[HN Gopher] Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt
___________________________________________________________________
Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt
Author : kohlschuetter
Score : 183 points
Date : 2026-01-27 20:57 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kohlschuetter.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (kohlschuetter.github.io)
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Now I just have to contrive the circumstances where this is
| useful to me. :)
| e40 wrote:
| Porn?
| leosanchez wrote:
| What kind of porn requires 25 gigabits ?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| A _lot_ of porn.
| modderation wrote:
| As a guess, large-scale volumetric or photogrammetric
| "datasets" could be difficult to stream over lesser
| interconnects.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Mind-blowing 3D stereoscopic 480 FPS with 11.2 audio
| channels with 768 kbps rate and spatial sound stage :D
| mcny wrote:
| I don't know about the Ethernet part but it bothers me that
| even wifi has become faster than the wired USB port on our
| phones.
|
| All I want to do is copy over all the photos and videos from my
| phone to my computer but I have to baby sit the process and
| think whether I want to skip or retry a failed copy. And it is
| so slow. USB 2.0 slow. I guess everybody has given up on the
| idea of saving their photos and videos over USB?
| diogocp wrote:
| > USB 2.0 slow
|
| Many phones indeed only support USB 2.0. For example the base
| iPhone 17. The Pro does support USB 3.2, however.
|
| > I guess everybody has given up on the idea of saving their
| photos and videos over USB?
|
| Correct.
| ranguna wrote:
| Why don't you get a phone with 3.0+ USB?
|
| My last two phones in the last 4 years had at least USB 3.1
| jacquesm wrote:
| Wifi is fast but the latency is terrible and the reliability
| is even worse. It can go up and down like a yo-yo. USB is far
| more predictable even if it is a bit slower.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I have a cluster of 4 RPi Zero Ws and network reliability
| is not great. Since it is for the chaos, it's fine, but
| it's very common to have a node be offline at any given
| time.
|
| Even worse, the control plane is exposed, but for something
| that runs 3 Hercules mainframe emulation and two Altairs
| with MP/M, it's fine.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have a bunch of HA wifi connected sensors, I see them
| drop off and reconnect all the time it is most annoying.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not sure why this happens to you. I have HA with several
| dozens WiFi devices and I have only 2 devices (one relay,
| one sensor) that disconnect regularly, they have both
| poor WiFi signal, one in a basement and one far from the
| AP. Almost all are on 2.4 GHz, not by choice, but they
| work well.
| cirrusfan wrote:
| > but I have to baby sit the process and think whether I want
| to skip or retry a failed copy
|
| Do you import originals or do you have the "most compatible"
| setting turned on?
|
| I always assumed apple simply hated people that use
| windows/linux desktops so the occasional broken file was
| caused by the driver being sort-of working and if people
| complain, well, they can fuck off and pay for icloud or a
| mac. After upgrading to 15 pro which has 10 gbps usb-c it
| still took forever to import photos and the occasional broken
| photos kept happening, and after some research it turns out
| that the speed was limited by the phone converting the .heic
| originals into .jpg when transferring to a desktop. Not only
| does it limit the speed, it also degrades the quality of the
| photos and deletes a bunch of metadata.
|
| After changing the setting to export original files the
| transfer is much faster and I haven't had a single broken
| file / video. The files are also higher quality and lower
| filesize, although .heic is fairly computationally-demanding.
|
| Idk about Android but I suspect it might have a similar
| behavior
| walterbell wrote:
| _> given up on the idea of saving their photos and videos
| over USB?_
|
| Until USB has monthly service business to compete with cloud
| storage revenue.
| drawfloat wrote:
| I feel like this is an artifact from the late 2010s when the
| talk was of removing the port completely from phones, where
| that was being touted alongside swapping speakers with haptic
| screen audio as a way to make them completely waterproof.
