New DSLReports speedtester

[Chrysalis]

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.

10gbit is out there but not aimed at the consumer market. As a consumer product 2.5gbit first makes sense.

Look at across the entire hardware space and you see the practice is incremental upgrades, from smartphones to computer components.

No way do hardware vendors release the best they have to offer, they always keep something in the pocket to get your money another day.

As an example intel have been making 16 core cpu's for years, yet we only got their first consumer 8 core cpu earlier this year.

[Ignitionnet]

Hardware vendors don't release the best they've got because it's too expensive.

10GBase-T has been around since 2006. If there were demand for it there would be more units produced and it would be more common.

You're complaining about 10GBase-T being an unnecessary incremental upgrade. I'm just pointing out that it is not. Something is needed to fill the gap as 10GBase-T hasn't come close to the levels of usage it was expected to originally.

Of course hardware vendors don't release their absolute state of the art as consumer products except in rare occasions like GPUs where some nutters will pay nearly £1k for a graphics card. It's. Too. Expensive.

Intel have been making 16 core CPUs, yes. How many people run applications that actually make use of 16 cores? I have a machine that has 16 cores, 2 x 8 core Xeon. It's my home lab machine and runs ESXi. I rarely have it switched on as it eats electricity like a beast and blasts out so much heat it raises the temperature noticeably in the floor above. I would suggest that's not a common usage scenario, so they have been targeted at businesses.

The big power whores for CPUs are gamers, for whom most games don't make much use of multithreading and fewer, faster cores are preferable, and things like video transcoding, which is something that lends itself well to multithreading but will be done on enterprise kit.

It's the same argument as with broadband. People don't want to pay for the latest and greatest for the most part, they just want good enough. The vast majority of VM's customer base continue to take the lowest sold product.

[Chrysalis]

I would prefer 10gbit over 2.5gbit, but I am just saying how business looks at it.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I would prefer 10gbit over 2.5gbit, but I am just saying how business looks at it.

Then you're in luck.

[Kushan]

It's a lot pricier than it should be

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Kushan

It's a lot pricier than it should be

A 160Gb switching fabric doesn't come cheap.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Kushan

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.

I'm not sure how seriously I can take an "Enterprise" vendor trumpeting 5Gbps cat videos as a use case for their technologies.

---------- Post added at 19:40 ---------- Previous post was at 19:33 ----------

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

10GBase-T has been around since 2006. If there were demand for it there would be more units produced and it would be more common.

You're complaining about 10GBase-T being an unnecessary incremental upgrade. I'm just pointing out that it is not. Something is needed to fill the gap as 10GBase-T hasn't come close to the levels of usage it was expected to originally.

Probably because there's little benefit to it on edge devices partly because they never expected hard drives to be stuck at 50% more STR than they had 10 years ago. That, and the fact that it's not going to go anywhere near a laptop or low-end home PC until it starts using less idle power than the whole PC.

On the other hand, I don't know a single datacentre core that doesn't run on 10GbE already. Everywhere I know that actually needs 10GbE has it, with many moving beyond.

Still, as I mentioned before I suspect the pricing and take-up may change significantly over the next couple of years thanks to certain very large, powerful companies bundling it into mass-market consumer gear at below-cost prices.

Intel have been making 16 core CPUs, yes. How many people run applications that actually make use of 16 cores? I have a machine that has 16 cores, 2 x 8 core Xeon.

And you call me a nutter for my 24-bay NAS with a single 4-core Xeon?

P.S. 22-core Broadwell-EP is due out in the next month or two.

---------- Post added at 19:45 ---------- Previous post was at 19:40 ----------

Originally Posted by Kushan

It's a lot pricier than it should be

Wanna guess how much one of these costs?

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/product...-2t/index.html

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Nice. Is that CPE connected over USB or are they actually handing out 10GBASE-T gear?

Just FYI the kit they supply is one of these.

Yes really.

[qasdfdsaq]

Included in the $300 a month or extra?

I'd normally say that'd definitely make it a SME product and not "rich home user" but that said, it's fanless. Fanless.

[Ignitionnet]

It's included in the price.

It's environmentally hardened kit, it's intended more for use as an access router than taking a 10Gb feed for a property.

I've a suspicion Comcast know they won't sell many and are reusing surplus metro net equipment as CPE

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

It's environmentally hardened kit, it's intended more for use as an access router than taking a 10Gb feed for a property.

That much is obvious from the 16 TDM ports and the "next-generation access routers" line in the description

Should be perfectly sufficient for your 600Mbps+ dual-WAN requirement though

[roughbeast]

Speedtest.net has put up a beta test.

http://beta.speedtest.net/result/4701464425

Flash based, but seems to work ok ;



http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4701931336

[Jimmy-J]

Working just fine.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by roughbeast

Speedtest.net has put up a beta test.

http://beta.speedtest.net/result/4701464425

Yes, we mentioned it several months ago.