Will 5Gb/s be enough?

[13Gigatons]

Long ago I had 10 megabit internet and a 1Gb/s network, now I have 1Gb/s internet and still the same 1Gb/s network.
Now after 20 years the network gods have decided to finally upgrade the standard. The 802.3bz standard will bring a long overdue speed upgrade.

5GBASE-T is expected to work with most Cat 5e/6/6a installs. (And 5GBASE-T will mostly be the standard with 10GBASE-T being rarely offered.)

Will this be enough of a upgrade to last for the next 20 years?

With storage and WiFi making leaps in speed it seems the line speed is dragging behind. Networking gear is updated less often and is usually more complicated and labor intensive. So it really needs to be worthwhile.

 

[mxnerd]

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-usb-wi-fi-adapter/

Router used is Netgear Nighthawk X4S AC2600

The throughput is tested both at a “close” 8’ (2.4m) distance with direct line of sight, and also at a “far” 30’ (9.1m) distance with an obstructing floor and wall in the way, as well as some metal ductwork intervening.

The results are presented below, with all speeds reported in Mbps, and the top results in bold.

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5GBASE-T will be fixed 5Gbps up to 100m using cat6 cable.

 

[13Gigatons]

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-usb-wi-fi-adapter/

Your post is off topic and doesn't add anything to the thread. I don't care about today's WiFi, it isn't capable of 1Gb/s speed. I think it tops out at 300mbps but that is just home WiFi.

Storage devices will also keep getting faster and allowing servers to be faster. Any network, home, small or medium size business the network will fast become the bottle neck.

Over the next 10-15 years our laptops and desktops will have 5Gb/s cards by default, seems they are dragging their feet.

 

[mxnerd]

My bad, misread your question.

Maybe the reason internet & wifi technology advance faster than wired tech is because home users are paying the technology out of their own pocket and the money is poured into the development. For business, there is no such money.

There are already 25GBASE-T/40GBASE-T standards, but who is going to pay for it?

Not everyone needs 1Gbps or more for internet/LAN, I'm very happy with my cable 30Mbps internet & 1Gbps LAN.

Cost is a major factor, either for home or business.

I believe 5Gbps will be good for many years, but for how long? Probably even engineers won't know.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

They're dragging their feet because demand isn't there. Most people don't even have NAS boxes. The few nerds who actually want >1Gbps in-home will do LAGG or buy used Infiniband gear on eBay. Wifi is everywhere and it's good enough for 90+% of applications, since most home LANs are just used to share a <100Mbps WAN connection.

The most common home application for wired ethernet still seems to be backups, and for that, 1Gbps is almost fast enough not to be annoying in most cases. But consumer computers have been shipping from the factory with <200GB primary storage (HDDs then, SSDs now) for a decade+, which tells that the amount of data people are backing up isn't any higher than it was back when.

If data really starts to bloat again, and multi-computer setups become more common on the home, then there'll be more demand for high speed networking. But with streaming and cloud supplanting managing your own data landfill... I don't see LAN speeds continuing to be a bottleneck. If anything, the average consumer in 2028 will probably have _less_ locally stored data than they do now, and less need for a high speed LAN.

 

[mxnerd]

The few nerds who actually want >1Gbps in-home will do LAGG or buy used Infiniband gear on eBay.

Exactly. OP can do what Linus did in this vieo.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Gig is good enough for most purposes, you can even build a respectable SAN/VM environment with teamed gig links. 10 gig is the next best thing but still cost prohibitive so only reserved for those who truly need it, vs those just installing it for the sake of it. For home, I use gigabit for most things but could get away with 10/100. I have a 10/100 expansion switch and I actually do have some stuff running on it to free up ports on the gig one. It's even fast enough to stream HD content to my Kodi box via NFS.

I want to look at teaming for my file server actually, but I'll need to buy another NIC. That would require to shut down the server which in turn involves shutting down my entire environment as all my VMs run off there.

Once 4k content comes out then that might also call for 10 gig. Not sure how much bandwidth it's going to take.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Gig is good enough for most purposes, you can even build a respectable SAN/VM environment with teamed gig links. 10 gig is the next best thing but still cost prohibitive so only reserved for those who truly need it, vs those just installing it for the sake of it. For home, I use gigabit for most things but could get away with 10/100. I have a 10/100 expansion switch and I actually do have some stuff running on it to free up ports on the gig one. It's even fast enough to stream HD content to my Kodi box via NFS.

I want to look at teaming for my file server actually, but I'll need to buy another NIC. That would require to shut down the server which in turn involves shutting down my entire environment as all my VMs run off there.

Once 4k content comes out then that might also call for 10 gig. Not sure how much bandwidth it's going to take.

Netflix has been streaming 4k for a while...

http://bgr.com/2013/09/26/netflix-4k-streaming/

Sounds like it still eats less than 20Mbps.

 

[13Gigatons]

I guess you guys are making point that 1Gb/s is enough and 20 years ago I thought 1Gb/s was super fast when my Internet was only measured in megabits. Today however 1Gb/s Fiber Internet is being offered at $70.

I'd prefer to install a much faster network then is needed and then grow into it over the next 10 years without paying the enterprise tax.

 

[XavierMace]

This was already beaten to death in the 10GbE thread. I don't know why it keeps coming up. There's been limited "progress" because the market for it is almost zero. Unless you can afford an all flash NAS/SAN, spindles aren't even going to saturate a pair of GbE links. Having 5/10GbE doesn't magically make everything faster. True gigabit internet still has extremely limited availability overall. Internet that can exceed that is unlikely to see widespread availability in the near future.

