Gives me fiber for bandwidth and copper for PoE. Figured it was smarter to do both than compromise to either one, and surprisingly the fiber was cheaper than the copper to pull.
What do you mean by "trunk which is available in three locations"?
Usually cabling is home-run to a single, central patch panel. A cable (fibre, copper) would usually have one end in a room's wall outlet, with the other end at a patch panel: how would you have a cable one end at three locations? Do you have three patch panels? I.e., three hubs, with the room cables going to one hub and then you can have hub-to-hub runs?
My 10 gigabit thunderbolt dongle weighs about a pound, and I think 90+% of that weight is just heatsink. If I've had it plugged in for awhile, if I accidentally touch that dongle it actually hurts because it's so hot. I cannot image that much heat is good for, well, anything.
I have another Thunderbolt dongle that has an SFP+ module, so I ran a fiber line from my switch to my computer, and that runs considerably cooler. That's what I use nowadays.
DACs are copper, and they're happy.
> I have another Thunderbolt dongle that has an SFP+ module, so I ran a fiber line from my switch to my computer, and that runs considerably cooler. That's what I use nowadays.
This is also what I am doing, and I love it. Much better and more reliable than WLAN. I want as much wired as possible.
However... recently, Realtek released several products adding cheap, affordable, low-power 10 gbit SFP+ and PCIe copper (even certain for routers/switches, too). STH did reviews: they're performing. Specific chipset are: RTL8127, RTL8127AP (servers, with management), RTL8127ATF (fiber, no 10/100 mbit)), RTL8127AT (idem, but copper), RTL8159 (USB-C), RTL8261C (SFP+ copper, and media converter). See the examples here: [1]. I've already seen various been selling since ~December on AliExpress, especially copper RTL8127 variants (back then, even one RTL 10 gbit PCIe SFP+ variant). There appears to be one caveat: macOS isn't supported, Windows and Linux are.
I get the case for PoE, but PoE is apparently not as power-friendly as using a dedicated charger. I do find it much more elegant though.
Edit: I'd like to add that I've been having good success with Aquantia AQC100S which I use in my desktop (running Linux, and using a SFP+ for 10 gbit fiber), as well as a Sonnet TB3 (to SFP+ for 10 gbit fiber, running macOS M1 MBP). Both don't get hot, don't use a lot of power, and the connections saturate. Mind you, it is important to specifically go for the AQC100S and not the AQC107 or AQC113 which are both much more common. Both use more power. Because I got good success with these, and my router is sporting a X710 4 port SFP+ NIC (which could be more efficient, to be fair, but it is what it is) I am no longer interested myself in any alternatives. I'm settled.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/337113/realtek-to-bring-affordab...
To be clear the Cat6a is thicker than Cat6 and harder to work with. It makes termination a bit more tricky.
The floors where native fibre is not needed have a cheap ethernet media converter from fs.com, everything else (3 floor switches) are interconnected with 10Gbps SFP+ modules and 2.5G ethernet for the hosts.
All done thanks to the great https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...
(if you are reading this, I owe you several beers)
Is answered in the comment you responded to:
> because the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet at 10gbit/s
As for
> because that is what devices such as PCs and WiFi access points use
We are looking to the future. If you're putting stuff in the walls, then you should try to target something that will be adequate both today, and in 10 years from now.
Increasingly, prosumer stuff is including an SFP port. High end PCs will be shipping it in the near future, as well. And, while low-power chips are coming out, the simple fact is that physics are getting in the way.
I do think that the average home won't need more than 2.5gbps, pretty much indefinitely (an 8k video at "bluray quality" is about at most 5% of that bandwidth). But if you have any desire of going past 10gbps, Ethernet is not going to cut it.
And yes, before you ask, there is a 25gbase-t standard. Maximum distance: 30m (100ft). 100ft from panel to panel in a house? Oof.
You should be running both.
If you are being smart about it your planning distributed switching (fiber to media boxes with power).
From a pure networking stance, fiber is the way to go. But POE continues to have more and more uses (doorbells, cameras, sensors, lighting controls).
How many consumer devices have an ((Q)SFP(+)) optical cage?
If you're in their pulling stuff anyway, sure, do some OS2, but for most people, for most devices, Cat 5e/6 is more useful, especially since you can do POE(+(+)) over it as well. 5e/6 gets you 10GbE to 55m, and 6A to 100m.
