When will 10GBase-T reach the consumer level?

[azazel1024]

Power consumption is minimal. Those single port Ethernet only cards use a little less than 6 watts a piece with an SFP+ loaded. And you don't need fiber if the systems are within 30 feet (total cable running length). You could just use TwinAx Direct Attach cabling like I referenced in my first post. SFP+ modules are already attached to the cable, and the whole assemblies are down to $1 / foot at this point. Most cables below 5-7 meters are passive and very cheap to obtain. Above 5-7 meters they are active cables. Distance tops out around 15 meters. But in exchange you get a connection that has far less latency (.1us vs 2us), and far less power usage (1W vs 4-6W for 10gbe ethernet transceivers).

If you need more then that, I'd still personally go to 10gb SFP's for $20 a piece and then just whatever fiber length I needed. CAT6a still seems to have a long way to go to get into the home for 10gb, while fiber and twinax can reach the distances more easily, and therefore, used equipment prices are falling to reachable costs much more quickly than CAT6a.

Distance is around 50ft and I'd have to open walls to run new cabling is the problem.

Cat5e will do 10Gbase-t to 45m of length, which is mostly what I have. I have some Cat6 which will do 10Gbase-t to 55m of length, or 37m in a harsh alien cross talk environment (which doesn't exist in my house). I am not worried about being able to do 10GbE in my house at a later date even on the longer runs...except maybe the run from my ONT box to my router, which is my longest house run and is about 100ft in total length. That might not cut the mustard later* as it is Cat5e...but it also might (and I can change things up to make that just an AP and relocate my router to my server "closet" as the wiring already runs through there on the way from my ONT to my current router, which is in my basement office with my desktop).

So sadly twinax isn't an option for my setup for a variety of reasons (distance, not leaving exposed wires, not wanting to open walls).

So I may just have to wait for cheap 10GBase-t cards. I probably will do a direct network connection between my desktop and server though. I don't need 10GbE for my entire network. Not for probably a large number of years. Heck, I don't really NEED it right now as 2GbE is sufficient...its just...well if I CAN take advantage of the extra disk speed, why not? At best we are talking in the area of 2-4Gbps depending on disk utilization.

*Which of course begs the question if 10 gigabit, or at least faster than 1Gbps internet will ever actually be a thing I get to experience either A) in my life time or B) within the time frame I am likely to own the house...which is probably another 20-35 years.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Will regular cat6/rj45 do gigabit or do you need cat7 for that?

 

[imagoon]

Will regular cat6/rj45 do gigabit or do you need cat7 for that?

Cat6 does gigabit fine at 100m. If you mean 10GBe then you need Cat7 for 100meters on twisted pair. CAT6A is good for about 1/2 that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Cat6 does gigabit fine at 100m. If you mean 10GBe then you need Cat7 for 100meters on twisted pair. CAT6A is good for about 1/2 that.

Doh I meant 10gb. So between servers within a rack you could use cat6 for 10gb but not for longer hauls?

 

[imagoon]

Doh I meant 10gb. So between servers within a rack you could use cat6 for 10gb but not for longer hauls?

It is normally good for about 55m. So it would really depend on the size and number of racks.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It is normally good for about 55m. So it would really depend on the size and number of racks.

Oh that's pretty good then. I think that would even be enough for regular runs around the house. 55m is still a decent enough distance in a house. All my stuff is already cat6 so I suppose I could consider myself 10gb ready.

 

[azazel1024]

Cat6 does gigabit fine at 100m. If you mean 10GBe then you need Cat7 for 100meters on twisted pair. CAT6A is good for about 1/2 that.

No sir. Cat7 isn't a thing (if you look it up, the standard goes Cat3, 5, 5e, 6, 6a and 8 is the brandest new standard). Cat7 is a made up thing by some wire manufacturers for "better than Cat6a".

Cat5e is certified for gigabit up to 100m and for 10GbE up to 45m.

Cat6 is certified for gigabit up to 100m and for 10GbE up to 55m. 37m in a harsh alien crosstalk environment (IE big server room and/or running in LARGE trunks of cables).

Cat6a is cerfieid for 10GbE up to 100m in ALL environments and 30m for 40GbE.