If you have enough money to have multiple devices that can actually saturate a GbE connection (or two), then you could afford to get faster than GbE connectivity between them. You can do a 4Gb/s FC setup (meaning switches, cables, and HBA's) for under $300. 40Gb/s Infiniband for under $600 as long as you can live with short cabling distances. The consumer market has ZERO use for these speeds at this time, therefore there's zero incentive to spend money putting faster interfaces on motherboards. I work in IT. I know a lot of people. Outside of myself, the number of people I know who could actually use a faster than GbE network can be counted on 1 hand. I know more people who have switched over to all WiFi than people asking for faster than GbE.

It took me 15 hours to replicate 5.1TB on my SAN to a second SAN over GbE (95.6 MB/s). After that, it replicates every two minutes (changed blocks) which takes about 8 seconds. If GbE is causing you issues with your backups, you've got a bad backup strategy. I was previously running load balanced 4Gb FC between my servers for 16Gb/s of bandwidth. Because of the limitations of spindles the ACTUAL performance advantage I got from that was MAYBE 30MB/s in perfect scenarios. In the mean time the electricity cost from the power hungry Fiber Channel infrastructure was costing me $200/yr in electricity.

It takes me 2 minutes to copy a 15Gb Bluray rip over GbE. Again, because of spindles, if network bandwidth wasn't a factor, that might drop to a bit over a minute. I hate waiting as much as the next guy, probably more. But to get it below that, I'd have to replace 40TB of spindles with SSD's. That's $11k at current prices (MX300 2TB @ $550). I'm not ATOT'er salary so that's not remotely in my budget, but if it was, an extra $600 for Infiniband wouldn't even make me blink an eye.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

This was already beaten to death in the 10GbE thread. I don't know why it keeps coming up. There's been limited "progress" because the market for it is almost zero. Unless you can afford an all flash NAS/SAN, spindles aren't even going to saturate a pair of GbE links. Having 5/10GbE doesn't magically make everything faster. True gigabit internet still has extremely limited availability overall. Internet that can exceed that is unlikely to see widespread availability in the near future.

Not to mention routing hardware that can actually handle 1Gbps.
I slapped DD-WRT x86 in a VM onto a 3.7GHz Phenom II X6 1045T and it's running like a dream

 

[XavierMace]

I didn't mention that because it's the cheapest part of the equation if you know what you're doing. I've been running a virtual router (PFSense then Sophos) for years now.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Heck, I have a "split" gigabit network, with an AC1200 bridge in-between. The most I can manage over the bridge, it seems, is around 40-42MB/sec to my local NAS on the other gigabit segment.

I would love to have an all-gigabit wired network, and very nearly do, except that I would have to string some ethernet under a cable-concealer at the doorway, or string ethernet up and around the door frame.

Quite frankly, wireless is easier, in some senses.

Maybe, if I start online gaming, I'll move to all-wired. (Except for the laptops / tablets, which aren't used to game on.)

Edit: As an experiment, I temporarily connected my halves of my gigabit network together with a wire, and tried copying some ISOs from and to my TS-451 QNAP NAS, with four 5TB Seagate desktop HDDs in RAID-5. The client box(es) have SSDs in them, and Intel NICs.

Read from TS-451, was a fairly steady 113MB/sec.
Writes, well, I was doing several transfers at once, but when I let one of them finish, and paused the other, I saw it go up to 95MB/sec.
Writes to my other NAS, with four 2TB Hitachi 5400 RPM "CoolSpin" HDDs in RAID-10, vassellated between 20MB/sec and 40MB/sec, never really hit over that.

Even at that speed, transferring 15GB worth of ISOs still takes a slightly annoying amount of time, so ... yeah, I'm onboard the 5Gbit/sec Cat6 copper ethernet train, I guess. Bring it on!

My two bigger NAS units both sport dual gigabit ethernet ports, so if I invested in some more expensive switches to do LAGG / teaming with, then I might see even higher speeds. At least, on my fastest NAS (the TS-451). I don't think either one of my other NAS units would really exceed the speed of a single gigabit LAN connection.

 

[XavierMace]

My two bigger NAS units both sport dual gigabit ethernet ports, so if I invested in some more expensive switches to do LAGG / teaming with, then I might see even higher speeds.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Maybe on reads, but it's not saturating a single GbE on writes currently, so having more network bandwidth isn't going to do anything.

 

[Genx87]

In the enterprise this is also happening. More and more applications are in the cloud. More and more devices are wireless. 1 Gbps switching has been around for 15+ years. And I don't see a whole lot of reason to move up given internal network bandwidth requirements are dropping.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I guess you guys are making point that 1Gb/s is enough and 20 years ago I thought 1Gb/s was super fast when my Internet was only measured in megabits. Today however 1Gb/s Fiber Internet is being offered at $70.

I'd prefer to install a much faster network then is needed and then grow into it over the next 10 years without paying the enterprise tax.

You're not wrong to want that. But no, my point at least, is that you aren't really going to be able to not pay the enterprise tax unless demand for >1GbE skyrockets and vendors move to fill that demand. Unless you start doing the ebay scavenger hunt thing.

It's awesome that you have FttH, but the average residential WAN connection in the good old U S of A is <8Mbps.