10 Gigabit ethernet and fiber optic cables

Radiation · 22 Sep 2010 at 14:18

When will this become an option for the average home network?

I know its not really needed for most people and won't be for some time but it seems like the tech should be available and be getting cheaper by now regardless, also when it comes to optical cables surely they can't cost that much for small lengths now?

Optical audio cables can be had for cheap, though i suspect the electronics dealing with it are low bandwidth, i don't see why proper networking stuff would cost so much more, surely its about time we started to move over as once we have fiber optic cables with certain standards and connections we're sorted, we then only have to worry about upgrading the hardware.

branddaly · 22 Sep 2010 at 14:27

Nielsen's Law covers bandwidth, and that states 50% per year. If you consider Virgins 50mbps service to be affordable and average, that would take 15 year to get to 10gig. However, knock off 3 years because they are rolling out 100mbps this year. So 12 years ish.

Radiation · 22 Sep 2010 at 14:56

branddaly said:
Nielsen's Law covers bandwidth, and that states 50% per year. If you consider Virgins 50mbps service to be affordable and average, that would take 15 year to get to 10gig. However, knock off 3 years because they are rolling out 100mbps this year. So 12 years ish.

Interesting, i didn't know there was a law for bandwidth like there is for processors, i was mainly talking about home lan though which i would think is cheaper and easier to upgrade, yet it doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon, theres not even any talk of it as far as i've seen, why is that?

branddaly · 22 Sep 2010 at 15:17

Radiation said:
Interesting, i didn't know there was a law for bandwidth like there is for processors, i was mainly talking about home lan though which i would think is cheaper and easier to upgrade, yet it doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon, theres not even any talk of it as far as i've seen, why is that?

Ah, I didn't realise you were refering to the LAN. The main reason will be demand and cost. The vast majority of home users are still running 100mbps LAN's (restricted by the switch in their router) or even just wireless networks. Some kit is now providing 1 gbps wired LAN, but this tends to be more expensive. Eventually its likely to become the norm, either due to demand, or more likely cost, as the components required to build a 1 gig switch device become as cheap as those to build a 100mbps device. The jump from 1 to 10 gig is quite a large one, and for the average home user there is just no demand, I have no idea how long it will take. I've had 100mbps at home for almost 10 years, and I'm only just thinking about upgrading to 1 gig now.

Dist · 22 Sep 2010 at 15:26

They won't start selling 10 gigabit NICs, switches and such in a home environment until there is a need for it. You have to remember that the vast majority of users barely saturate their gigabit ethernet network as often the HDD isn't capable of the speeds, and unless you are running some sort of RAID setup and need to transfer large files over the network to another machine using RAID to allow for enough throughput from the NIC to the HDD then you won't even come close to saturating 10Gb/s.

And for those rare few people who do want to run insane setups like that in a home environment, well they can always pay for the business grade equipment used for 10Gb/s.

When there is a real need for 10Gb/s then there will start being 10Gb/s devices developed for the home environment. But since 1Gb/s is perfectly fine for streaming 1080p video across the network, and transfering large files at reasonable speeds (often not bottlenecked by the gigabit network) then it won't get replaced any time soon, there simply isn't a need for it yet.

branddaly · 22 Sep 2010 at 15:40

Dist said:
But since 1Gb/s is perfectly fine for streaming 1080p video across the network

100mbps is generally fine for streaming 1080p video. Blu Ray has a bandwidth of 48mbps for video/subtitles/audio. The majority of stuff that people may download from that interwebby thing are compressed further, so have even more limited bandwidth requirements.

HazardO · 22 Sep 2010 at 15:43

Fibre is cheap, 10Gbit fibre transceivers however are very expensive, (~£500 IIRC), so each adapter would need a £500 transceiver. If you wanted a switch as well, you would be looking at £1000 per machine + adapters (~£500 per machine) + switch (£5000). Not really a home solution for the forseeable future. However 10GBaseT will run over CAT5e for 40M or CAT6a for 100, so back to back, you could have 10G networking for ~£500 per machine, if you want a switch as well though...

Radiation · 22 Sep 2010 at 21:00

Are transceivers expensive for real practical reasons or artificially high, low demand business type reasons?

Considering fiber is relatively cheap now, it would be good if it started to become a general data cable for most electronics, not just networking.

