that.

MegaFalloutFan:

What do you mean "all that bandwidth? Its just under 300 mb/s its slower then SATA SSD and Slower then RAID I can give you bunch of case uses: 1) NAS 2) Home Ethernet [using otehr PCs with feeling of being "local"] 3) Uncompressed home streaming of 4K content and gaming 4) In homes with 2 or more PCs, everyone can use the NAS, stream 4K and do whatever they want to do without much delay [IMHO 2.5G is still too slow, its just under 300MB/s, 5G should be minimum] for big families with you know big houses and bunch of kids, you need 10G Ethernet otherwise kids will be arguing Lots of people dont want heat near them even if PC is fully custom modded and water cooled and cost more in moding then average PC for otehr people, to save money and to get rid of heat and noise, you can build huge ventilated ugly PC somewhere in a closet, people in USA that lots of them live in private houses can shove it in the basement , apartment dwellers use some closet. And then you have thin client with 5G or 10G Ethernet, you 4K TV/screen and you connect to the PC remotely, you have you desk free of PC cases, noise, heat, dust, and you enjoy using powerful PC

Thanks for the example. Still there ARE currently houses with families and multiple 4K streaming clients, do such issues occur right now? This is a serious question since I have honestly never heard that 1G ethernet is the limit for anything right now. How much bandwidth does uncompressed 4K need? Also, how do you think you're getting 4K gaming from the computer somewhere else to your display monitor / TV? That does work with LAN? Please help me learn here since I seem to lack knowledge about the subject.

fantaskarsef:

Thanks for the example. Still there ARE currently houses with families and multiple 4K streaming clients, do such issues occur right now? This is a serious question since I have honestly never heard that 1G ethernet is the limit for anything right now. How much bandwidth does uncompressed 4K need? Also, how do you think you're getting 4K gaming from the computer somewhere else to your display monitor / TV? That does work with LAN? Please help me learn here since I seem to lack knowledge about the subject.

Single Gigabit is enough for 4K streaming, but if you have 2-3 streams at once? 100MB/s that the speed of single gigabit, slower then PMR HDD. If you just want to game and thats it, its easy. You can stream games to anything now, you can use hardware like steam link or software like steam link app [you can stream to any hardware with Android and probably iOS], there are apps that use GForce streaming. If you want to hide a PC in closet and use it remotely, you use a thin client or a small PC. https://pro.harman.com/insights/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Video-Bandwidth-Chart.png HDMI uses higher bandwidth, https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/CEDIA/UploadedImages/5092830d-729a-4c31-bddd-6bff0f2af4ff/180611_HDMI_data_rates_for_4K_HDR_formats.png

fantaskarsef:

Thanks for the example. Still there ARE currently houses with families and multiple 4K streaming clients, do such issues occur right now? This is a serious question since I have honestly never heard that 1G ethernet is the limit for anything right now. How much bandwidth does uncompressed 4K need? Also, how do you think you're getting 4K gaming from the computer somewhere else to your display monitor / TV? That does work with LAN? Please help me learn here since I seem to lack knowledge about the subject.

The reason those households have multiple 4K streaming services is because they're either: A. Using an online service, where you get very lossy compression (like Netflix or Youtube). Even 50Mbps is enough to stream 4K from online services. B. They have a device DLNA or other media-sharing protocols (such as Plex or ReadyMedia), some of which can dynamically adjust bit rate.

Video streaming was never an issue. Even 1 Gigabit Ethernet is complete overkill for MPEG 4 type video streams (H264 or HEVC), even multiple ones. 1000mbps is much more limiting in file transfers (of any kind). HDD's have crossed that speed quite a long time ago, and SSD-cached servers/NAS are easily capable of delivering 4-5 times that speed (or more for high-end ones with NVMe). When copying data HDD to HDD: For 1.0 - the limit is the network, and even worse, when 2 or more users access things simultaneously, it becomes unbearably slow. For 2.5 - the limits are in the HDD's themselves, so the network stops being a bottleneck. SSD's are still too fast for 2.5 - This is the ideal speed for home use (single or max 2 simultaneous users) For 5.0 - Typical (SATA) SSD's and network speed is matched, so there is no obvious bottleneck anywhere - This is the ideal for SOHO. --- so far we can still do away with Cat5/Cat5e, no cable replacement needed --- 10.0 is overkill still for most situations, as it's faster than any SATA drive, and way too expensive for home or small business use, due to the need of replacing cables (which can get EXTREMELY expensive if walls need to be ripped out to do so) Really, the sweet spot is either 2.5 or 5.0, and we'll see in time which standard wins out (so far it seems that more investments are going into 2.5 than in 5.0, and new motherboards include 2.5 capable chip, not 5.0)

Realtek is slowly getting its chip into some products: https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Express-Controller-Converter/dp/B07RF4SZ8R Not sure what brand this is, probably complete no-name Chinese thing, but $30 for a 2.5gbps card is not bad at all ! In the EU there are some DeLOCK branded cards which cost around 38-45 Eur. I wonder if Intel is capable of going lower than that.

Alessio1989:

USB provides all but better latency than ethernet.

Thunderbolt should take care of that latency issue.

Astyanax:

Thunderbolt should take care of that latency issue.

Yes, but what about the wire pricing? Ethernet is a big win there.

Alessio1989:

Yes, but what about the wire pricing? Ethernet is a big win there.

Massive, not just big ! I can't imagine the cost of 100m of USB 3.2 Gen 2 (or in layman's terms: 10gbps) compatible cable.... it's also probably also impossible to do. USB wasn't meant for long-distance communication. Ethernet has one little feature that few people know about - Transmission power adaptation. When negotiating, the two cards boost the signal by simply transmitting at higher voltage (until the preset limit is reached, in order to get a recognizable signal on the other side). It's like a radio transmitter that increases the amplifier gain so people further away can hear it. I have done hacks in the past (by shunting resistors) that basically "overvoltage" a network card, and managed to get a clean 100mbps network at cable length of over 180 meters, which is WAY out of spec ! (If the receiving card was close, it would have probably being burnt by the too high voltage, but due to the distance, the signal was just "in spec" at the receiving end) The typical 300m rolls of Ethernet cables which are "solid core" are also much better signal carriers than the thin multi-wire USB cables, but also much more rigid. USB is designed for flexibility and endurance, not for signal quality over long distance. Sorry for the long post...