|
| As wireless charging never quite reached the level hoped -
| see AirPower - and Google/Apple seemingly bought and never
| did anything with a bunch of haptic audio startups, I figure
| that idea died....but they never cared enough to make sure
| the USB port remained top end.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I'd usually be against losing ports and user serviceable
| stuff but if the device could actually be properly sealed
| up (ie no speakers, mics, charge ports, etc) that would be
| legitimately useful.
| rbanffy wrote:
| If the photos on the phone are visible as files on a mounted
| filesystem, you can use rsync to copy them. If the connection
| drops but recovers by itself, you can put rsync inside a
| while true loop until it's doing nothing.
|
| I'm using Dropbox for syncing photos from phone to Linux
| laptop, and mounting the SDcard locally for cameras, so this
| is a guess.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Wouldn't this be useful for clustering Macs over TB5? Wasn't
| the maximum bandwidth over USB-cables 5Gbps? With a switch, you
| could cluster more than just 4 Mac Studios and have a couple
| terabytes for very large models to work with.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| I was hoping somebody would suggest that (and eventually try
| it out).
|
| With TB5, and deep pockets, you might probably also benchmark
| it against a setup with dedicated TB5 enclosures (e.g.,
| Mercury Helios 5S).
|
| TB5 has PCIe 4.0 x4 instead of PCIe 3.0 x4 -- that should
| give you 50 GbE half-duplex instead of 25 GbE. You would need
| a different network card though (ConnectX-5, for example).
|
| Pragmatically though, you could also aggregate (bond)
| multiple 25 GbE network card ports (with Mac Studio, you have
| up to 6 Thunderbolt buses, so more than enough to saturate a
| 100GbE connection).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Too bad Jeff Geerling returned his Mac Studios to Apple.
| Would be lovely to see how 5x faster RDMA impacts the
| performance.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 25 Gbps isn't all that much. It would be good, but would
| be below the 40+ Gbps I was getting on the TB5 ring
| network.
|
| I think where it would show more significant speed up is
| on the AMD Strix Halo cluster.
|
| Except I haven't been able to get RDMA over Thunderbolt
| on there to work, so it'd be apples to oranges comparing
| ConnectX to Thunderbolt on Linux.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Remote Time Machine backups are snappier than ever before :)
| notrustincloud wrote:
| rsync...grsync...a solution for broken partial batch transfers
| since forever
| sschueller wrote:
| Would be useful if I had to debug my internet link and I only
| had a laptop.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| It also works on iPad Pro :)
| consp wrote:
| I recently did a complete disk backup/clone which only took 15
| minutes instead of hours. Maxed the SSD which was being backed
| up at about 2.5GB/s.
| soneil wrote:
| Pretty much anywhere you have networked storage? Gigabit is
| about on-par with pre-sata ATA133.
| userbinator wrote:
| Thunderbolt is basically external PCIe, so this is not so
| surprising. High speed NICs do consume a relatively large amount
| of power. I have a feeling I've seen that logo on the board
| before.
| xattt wrote:
| The PCI-E logo or the "octopus in a chip" logo? I'm more
| interested in the latter.
| userbinator wrote:
| The octopus logo. Might've been on Aliexpess or one of the
| other Chinese marketplaces.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| I don't know how to measure the direct power impact on a
| MacBook Pro (since it's got a battery), but the typical power
| consumption of these cards is 9 W, not much more than Aquantia
| 10 GBit cards.
|
| Also, if you remember where you saw that logo, please let me
| know!
| consp wrote:
| Plus 1-2.5w per active cable. You need the heatsinks as the
| cx4 cards expect active airflow, and active transceivers as
| well.
|
| I have a 10gbit dual port card in a Lenovo mini pc. There is
| no normal way to get any heat out of there so I put a 12v
| small radial fan in there as support. It works great at 5v:
| silent and cool. It is a fan though so might not suit your
| purpose.
| ZenDroid wrote:
| Do you mean active Thunderbolt cable? Short Thunderbolt
| cables (0.8m) are passive.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/y5uokj/comme
| n...
| userbinator wrote:
| Active Ethernet cables.
