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802.11ax vs. 10GigE: Which will come first in the home?

Eug

Eug

Lifer
I used to think 10 Gig E would be the next big thing in the home for fast network speeds, but now I'm starting to think that 802.11ax WiFi will beat it to the punch in the consumer space.

I don't expect consumer 802.11ax devices to really to max out anywhere near max possible real-world speeds, but it'd be nice to see mainstream consumer 802.11ax devices hit 2-3 Gbps in real-world conditions.

I'm already network-speed-limited with my NAS, given that I have an SSD drive as my primary drive in my NAS. I'd like to at least double my access-to-NAS max speeds, which is currently 1 Gbps. (I don't want to have to try to deal with dual-Gigabit setups.)

Mind you, I'm not sure I'd want to rely upon WiFi for my NAS, so I'm rooting for faster home adoption of 10GigE over copper. (I have CAT6 in much of my house. No, not CAT6a, but CAT6 should be OK for these short distances.)

What's your take on this? I'd like to see this come to fruition with affordable pricing by 2020.
 
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We're probably going to see 802.11ax marketed in the consumer space before 10GigE. And not for any meaningful technological reason.

Wifi sells. Everyone is hip deep in smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart tvs, and everything else. "faster wifi" is a fantastic buzzword to sell more routers, while most consumers are still coming nowhere close to utilizing even a Gigabit ethernet connection, there's no reason for them to upgrade or care about 10GigE. Honestly you could put most people on an old 10/100 switch and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Like most hardwired tech, 10GigE going to be bigger in the corporate space and eventually trickle down to consumer gear.
 
WiFi sucks.

The reasons are simple. It's a shared medium. Shared between you and your neighbors. And there is a limited amount of frequencies, and thus a limited amount of bandwidth.

WiFi is awesome for hand-held devices. Because you don't want cables and connectors on your phone or tablet.

But for everything else, wired Ethernet is a lot faster, a lot more reliable, predictable and robust. Of course it's more effort to lay wires to all the rooms in your house. But once your house is wired, wired is a lot better for the majority of networking-applications.
 
For home, it doesn't really matter. 10gbE will likely never be necessary outside extreme enthusiast markets. If you're really that impatient, then you can pay the extra.

For business, wifi is terrible. Where better wifi will help is in long-range point-to-point scenarios, not access scenarios. As an access medium, wifi is terrible unless you have one antenna per client, and then there's not nearly enough spectrum to do that. Outside of a lab environment, stuff like 160mhz channel bonding for AC is just not viable. Even then, the primary environment for wifi outside of business is education, and in that sense, most are using crummy Chromebooks that don't even support more than two streams anyway.

Pushing the boundaries for the same of pushing the boundaries, while seeing no real practical gain, doesn't accomplish anything.

I still use the 100mbps switch built in to my ASA5505 and a single-stream Wireless N AP. They both more than handle my needs.
 
Honestly, right now, I don't see AC wifi in homes actually being fully utilized. The best use case for AC is in the education area where wired simply isn't a reasonable expectation anymore.

Wifi in businesses is hit or miss, depending on how it's designed but it's generally cheaper to have a rock solid wired network than to spend tens of thousands to have a robust wifi.

In residential space, I fail to see where anything over 100mbps is actually necessary. Most families won't actually use anything over that for several years to come. Outside of speedtest results, what's the point in having more bandwidth than you actually need and internet download speeds (outside of Netflix/Microsoft/CDN's, etc) are usually throttled on the the server side to avoid the servers being overloaded.
 
It's easier to market Wifi to the masses, look at how many think 5.3Gbps is the bee's knees and are using it with their 802.11g laptop and come to people like me when their Wifi doesn't work right. I wish 10GigE would catch on and be offered onboard and become the standard but eh, GigE is still pretty good and sub millisecond latency at all times can't be touched by Wifi.

edit- Also it is less expensive to set up LAG ports.
 
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Mushkins said:
Wifi sells. Everyone is hip deep in smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart tvs, and everything else. "faster wifi" is a fantastic buzzword to sell more routers
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Worse yet, people buy ever-cheaper laptops and netbooks. (I did! $120 for a Lenovo IdeaPad 100s Atom Z3735F / 2GB / 32GB Netbook. Couldn't resist.) Yet, at the same time, due to "price points", these netbooks, etc., only come with the very cheapest single-stream 2.4Ghz 802.11n wifi hardware. So those ever-more-powerful 5Ghz, AC, multi-band, super-duper routers are effectively useless, and the user would have been better off with a cheap 2.4Ghz N150 router (preferably running DD-WRT).

