Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
An 8 port gigabit switch is £20. An 8 port 10Gb switch is £600. A gigabit NIC from a recognised brand is £6. The cheapest, unknown brand 10Gb NIC I could find is £200. The answer is price versus performance making sense.
The sweet spot is about 3-4 times the price for 10 times the bandwidth. Right now 10GBase-T isn't even close at 30x.
As the presentation indicates there are genuine use cases in offices and, in time, homes, for 2.5Gb and 5Gb. The idea that it's because incremental upgrades are more profitable seems strange given it's not incremental, 10Gb has already been released, it's just too expensive for the applications that may use it.
EDIT: I glossed entirely over something else quite obvious, too. The vast majority of cabling is Cat 5. 10Gbase-T doesn't run so well on most Cat 5, so something that will allow upgraded bandwidth without requiring changing out of all cables in offices is very desirable.
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That was a really interesting link and I read it all, but I'm still a little unconvinced. Their mean reasoning for 2.5G and 5G to exist is that wireless speeds have surpassed gigabit - and it's a worthy point. However, on the same slide they state this, they show that wireless speeds are going to go beyond 5Gbit in less than 2 years and faster still in 3 years.
It still seems like a bit of a pointless stop-gap between 10GbE? Then again, the cabling aspect is a worthy one and it's certainly better to be able to negotiate to 5Gbit if 10Gbit isn't possible on that particular cable. I suppose that's the real difference, having something inbetween for when your cabling isn't good enough. Still, it'd be nice if this just meant that devices started shipping with 10GbE capable ports that could just negotiate down, rather than trickling devices that do 2.5GbE and 5GbE.