| usagisushi wrote:
| JFYI, for measuring power draw, you might be able to use
| `macmon`[0] to see the total system power consumption. The
| values reported by the internal current sensor seem to be
| quite accurate.
|
| [0] https://github.com/vladkens/macmon
| usagisushi wrote:
| Speaking of hardware, the RTL8159 (10Gbps) hit the market
| late last year and is said to consume only about 2-3W. It
| apparently runs very cool compared to older chips. (Though
| it would need to be bonded to reach 25Gbps ;-)
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| I got me one of these adapters (RTL8127AF TXA403, with
| SFP+ cage); I haven't properly benchmarked it yet.
|
| There's no driver support on macOS, and for Linux you'd
| need a bleeding edge kernel. Just trying to physically
| connect it (along with a connected SFP28 transceiver) to
| my Mac's Thunderbolt port using an external PCIe-to-TB
| adapter, macmon tells me a power draw of around 4.3 W, so
| it's not significantly less for half the bandwidth, but
| the card doesn't get hot at all.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Very nice tip, thank you!
|
| I measure around +11W idle. While running a speed test, I
| read ca. +15W.
| usagisushi wrote:
| Thanks for the measurements! 15W under load definitely
| justifies those massive heatsinks.
|
| I'm looking forward to your writeup on the RTL8127AF as
| well. Your blog is awesome!
| zokier wrote:
| Note that you can do point-to-point network links directly with
| thunderbolt (and usb4).
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/ip-thunderbolt-conn...
| etc
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Yes! However, I got around 15 Gbps with a Thunderbolt-only
| setup (TB3/TB4) = only 75% of the Ethernet setup.
|
| You'd also mostly be limited to short cables (1-2m) and a ring
| topology.
| admash wrote:
| Any idea why that would be the case?
| butvacuum wrote:
| The linux implementation is quite poor. Among other issues,
| your answer is linux treats it as a TCP/IP link- so packets
| don't have any offloading for checksums, etc. it's also
| incomplete (ex- you have to physically unplug and replug
| the cord every time one side loses link- even a reboot).
|
| This is my firsthand experence trying to get some tablet
| motherboards to link up and work as a proxmox cluster w/
| TB3 as the link between nodes.
| sponaugle wrote:
| I have a 3 node proxmox setup on MS-01s using a 25G
| Thunderbolt ring for Ceph, and indeed it took a lot of
| hoops to get it working correctly and reliably. I did
| manage to get it such that nodes can go up and down
| without needing to unplug anything, and the dynamic
| routing works if a node disappears. Performance is pretty
| good, with a more realistic 20ish gbit/sec.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Neat, but the thermal design is absolutely terrible. Sticking
| that heatsink inside the aluminum case without any air
| circulation is awful.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Yeah, it's because the network card adapter's heatsink is
| sandwiched between two PCBs. Not great, not terrible, works for
| me.
|
| The placement is mostly determined by the design of the OCP 2.0
| connector. OCP 3.0 has a connector at the short edge of the
| card, which allows exposing/extending the heat sink directly to
| the outer case.
|
| If somebody has the talent, designing a Thunderbolt 5 adapter
| for OCP 3.0 cards could be a worthwhile project.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A Flex PCB connecting the OCP2 connector would allow to put
| the converter board _behind_ the NIC board, allowing the NIC
| board to be exposed to the aluminum case to use the case
| itself as a heatsink (would need a split case so the NIC
| board can be screwed to one side of the case, pressing the
| main chip against it via a thermal pad).
|
| As a stop-gap, I'd see if there was any way to get airflow
| _into_ the case - I 'd expect even a tiny fan would do much
| more than those two large heatsinks stuck onto the case
| (since the case itself has no thermal connection to the chip
| heatsink).