It might be different, if the cheap netbooks at least came with dual-band wifi, even if only N150. But they don't seem to.
 
drebo said:
I still use the 100mbps switch built in to my ASA5505 and a single-stream Wireless N AP. They both more than handle my needs.
Click to expand...
1 Gbps is already somewhat of a bottleneck for me. I keep all my important data (including large multimedia files), on my NAS. With SSD in the NAS for personal files 1 Gbps is acceptable, but not ideal. 100 Mbps would be woefully inadequate, however. Way too slow.

I also back up NAS to NAS over the Gigabit network. It's pretty slow, but in that case >Gigabit wouldn't help since the backup NAS uses platter drives.

XavierMace said:
I've got 10GbE in my house now. If you're willing to shop used it's starting to get reasonably priced.
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Well, one problem is getting 10 Gig E in the client devices.

What hardware are you running?
 
Well, one problem is getting 10 Gig E in the client devices.
Click to expand...

Yup. With the recent Xeon-d that integrate 10gbe, I'm hoping that we see a shift to 10gbe on client type motherboards soon. 10gbe expansion cards are relatively cheap compared with say, similar speed fiber channel HBAs, but "relatively cheap" is still fairly expensive for home use (quick newegg search is Intel nics ~300 usd for a single rj45 or two sfp), and even things like TB to 10gbe are pricey (cheapest I've seen is like $500 from b&h).
 
I just picked up a 28 port Netgear S3300 on amazon and it's a great piece of kit. 2 10GBase-T copper ports and 2 SPF+ 10G ports for $500 delivered. Fan not silent compared to my old cisco 10/100 switch but not crazy loud compared to the initial firmware on some of the origital Netgear 10G ones.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Worse yet, people buy ever-cheaper laptops and netbooks. (I did! $120 for a Lenovo IdeaPad 100s Atom Z3735F / 2GB / 32GB Netbook. Couldn't resist.) Yet, at the same time, due to "price points", these netbooks, etc., only come with the very cheapest single-stream 2.4Ghz 802.11n wifi hardware. So those ever-more-powerful 5Ghz, AC, multi-band, super-duper routers are effectively useless, and the user would have been better off with a cheap 2.4Ghz N150 router (preferably running DD-WRT).

It might be different, if the cheap netbooks at least came with dual-band wifi, even if only N150. But they don't seem to.
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Picked up a Broadwell based Dell Inspiron earlier this year. General usage for wife and kids so it doesn't need to be a powerhouse.
100mb ethernet and N wireless

I have a wired gigabit and a separate AC68 with plenty of other devices.
Copying files between the NAS and that Inspiron is not one of my favorite activities.
 
Eug said:
1 Gbps is already somewhat of a bottleneck for me. I keep all my important data (including large multimedia files), on my NAS. With SSD in the NAS for personal files 1 Gbps is acceptable, but not ideal. 100 Mbps would be woefully inadequate, however. Way too slow.

I also back up NAS to NAS over the Gigabit network. It's pretty slow, but in that case >Gigabit wouldn't help since the backup NAS uses platter drives.
Click to expand...

You're an edge case and certainly not indicative of the vast majority of users. Manufacturers don't cater to edge, except in extreme performance niches. If you want that, you'll have to pay. The hardware does already exist.
 
drebo said:
You're an edge case and certainly not indicative of the vast majority of users. Manufacturers don't cater to edge, except in extreme performance niches. If you want that, you'll have to pay. The hardware does already exist.
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I may be edge now, but remember, this is exactly what people said when the first Gigabit Ethernet Macs came out. That was in mid 2000, or 15 years ago.

Those macs were expensive, but I wouldn't have called them as having "extreme performance" by any means.

A lot of people on these types of boards thought Gigabit was superfluous, and that 100 Mbps Ethernet all that was needed for the foreseeable future.

I don't think it's unreasonable to want to see 10 Gig E built-in on higher end computers (like a high end iMac or something like that) by 2020. Hell, you can already do it now externally with a Thunderbolt adapter. And then if say Synology adds it to a small business NAS, I'd be all set.
 