It is difficult, but possible, to find a SFP+-capable switch where idle consumption scales at around 1W/port, but less than that I have not found.
4G has been enough for a decade, 5G was mostly just an infrastructure and capacity improvement and most consumers could never tell you they notice a difference between the two. The human eye can only see so much resolution, we don't need 8k video. I don't think consumers will need more than what they already have. At least until some new novel media format that gulps down bandwidth comes around.
This isn't necessarily all bad news. There is still a push for higher bandwidth for datacenters etc, which will keep pushing technology forward, hopefully making consumer and ISP grade equipment cheaper.
If I built a house I'd probably run ethernet. Maybe play around with a 10gbe core network. But it wouldn't really give me any benefit, it's not like disks are that fast anyways.
The upside of this is that you can increase bandwidth as the technology evolves without needing to rerun cables anytime a new specification is created for high-speed copper. OM5 fiber can do up to 400Gbps for short distances. Maybe in the future you can bundle a few pairs up and have a remote GPU sitting somewhere.
The downside is that you may need MCs, but they are small and can be hidden in wall outlets.
[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
For majority of home usage it will all be WiFi. WiFi 7 has gotten to the point where prosumers are happy with its performance. WiFi 8 and 9 will further improve in that direction for reliability and speed.
With PoE, router and everything else Ethernet is still clearly the easiest choice. And as mentioned we now have sub 2W 10Gbps Ethernet. What will likely happen is that 10Gbps becomes like 1Gbps Ethernet, it will stay here for 10-20 years until something happen in the future that needs extra bandwidth.
May be in 10 years time 10Gbps could be done under 1W.
Do you mean Ethernet cables get hot? Or just the networking equipment pushing that data.
I ask because I’ve never heard of Ethernet cables getting hot.
Before specifying fibre everywhere I suggest you note that a CAT 6 cable can manage 10G and PoE++. Its a lot more resilient to breakage too, especially outside the data centre.
If you really want to blow some cash there is CAT6A, which is probably not indicated unless you want cable lengths of more than say 50m.
Often that will mean running both Cat6A and fiber.
You are correct that 10GBASE-T really shouldn't be the default choice, fiber and DAC both have advantages over it. But compatibility is important, and there are a lot of situations where 10GBASE-T is just more convenient.
Makes a decent draw wire.
Also personally, if you can get away with a copper DAC, I would rather use that instead of fiber because you don't need any special modules.
Regular people also are not buying DACs.
If you are in the line of work where you need to know what SFP is and the difference between DAC and Optical, a quick "what's OM3 vs OM5 and when do I use either?" to your favorite LLM/Search engine will get you sorted.
Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7. So... yeah.
> ...OM3/OM4/OM5? Single mode/Multi mode? LC/SC?...
My answer is OM4, Multi-mode [0], LC. OM3, 4, and 5 will all work at 10gbit for any run you'd expect to make in most houses. I chose cable grade based on what was in stock at the local store. I chose connector type based on what fit into my NICs. I went with multi-mode because it was cheaper than single-mode and I wasn't going to be making multi-km runs.
[0] That's what the "M" in in the cable designation means.
Replaced a wifi bridge that way...30m run across multiple rooms & hallway...zero drilling.
https://www.ui.com/us/en/integrations/accessory-tech/sfp-wiz...
Previously seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732874
Especially handy for specific Intel NICs where they refuse to link up if the module isn't in the driver-allowed list and those modules are hard to come by
They all are little snowflakes. Compatibility is hit-or-miss. They run hot. They eat more power. They're finnicky. Heck, they plain out lie about what they are (I've got some that pretend to be fibre with 3m of copper, sure).
So yeah, DAC it is for patch, fibre for anything more.
Ethernet is dead for home usage. I wish companies gave a damn, but no, for the past 25 years we are stuck at 1GB/s. Only recently some laptops and motherboards started shipping with 2.5GB/s ethernet options.
If you need internet for work related audio/video conferencing, and you share your screen, wired is the way to go. Over time you can tell which colleagues are on wireless and those that are wired in.
Perhaps you're making the case that wifi7 is as good or better than wired but I would argue that depends on your physical setup and possible interference issues.