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| My goal was to get a fanless setup (for a quiet office).
|
| If that's not a requirement just get the Raiden Digit Light
| One, which does have a fan (and otherwise the same network
| card).
|
| If I could design an adapter PCB myself, I would go
| straight to OCP 3.0, which allows for a much simpler
| construction, and TB5 speeds.
|
| Alternatively, there are DELL CX422A rNDC cards (R887V)
| that appear to have an OCP 2.0 connector but a better
| heatsink design.
| consp wrote:
| I'd be more worried about cooling the transceivers properly.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| My optical transceiver gets to around 52 degC (measured via
| IR camera), well below its design limit, so that's not bad.
|
| If truly concerned, one could use SFP28 to SFP28 cage
| adapters to have the heat outside the case, and slap on
| some extra heatsinks there.
| consp wrote:
| I'm surprised you are only getting 20gbit/s. I did not expect
| PCIe to be be the limiting factor here. I've got a 100gbit cx4
| card currently in a PCIe3 X4 slot (for reasons, don't judge) and
| it easily maxes that out. I would have expected the 25g cx4 cards
| to be at least able to get everything out of it. RDMA is required
| to achieve that in a useful way though.
|
| Edit: forgot is isn't "true" PCIe but tunneled.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| The limitation is Thunderbolt (32 Gbps theoretical limit for
| PCIe 3 tunneling).
| otterpro wrote:
| > reduces temperatures by at least 15 Kelvin, bringing the
| ambient enclosure temperature below 40 degC,
|
| I had to do a double-take when it mentioned Kelvin since That is
| physically impossible.
| sigio wrote:
| reduces temperatures by at least 15 Kelvin == the same as
| reduces temperatures by at least 15 Celcius.
|
| It 'reduces it by' ... not reduces it TO
| maratc wrote:
| Isn't "reduces temperatures by 15 Kelvin" the same as "reduces
| temperatures by 15 Celsius"?
| buildbot wrote:
| Yes, Kelvin is only a linear offset from Celsius. (273.15 for
| anyone who doesn't already know).
|
| It's a little bit funny/coy to use it mixed with Celsius.
| madduci wrote:
| I still have issues under Linux (Kernel 6.14) and Thinderboldt 4
| docking stations. The simply don't get recognised.
|
| But this is a cool solution
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Thanks! Have you tried the boltctl/rescan setup I mentioned in
| the post? It should get you going, as long as your
| Thunderbolt/USB4 setup is correct.
|
| If you're using an adapter card to add Thunderbolt
| functionality, then your mainboard needs to support that, and
| the card must be connected to a PCIe bus that's wired to the
| Intel PCH, not to the CPU.
| madduci wrote:
| Yes, rescan, re-enroll too. But it still shows as
| disconnected. I don't know if the firmware is completely
| incompatible, but it is weird that under windows works and in
| Linux doesn't
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Disconnected as in "network"? What PCIe card do you use?
| Can you update the firmware (maybe from Windows)?
|
| Also check the BIOS settings (try setting TB security to
| "No Security" or "User Authorization")
|
| Some OEM Mellanox cards can be cross-flashed to NVIDIA's
| stock firmware, maybe that's also relevant.
| madduci wrote:
| It's embedded in the laptop (a HP ZBook from work).
| Disconnected as in network. Laptop charges, but signal
| doesn't work. With Thunderbolt 3 devices, it works. (The
| card itself is T4).
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Ha! Been running these for years on both linux and windows (on
| lenovo x1 laptops). Using cheap chinese thunderbolt-to-nvme
| adapters + nvme-to-pcie boards + mellanox cx4 cards (recently got
| one cx5 and a solarflare x2).
|
| Pic of a previous cx3 (10 gig on tb3) setup:
| https://habrastorage.org/r/w780/getpro/habr/upload_files/d3c...
|
| 10gig can saturate full speed, 25G in my experience rarely
| reaches same 20G as the author observed.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, what are you using these for?
| Saturating these seems like it would have reasonably few
| workloads outside of like cdn or multi-tenant scenarios.