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It is very hard to peak on 1 GiGe.......... Usally HDD are two slow to take an advantage of the that. Also home user do not have an application which take an advantage of 1 Gige speed.
WiFi is a broadcast domain half duplex platform.
5 WiFi device can easily slow down AC 1900 network real quick.
 
Mir96TA said:
It is very hard to peak on 1 GiGe.......... Usally HDD are two slow to take an advantage of the that. Also home user do not have an application which take an advantage of 1 Gige speed.
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As I mentioned earlier, SSDs in consumer NASes easily max out Gigabit nowadays. Some of the small business NASes now include 2xGigabit to compensate for this, but it's not really a solution for individual clients because the OSes aren't really set up to use two separate Gigabit connections well, and most motherboards don't have two Ethernet connections anyway.
 
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Eug said:
I may be edge now, but remember, this is exactly what people said when the first Gigabit Ethernet Macs came out. That was in mid 2000, or 15 years ago.

Those macs were expensive, but I wouldn't have called them as having "extreme performance" by any means.

A lot of people on these types of boards thought Gigabit was superfluous, and that 100 Mbps Ethernet all that was needed for the foreseeable future.

I don't think it's unreasonable to want to see 10 Gig E built-in on higher end computers (like a high end iMac or something like that) by 2020. Hell, you can already do it now externally with a Thunderbolt adapter. And then if say Synology adds it to a small business NAS, I'd be all set.
Click to expand...

Most people are still on 802.11n, which is plenty for internet streaming. Most people outside of this forum don't think "I'm going to use a wired connection because it's faster."
 
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Eug said:
As I mentioned earlier, SSDs in consumer NASes easily max out Gigabit nowadays. Some of the small business NASes now include 2xGigabit to compensate for this, but it's not really a solution for individual clients because the OSes aren't really set up to use two separate Gigabit connections well, and most motherboards don't have two Ethernet connections anyway.
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As I said; it is very HARD to peak off. AVG home does not have NAS. Let alone have a SSD NAS.
How often and how long it going to peaked out 1 Gige ?
How often home user doing a Large File transfer ?
I have 3750x I hardly go over 30 % avg
Back plane are 10 Gige which hardly go over 10%
Most of the consumer rated Nic (on MB) have very HIGH CPU usage.....
I do think as of right now 1 GBe is plenty.
However ease WiFi will excel and wire technology will go away.(eventually)
 
Mir96TA said:
It is very hard to peak on 1 GiGe.......... Usally HDD are two slow to take an advantage of the that..
Click to expand...
The maximum throughput of GigE is ~110MB/sec (1000Mbps - 12% TCP overhead). Any single modern 500+ GB SATA drive can max out GigE. Then especially in the case of a shared NAS, that pipe is going to be hit by multiple clients. For large data transfer over a network 10Gig would definitely be nice but I do agree with your assessment about average home users who seem to be satisfied with craptastical Wi-Fi or FE. I am pessimistic about the adoption of 10GigE but I can dream...
 
Personally I'd love to see 10gig wired stuff become more affordable, but I think you're right, it's the wifi stuff that will end up dominating just because it sells and wireless is a cool hip thing. "You don't need to run new wiring, and all your IoT devices will be faster!" will basically be the selling point. I personally have trouble actually seeing 10gb speeds over wifi especially with multiple devices talking at once. But even then security is my main concern with wifi. I don't want stuff like my NAS to be on the wireless network. My wireless network is on a separate vlan, and it only has access to stuff I actually want to access from my mobile devices. Everything else is wired.

I personally don't have a need for 10g yet though, but it sure would be nice for server back end interconnects at very least. 😀 But even in enterprise environments that I've worked in you typically see a bunch of teamed gigabit connections and it works fine.
 
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^^^ Heh. Re: your sig.

I still have my Trident 1 MB video card in my computer junk cabinet. It came in handy a few years back when I was trying to configure a PC with no on-board GPU, and I had no recent GPU to put in it. Worked fine in Win XP.
 
sdifox said:
I dont see 10GbE in consumer space any time soon.
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I personally think it depends on how fast Docsis 3.1 rolls out and at what levels. If they manage to get multiple Gb/sec out pretty quickly, people will need equipment to handle that type of speed. Throw in the new fiber networks that are already being offered at above Gbit speeds.
 
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