10gbps in wifi7 is great in theory but client hardware is normally 2 spacial streams, channel widths of 320 are impractical and cause me CCI even at home. Then a load of my stuff still uses 2.4. OT is a bit like that and isn't going to change. I have to share air time with my family other devicew, there are sometimes hidden nodes, DFS from the local airport.
500Mbps is more realistic.
You couldn’t pay me to rip out my fiber and run strictly on wifi.
The correct solution to future proof has and probably always will be running some single mode fiber runs. The same cable would have taken you from 10mbit to 400gbit+.
10baseT (!0Mbps) came out in 1990 (there were non-twisted pair earlier versions). "Fast Ethernet" (100Mbps) came out in 1995. Copper 1GbE came out in 1999. Copper 10GbE came out in 2006. Ethernet seemed addicted to 10x'ing every version and 10GbE is really where everything fell apart. Or at least, it's where it got hard. We never really got mass market 10GbE. The controllers were too expensive. The cable requirements were quite high. And heat was an issue.
1GbE really was fast enough and 10GbE was a massive jump that I even remember thinking at the time that there should've been intermediate steps, which is what happened in 2016 with 2.5GbE and 5GbE.
Now compare to Thunderbolt, introduced in 2011, which has completely surpassed Ethernet bandwidth, in part by putting chips in the cables, but of course the big difference is cable length. A copper cat 6/7 cable can get to ~100 meters, which is also why the power is so high: attenuation.
but I guess my point is that 10GbE over copper was a mistake. We'd reached the point where you really had to swap over to fiber.
I'd say 10GbE has arrived. It is relatively cheap, most of the time works over existing 1GbE cabling, and gracefully degrades to 5/2.5/1Gb based on conditions when it can't reach 10Gb.
Yes to be 100% guaranteed of getting 10Gb even in bundles of 100 cables running over noisy fluorescent ballasts to a full 100m you need Cat6A but in many environments Cat5e or Cat6 is more than sufficient. It works so well if you fail to get the full 10Gb I humbly suggest you re-do the terminations on both ends before considering replacing the cable.
It's coming sooner than you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967
After stepping up in networks periodically (coax, then twisted pair with hubs, then 100mbps dual-speed switching hubs, then finally non-blocking 100mbps switches), I finally upgraded to gigabit ethernet at home because that had became cheap enough.
That last upgrade was 18 years ago, in 2008, and by that point I wasn't even an close to an early-adopter.
And now, 18 years hence: It seems absurd that the next 10x improvement is still not quite ready yet.
https://www.fs.com/c/gpon-xgspon-sticks-5607 (I think this is what you're looking for?)
Glad it was helpful and not me being an idiot. That's a shame about the temp read out. I just checked my MikroTik and can see the same thing. In fact, the only SFP module reporting a temperature at all is the real fiber one, all of the DACs/converters report nothing. No voltage either.
There is an old but still good list of transceivers with this feature here: https://www.servethehome.com/sfp-to-10gbase-t-adapter-module...
But for cabling, OS2 clear bend rated cable … pre-terminated is like the same price and currently have 25gb optics but I’m able to run over 100gb in my house without having to drill holes etc. (runs along the baseboards)
The cables are super thin… and clear/transparent
And I never have to replace the cable again I’m pretty sure haha
The bidi sfp28s $25 are awesome :)
And worst case if your service loop just … loops …. Eh haha
Gonna try using it for other things like hdmi etc too with a cassette :)
Within the past year, I've tried a number of Chinese 10GBase-T SFP+ modules with the Broadcom chipset and they've all been great. The one's I've got now are WTTOGTEC and WTSFOPTC, which seem to be the same company. They're dirt cheap at less than $30 each, and they're solid. I've tried both the 30m and 80m variants, and have not had any problems at all.
I've got six of them here that have been running fine full-time for several months. Two of those are in a garage with no climate controls, and summer temperatures lately often over 100℉.
The six modules I'm using are installed in three Ubiquti USW Pro XG 8 PoE switches.
https://www.moduletek.com/en/application_notes/an_00196.html
Fiber is affordable, and for short distances you can use direct attach copper cables. Basically two SFPs hardwired together. You can order a 3 meter 10 GBit DAC cable for like 20 bucks. And they can be had in lengths up to 10+ meters.