| Curious what my lack of imagination is hiding here.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I do media production, and sometimes move giant files (like
| ggufs) around my network, so 25 Gbps is more useful than 10
| Gbps, if it's no too expensive.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Officially: to access NAS, get raw market-data files (tens to
| hundreds of gigabytes a day), not needed on laptop every day,
| but only once in a while to fix or analyze something.
|
| Really: because I can, and it is fun. I upgraded my home lan
| to 10G, because used 10G hardware is cheap (and now 25G
| enters the same price range).
| sponaugle wrote:
| "because I can, and it is fun." The best answer! I am most
| of the way done with upgrading most of my homelab to 100G
| from 10G, but there really isn't a practical reason for it.
| 100G has dropped in price so much as datacenters are all
| about 400/800G now.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Nice! Cool to hear from a fellow admirer of overkill-lan
| setups ;)
|
| Which cards do you prefer for 100G, and what is the
| situation with dacs/optics?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is an outstanding blog post. Initially, the title did little
| to captivate me, but the blog post was so well written that I got
| nerd-sniped. Who knew this little adapter was so fascinating! I
| wonder if the manufacturer is buying the Mellanox cards used from
| data center tear-downs. The author claims they can be had for
| only 20 USD online. That seems too good to be true!
|
| Small thing: I just checked Amazon.com:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=thunderbolt+25G&crid=2RHL4ZJL96Z9...
|
| I cannot find anything for less than 285 USD. The blog post gave
| a price of 174 USD. I have no reason to disbelieve the author,
| but a bummer to see the current price is 110 USD more!
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I think, tragically, the blog post has caused this price
| increase.
|
| The offers on Amazon are most likely all drop shippers trying
| to gauge a price that works for them.
|
| You might have better luck ordering directly from China for a
| fraction of the price:
| https://detail.1688.com/offer/836680468489.html
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I saw the blog post last week and immediately bought the last
| one on that Amazon listing for the original price... hopefully
| they restock soon!
|
| I'm going to try a couple other fan assisted cooling options,
| as I'd like to keep the setup reasonably compact.
|
| I just ran fiber to my desk and I have a more expensive QNAP
| unit that does 10G SFP+, but this will let me max out the
| connection to my NAS.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| Be sure to test this adapter on iPad Pro, just for kicks (yes
| it works!)
|
| Although I managed to panic the kernel a couple of times
| without the extra heatsinks on...
| buildbot wrote:
| I believe the author is talking about the OCP (2.0) network
| card itself, that these adapters internally. The OCP nics are
| quite cheap compared to pcie - here's 100GBE for 100!
| https://ebay.us/m/HMQAph
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| This 100GbE card is an OCP 2.0 type 2 adapter, which will
| _probably_ not work with the PX PCB since that NIC has two of
| these mezzanine connectors, and PX only one.
|
| What also may not work are Dell rNDC cards. They look like
| they have OCP 2.0 type 1 connectors, but may not quite fit
| (please correct me if I'm wrong). They do however have a nice
| cooling solution, which could be retrofitted to one of the
| OCP 2.0 cards.
|
| I've also ordered a Chelsio T6225-OCP cards out of curiosity.
| These should fit in the PX adapter but require a 3rd-party
| driver on macOS (which then supports jumbo frames, etc.)
|
| What also fits physically is a Broadcom BCM957304M3040C, but
| there are no drivers on macOS, and I couldn't get the
| firmware updated on Linux either.
| buildbot wrote:
| That's a good point to note! I think the stacking height
| would matter, but in theory the single connector is still
| 8x pcie and should link without the upper 8x lanes
| connected.
|
| Spec for reference, I'm not 100% sure.
| https://docs.nvidia.com/nvidia-connectx-5-ethernet-
| adapter-c...
| Palomides wrote:
| you can get a 100Gb normal pcie card like a MCX416A for less
| than $100 if you're willing to flash them
| nunez wrote:
| $285 is still an AMAZING price for 25GbE ethernet over TB4. I
| paid $200 for the Sonnet TB4 10GbE adapter.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Not much to add here but wanted to agree, this is post was
| actually hacker news (tm)
| Lammy wrote:
| > The author claims they can be had for only 20 USD online.