Cat8, which I don't know if it has been finalized or not I think is certified for 100GbE to 30m and 40GbE to some indeterminante length. There is apparently a Cat8.1 which is effectively shielded Cat6a (possibly with tighter twists? Not sure) and Cat8.2 which has each twisted pair shielded from the reast.

All of these are "spec" this does not mean that it is the true maximum length. These are the spec lengths that should work so long as they are installed properly and terminated properly. Do it and it should work perfectly everytime.

I've terminated the ends of a 500ft box of Cat6 and it worked okay on gigabit. I DID see some packet loss on wireshark and my wirespeeds were not as rock steady or high as my actual installed Cat5e/6 wiring in my house is. I was getting from about 102-110MB/sec varying a fair amount. By comparison, on my longest run, which is 100ft to my shortest run of 3ft I get a nice steady 117.5MB/sec on the wire with effectively zero packet loss. That is the better part of 70% over spec and it still worked okay, though not okay enough that I'd personally want to install it at that length and use it.

 

[azazel1024]

There are two reasons for both the 100m max length certified as well as why 6a and 8 are seeing 30m lengths as a standard setting in.

The 100m was based on in wall/whole building installations. In general, unless the largest of the large buildings, a 100m run should be able to do probably 99% of all residential, commercial and industrial structure installations without needing an active repeater (probably because you have a network closet close enough that your runs never exceed that length, even if total distance from the workstation to the final server destination might exceed 100m).

TIA saw/sees no reason to certify something for longer than 100m as the instances where more length is needed are edge cases. That and it allows a somewhat relaxed standard. If they wanted to make it 150m, cable manufacturers would likely have to have much stricter construction on their cables, driving up prices for no good reason...just to accomodate edge cases from the .1-.5% of installations that need from 101-150m of cabling with no repeaters, still leaving .5% who need even more than 150m (and want to do it with copper).

The "newer" 30m cert on 6a and 8 you see is because of the recognition by the TIA that data centers and server rooms are deploying 40/100GbE and it isn't something that is going to be mainstream in building wiring for a VERY long time. 30m is generally more than enough to acommodate the needs for copper installs in a data center or server room. Again, no reason on needing to tighten up the standards more to certify at longer than those lengths, because for the use, distances further than that are edge cases, not mainstream.

In ALL of these cases, it matters more about a specific installation and a specific cable more than it does anything else. I've seen all kinds of tight and relaxed manufacturing on cables. I've seen Cat5e with 25AWG wiring and I've seen it with 24AWG wiring. I've seen Cat6 with and without the twisted pair seperator at both 23 and 24AWG. Now its possible some of these guys are marketing their Cat5e as such when it wouldn't actually pass specs...but with the exception of some of the REAL cheap guys (see CCA), their cables probably would all pass spec.

The better guys might end up passing spec and EXCEEDING it, so you could maybe stretch the install from 100m to 120m just fine. It isn't something I'd COUNT on though.

Just like a bit of me is nervous some day of bringing 10GbE up on my Cat5e installs. I know people who have tested 10GbE on Cat5 on 10-20m lengths and it worked perfectly. It wasn't originally intended for it though and a couple of my lengths to get up near 20m in my house. Its a small part of why I went Cat6, because it has slightly better regular performance and I know it has HAXT rating to 37m (though just how harsh is the question) and my longest run from my ONT box to my router is maybe 30m (though it is cat5e right now, but could be restrung at cat6) and most are in the 8-15m range in my house with 3-4 in the 20m range. All should be good with Cat5e...but Cat6 just seems like a bit of extra insurance since I have little doubt someday 10GbE will be the gold standard for wired Ethernet, even if 40/100GbE never becomes a consumer thing (something other than 40/100Gbase-t, maybe fiber or some other standard subsuming it making copper cabling irrelevant. I don't know and I can't predict anything with a drop of clarity out beyond about 10 years in the future).

 

[imagoon]

No sir. Cat7 isn't a thing (if you look it up, the standard goes Cat3, 5, 5e, 6, 6a and 8 is the brandest new standard). Cat7 is a made up thing by some wire manufacturers for "better than Cat6a".

Cat5e is certified for gigabit up to 100m and for 10GbE up to 45m.

Cat6 is certified for gigabit up to 100m and for 10GbE up to 55m. 37m in a harsh alien crosstalk environment (IE big server room and/or running in LARGE trunks of cables).