Zarf · 23 Sep 2010 at 23:56

Intel's Light Peak is the answer when it comes out next year. It'll be relatively cheap (they want it to replace USB) and supports 10GBps over 100meters to begin with (They think they will be able to take it to 100Gbps), and it should be pretty trivial to run multiple cables and team the connections. You won't even need switches or hubs, just daisy chain your pc's.

It'll eventually replace all your connectivity cables - Networking, USB, Video, Audio. It should even end up in your living room, you'll be able to replace all the cables round the back of your home theater setup with a a few light peak cables to daisy chain everything together, As it can run multiple protocols simultaneously - networking, video, sound etc over the same cable at the same time.

I'm really excited by the potentials here for a unified home computing system, where all your pc's and peripherals are connected to one another - so you could connect a keyboard and mouse to your living room tv and use the power of your gaming PC from the other side of your home - with 100m to play with distance of the screen from the pc isn't a problem and it'll still be low latency.

Radiation · 24 Sep 2010 at 12:17

Cool that sounds just like what i was thinking of, im a bit surprised its not come out already as i imagine it would pretty much take care of cables once and for all, there might be changes to the spec but once you have fiber + power in one cable your pretty well sorted.

branddaly · 24 Sep 2010 at 13:08

Zarf said:
You won't even need switches or hubs, just daisy chain your pc's.

Ekk....token ring all over again. The specs look good, should be an interesting system, and should have the affect of driving down the cost of fast POE switches which will probably provide some competition.

platypus · 24 Sep 2010 at 14:43

Why would we need more than gigE anyway? Fast Ethernet is fine in almost all applications at present, can't see anything past gE being needed for a long time.

Radiation · 24 Sep 2010 at 14:47

platypus said:
Why would we need more than gigE anyway? Fast Ethernet is fine in almost all applications at present, can't see anything past gE being needed for a long time.

Because if fiber is now relatively cheap and if the hardware side of things isn't too advanced and expensive why not make it more available, once we have an all in one fiber and power cable we're pretty much sorted.

Dist · 24 Sep 2010 at 15:01

Radiation said:
Because if fiber is now relatively cheap and if the hardware side of things isn't too advanced and expensive why not make it more available, once we have an all in one fiber and power cable we're pretty much sorted.

There are 2 ways that technology advances, either you have a need, and build technology to aid that need. Or you implement new technology, hoping new stuff will be developed to take advantage of that new technology.

The problem is, there is not a need for 10 gigabit ethernet yet, and in the home environment the limits of gigabit ethernet havn't been fully reached yet so making a push for 10 gigabit ethernet now would be a waste.

Just because you 'can' set up a 10 gigabit network doesn't mean you should.

Zarf · 25 Sep 2010 at 05:01

Dist said:
There are 2 ways that technology advances, either you have a need, and build technology to aid that need. Or you implement new technology, hoping new stuff will be developed to take advantage of that new technology.

The problem is, there is not a need for 10 gigabit ethernet yet, and in the home environment the limits of gigabit ethernet havn't been fully reached yet so making a push for 10 gigabit ethernet now would be a waste.

Just because you 'can' set up a 10 gigabit network doesn't mean you should.

I, personally, could take advantage of 10Gb, I've got a file server running 8disks in hardware RAID, which bench at around 500MB/s reads, 400MB/s writes. I do move a fair amount of stuff over my current Gigabit connection because i'm running SSDs on all my rigs and have limited local storage space, so I juggle installs around a bit.
I don't care enough to get a managed gigabit switch to team connections, or splash out on current 10Gb fibre, but once Light peak arrives and brings the price down to usb cable levels I'll be all over it like a rash.

Dist · 25 Sep 2010 at 11:37

Lightpeak will still be years away, and by the sounds of your setup you are closer to a small business than what an average home connection would have, so you can hardly expect any advances in home networking to be aimed at you. Unless you are willing to wait a Long time, the only option you have is to either pay for business grade 10Gb/s equipment, or just put up with gigabit.

Yamahahahahaha · 25 Sep 2010 at 12:20

Multipathing is a cheaper solution than getting 10GbE infrastructure for applications that need more than 1Gbit.

500MB/s is plenty for a huge number of applications, if you need more than that, you're probably doing something wrong.