| That seems too good to be true!
|
| In my experience, the cheap eBay MLX cards are DellEMC/HPE/etc
| OEM cards. However I also encountered zero problems cross-
| flashing those cards back to generic Mellanox firmware. I'm
| running several of those cross-flashed CX-4 Lx cards going on
| six or seven years now and they've been totally bulletproof.
| project2501a wrote:
| nitpicking but why would someone type `sudo su` vs `sudo -i`
| Bjartr wrote:
| I've mostly only ever seen `sudo su` in tutorials, so someone
| who's only familiar with the command through those is one
| possible reason why.
| flounder3 wrote:
| Muscle memory for folks who have been doing it since before -i
| was an option. I still instinctively type `sudo su -` because
| it worked consistently on older deployments. When you have to
| operate a fleet of varying ages and distributions, you tend to
| quickly learn [if only out of frustration] what works
| everywhere vs only on the newer stuff.
|
| `sudo su - <user>` also seems easier for me to type than `sudo
| -i -u <user>`
| thadk wrote:
| Does this manufacturer's practice pattern of repackaging data
| center components (e.g. Mellanox) imply any up and coming product
| creation opportunities?
| drnick1 wrote:
| I used to have an SFP28 Mellanox card in my home server, but went
| back to a simple 2.5G Ethernet port for the LAN side. The
| Mellanox card ran hot and needed an extra fan near it to
| dissipate the heat. It was cool but there was no real benefit
| other than occasionally when transferring some large files.
|
| Until motherboards include SFP ports it's probably not worth the
| effort at all in home setting; external adaptors like the one
| presented here are unreliable and add several ms of latency.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| For reference, I'm seeing pings from my Mac to my Linux boxes
| (Lenovo Tiny5) at well under 1ms, not much worse than between
| them directly. But yeah, your mileage may vary.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| Yep, these cards need a fan (or any kind of directed air flow).
|
| Where did you get "several ms of latency" figure from? I have
| not measured external card, but may be I should do it...
| Because cards themselves have latency in range of microseconds,
| not millis.
| drnick1 wrote:
| I haven't tested this particular Thunderbolt SFP adapter, but
| my experience with a TP-Link 1Gbps USB adapter is that it
| adds about 4ms of latency. Far from being unusable and
| similar to WiFi perhaps, but worse than PCIe cards that
| should be <1ms.
| serf wrote:
| it's all just driver/options crap if I were to take a
| guess.
|
| there are a lot of usb options that matter, and tp-link
| ships lots of realtek chipsets that require very special
| driver incantations that a lot of the linux drivers simply
| don't replicate.
|
| two+ layers of bad options will surely add 4ms quick.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Until motherboards include SFP ports_ [...]
|
| A micro-ATX motherboard with on-board 2xSFP28 (Intel E810):
|
| *
| https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/server/D3052-data...
|
| * https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-amd-motherboard-has-a-
| uni...
| shantara wrote:
| That is really cool to read. And here I am, still running my home
| network on a measly 1Gbit Ethernet. I considered upgrading, but
| the equipment power consumption even when idle makes it an
| expensive proposition to consider just for fun.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a
| time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems
| to be faster.
|
| Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality
| is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a
| cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.
| fulafel wrote:
| Wireless happened, I'd think. People started using wifi and
| cellular data for everything, so applications had to adapt to
| this lowest common denominator, and consumer broadband demand
| for faster-than-wifi speeds isn't there. Plus operators put all
| their money into cellular infra leaving no money to update
| broadband infra.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Wifi now can pretty realistically beat 2.5gbit/s while most
| Ethernet is still gigabit. It just seems strange to live in a
| world where the average laptop will get a faster connection
| speed over wifi than plugged in to Ethernet.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was
| a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi
| seems to be faster.