Cat6a is cerfieid for 10GbE up to 100m in ALL environments and 30m for 40GbE.

Cat8, which I don't know if it has been finalized or not I think is certified for 100GbE to 30m and 40GbE to some indeterminante length. There is apparently a Cat8.1 which is effectively shielded Cat6a (possibly with tighter twists? Not sure) and Cat8.2 which has each twisted pair shielded from the reast.

All of these are "spec" this does not mean that it is the true maximum length. These are the spec lengths that should work so long as they are installed properly and terminated properly. Do it and it should work perfectly everytime.

I've terminated the ends of a 500ft box of Cat6 and it worked okay on gigabit. I DID see some packet loss on wireshark and my wirespeeds were not as rock steady or high as my actual installed Cat5e/6 wiring in my house is. I was getting from about 102-110MB/sec varying a fair amount. By comparison, on my longest run, which is 100ft to my shortest run of 3ft I get a nice steady 117.5MB/sec on the wire with effectively zero packet loss. That is the better part of 70% over spec and it still worked okay, though not okay enough that I'd personally want to install it at that length and use it.

You may want to check your notes. Cat 7 (Class F) has a ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC TR-24750) number and is listed category that hasn't been approved by ANSI/TIA/EIA (TIA/EIA-568-B.2 addendum 1) but has specifications. I would also never put my name on someone installing out of the distance specs. Great, you got 500ft. I wouldn't put my name on it because once you screw with layer 1, you may as well toss your network in the trash. This is the same reason I hate seeing mod ends on in wall cable. It is a sign of a shoddy installer and seeing that normally means other short cuts else where.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, I wouldn't install out of distance specs on a job. I probably wouldn't even do it on a personal project, but if I had a reason to need to try something out of spec, I'd certainly give it a try before throwing up my hands and declaring it impossible.

Understanding why specs are the way they are is important for a variety of reasons, including sometimes needing to think outside the box on the solution to a problem instead of always rigidly adhearing to something. The later will pretty much always make sure something is done right, it doesn't necessarily make sure you can get it done at all though.

PS I was going off TIA/EIA, not ISO/IEC.

 

[alkemyst]

The reality is who needs 10G really in their home today?

 

[azazel1024]

The reality is who needs 10G really in their home today?

Small business owners/self employed?

I can see a self employed videographer needing/wanting 10GbE to be throwing files between their desktop and a server and that kind of thing.

Non-work related functions? Probably not a lot of people. I can think of a lot of people who would like it and can leverage it though.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I could use 10g between my servers tbh. All my data is on my file server so having 10g between that and vm servers would be nice.

 

[azazel1024]

I probably need it a bit less than that, but I am often throwing multi GB files between my desktop and server. Granted, mostly rips of my BRs (I am a horder. I admit it), but also device back-ups and stuff occasionally. It would also be nice for lower latency connections for some things. Running my LR library off my server itself instead of the RAW files locally would make some things easier to, and the higher bandwidth and lower latency would make at least desktop usage nicer (even if it does not a thing for laptop/tablet use).

Like I said, I am fine with 2Gbps I get with Windows 8/8.1 and SMB3 with a couple of GbE links...but native 10GbE would help with some things. I can't really say I need it, but I'd like it and I could certainly utilize it. It wouldn't be window dressing.

 

[cmetz]

The reality is who needs 10G really in their home today?

I do.

 

[alkemyst]

Small business owners/self employed?

I can see a self employed videographer needing/wanting 10GbE to be throwing files between their desktop and a server and that kind of thing.

Non-work related functions? Probably not a lot of people. I can think of a lot of people who would like it and can leverage it though.

That's not what I meant. Sure 10G would be faster than 1G connections in a home, but most...even small businesses will not benefit that much esp with using inferior 10G switches and the like.

At the low level the true connection speeds and the like would not be that different for MOST over 1G or better 2G port-channeled connections.

A lot of businesses don't see the ROI in moving to 10G or even 40G at this time.

 

[Ayah]

I could use 10g between my servers tbh. All my data is on my file server so having 10g between that and vm servers would be nice.

use infiniband. 50-75$ per card, 100-300$ for a >=16 port switch. easy.

 

[exdeath]

10 GbE is still being tightly manipulated and protected as a "premium enterprise" luxury to keep its prices inflated and profits high. There is no excuse for it to not have proliferated to the desktop and be dirt cheap by now.