|
| Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by
| wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially
| in congested environments.
|
| > Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the
| reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best
| buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.
|
| For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide
| many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes
| permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.
|
| For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push
| copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less
| PCIe lanes available to waste.
|
| For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most
| applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most
| household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough
| to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher
| transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as
| there is a multitude of different options to provide high
| bandwidth connectivity.
| kohlschuetter wrote:
| The new low-power Realtek chipsets will definitely push 10 GbE
| forward because the chipset won't be much more expensive to
| integrate and run than the 2.5Gbps packages.
|
| It all comes down to performance per Watt, the availability of
| cheap switching gear, and the actual utility in an office /
| home environment.
|
| For 10 Gbps, cabling can be an issue. Existing "RJ45"-style Cat
| 6 cables could still work, but maybe not all of them.
|
| Higher speeds will most likely demand a switch to fiber (for
| anything longer than a few meters) or Twinax DAC (for inter-
| device connects). Since Wifi already provides higher speeds,
| one may be inclined to upgrade just for that (because at some
| point, Wireless becomes Wired, too).
|
| That change comes with the complexity of running new cabling,
| fiber splicing, worrying about different connectors (SFP+,
| SFP28, SFP56, QSFP28, ...), incompatible transceiver
| certifications, vendor lock-in, etc. Not a problem in the
| datacenter, but try to explain this to a layman.
|
| Lastly, without a faster pipe to the Internet, what can you do
| other than NAS and AI? The computers will still get faster
| chips but most folks won't be able to make use of the bandwidth
| because they're still stuck on 1Gbps Internet or less.
|
| But that will change. Swiss Init7 has shown that 25GBps
| Internet at home is not only feasible but also affordable, and
| China seems to be adding lots of 10G, and fiber in general.
|
| Fun times ahead.
| matt-p wrote:
| We have 400Gbe which is certainly faster than USB.. but;
|
| On consumer devices, I think part of the issue is that we're
| still wedded to four-pair twisted copper as the physical
| medium. That worked well for Gigabit Ethernet, but once you
| push to 5 or 10 Gb/s it becomes inherently expensive. Twisted
| pair is simply a poor medium at those data rates, so you end up
| needing a large amount of complex silicon to compensate for
| attenuation, crosstalk, and noise.
|
| That's doable but the double whammy is that most people use the
| network for 'internet' and 1G is simply more than enough, 10G
| therefore becomes quite niche so there's no enormous volume to
| overcome the inherent issues at low cost.
| wmf wrote:
| 10Gbase-T requires a lot of transistors and power (maybe over
| 10x more than 1G) so it just wasn't worth the cost.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Ethernet did not stagnate. Ethernet on UTP did stagnate due to
| reaching the limits of the technology, but Ethernet continues
| to advance over fiber.
|
| For 10 Gbps I find it simpler and cheaper to use fiber or DACs,
| but motherboards don't provide SFP+, only RJ45 ports. Over 10
| Gbps copper is a no go. SFP28 and above would be nice to have
| on motherboards, but that's a dream with almost zero chances to
| happen. For most people RJ45 + WiFi 7 is good enough, computer
| manufacturers will not put SFP+ or SFP28 for a small minority
| of people.
| cyberax wrote:
| Ha. I got one of the 10G Thunderbolt adapters a several years
| ago. And eventually started having problems with Zoom calls
| around noon. With dropped connections and stuttering. Zoom
| restarts usually fixed the problem.
|
| After it happened 3-4 times, I started debugging. It turned out
| that we usually get at least a bit of sunlight around noon, as it
| burns away the morning clouds. And my Thunderbolt box was in
| direct sunlight, and eventually started overheating.
|
| And a Zoom restart made it fall back onto the Wifi connection
| instead of wired.
|
| I fixed that by adding a small USB-powered fan to the Thunderbolt
| box as a temporary workaround. I just realized that it's been
| like this for the last 3 years: https://pics.ealex.net/s/overheat
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