I second Infiniband for home LANs.

Realistically though unless all your PCs are running SSD RAID arrays your storage media is going to be the bottleneck with 10 Gb. That's around 1000 MByte / sec.

 

[VirtualLarry]

10 GbE is still being tightly manipulated and protected as a "premium enterprise" luxury to keep its prices inflated and profits high. There is no excuse for it to not have proliferated to the desktop and be dirt cheap by now.

I agree. It's the same reason that SAS drives got a 12Gbit/sec spec, but not SATA drives. Instead, we get garbage like "SATA Express", with these hideous huge connectors.

 

[imagoon]

Yes it is all a conspiracy!

/sarcasm

 

[imagoon]

use infiniband. 50-75$ per card, 100-300$ for a >=16 port switch. easy.

I assume you are talking used. Most infiniband stuff seems to be floating around the same price point when you get to TCO. 1 Port DDR cards are typically over $500 with those basically going away for QDR. The switches are slightly cheaper and a generally higher price for cables, especially if the switch is cheap because it requires active cables.

 

[Ayah]

I assume you are talking used. Most infiniband stuff seems to be floating around the same price point when you get to TCO. 1 Port DDR cards are typically over $500 with those basically going away for QDR. The switches are slightly cheaper and a generally higher price for cables, especially if the switch is cheap because it requires active cables.

correct.

 

[Mark R]

I'm tempted to pick up one of the 10G switches from a now bust UK manufacturer of ultra-high performance switches for HPC and HFT applications.

You can get them for under $40 per 10Gport, or $150 per 40G port, and with latency of under 130 ns and true-non-blocking construction, they will eat things like a Cisco Nexus for breakfast.

 

[_Rick_]

I've been looking at the ASUS Hadoop/cloud-oriented mainboard with twin SFP+ onboard (400 euro for a nice package http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/P9DMHSAS10GDUAL/). They also sell a 200 euro NIC. Cables are about 100 euro for 10 meters, but don't scale any longer. That might be trouble, wiring standard RJ45/Cat6 is relatively easy, but getting fiber to go the distance.... might be an issue.

My use case is on a high-end NAS (2 SSD + 12 spinners) that serves essentially as storage for everything that isn't installed to the local disk on my desktop. Profiles, home directories, etc are all mounted there. Additionally, that thing routes my internet, provides a few services and should in theory also work as a DVR, live-streaming HDTV.

Who knows what else I'll put on there. I'll be keeping the server hardware for at least 5 to 6 years (waiting for two die shrinks between upgrades), so I'd get the 10Gbit mostly for scaling purposes. Currently it adds about 50% to the cost of my planned upgrade. Driver support should be okay as well, I think, but haven't heard anything about it yet.

Once the Broadwell/Skywell Xeon platform is launched, I'll be having another long hard look, since I believe my update can wait until then. By then, I hope that copper has made its way into the budget enterprise market as well. SFP+ just isn't all that great.

 

[imagoon]

I've been looking at the ASUS Hadoop/cloud-oriented mainboard with twin SFP+ onboard (400 euro for a nice package http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Servers_Workstations/P9DMHSAS10GDUAL/). They also sell a 200 euro NIC. Cables are about 100 euro for 10 meters, but don't scale any longer. That might be trouble, wiring standard RJ45/Cat6 is relatively easy, but getting fiber to go the distance.... might be an issue.

My use case is on a high-end NAS (2 SSD + 12 spinners) that serves essentially as storage for everything that isn't installed to the local disk on my desktop. Profiles, home directories, etc are all mounted there. Additionally, that thing routes my internet, provides a few services and should in theory also work as a DVR, live-streaming HDTV.

Who knows what else I'll put on there. I'll be keeping the server hardware for at least 5 to 6 years (waiting for two die shrinks between upgrades), so I'd get the 10Gbit mostly for scaling purposes. Currently it adds about 50% to the cost of my planned upgrade. Driver support should be okay as well, I think, but haven't heard anything about it yet.

Once the Broadwell/Skywell Xeon platform is launched, I'll be having another long hard look, since I believe my update can wait until then. By then, I hope that copper has made its way into the budget enterprise market as well. SFP+ just isn't all that great.

SFP+ 10gbe fiber has a max range of 80km at the moment. Not long enough?