400Gbps Ethernet Specification Arrives

Megalith

Megalith

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The Ethernet Alliance is hailing the arrival of 200G and 400G Ethernet with the approval of IEEE 802.3bs. Obviously, home users will not get the privilege of experiencing this speed, but cloud-scale data centers, service provider networks, and other bandwidth-intensive application spaces will love it.

200G and 400G is intended for business, not home users, so you're not going to be flinging games and other big file transfers at breakneck speeds anytime soon. These speeds are also impossible over CAT 5 or CAT 6—IEEE 802.3bs requires optical connections.
 
[QUOTE="200G and 400G is intended for business, not home users.[/QUOTE]
I call bs, it may take awhile but these things work their way down--usually. My dream is to be able to copy 4k movies as fast as I now can a 2k byte file.
 
rgMekanic said:
I just want 10G to be mainstream.
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No joke here. That's enough to satisfy just one M.2 NVMe drive... and I have more than one slot ;)


[and NAS boxes are coming with them too; I'm about ready to move my photography stuff off permanently, but I want something faster than the paltry ~110MB/s of 1GBit...]
 
rgMekanic said:
I just want 10G to be mainstream.
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It is, it just isn't cheap. It is easy to get 10g everything. There's plenty of NICs, switches both managed and unmanaged from 5 ports up to hundreds, and it works on UTP, twinax, and all varieties of fiber. However the size and power requirements of the chips are still pretty large, which pushes up the cost. It is much cheaper than it was, but nowhere near gig and won't get there any time soon. Also the wiring is something that is likely to always be an issue. For short-ish ranges you can get away with Cat-6 but you need 6a to do longer ranges. Ever work with 6a? It sucks. It is either shielded, which is a pain and leads to potential ground loop issues, or MASSIVE when unshielded. Also expensive either way.
 
rgMekanic said:
I just want 10G to be mainstream.
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Asus has a 10G Nic out there for $100? (Not the best I hear)

But no matter the route people take, building a router (using a Router OS) would still be just as expensive (or more) as buying low end 10G switch...

But maybe 2018 will be the year people stop going point to point for thier setups.
 
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rgMekanic said:
I just want 10G to be mainstream.
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This.

I've been waiting years for the price to come down so I can implement it in the office server rooms.
GB Ethernet has been good since I upgraded everything almost 10 years ago, but I'm starting to run into network performance issues on the servers.
Might just have to spend the money this year since the amount of data they need isn't getting any smaller.
 
rgMekanic said:
I just want 10G to be mainstream.
Click to expand...

Yep. I've thrown away so many fiber HBAs from various employers, but not like I could use them at home (PCI-X) or if I could (PCI-E), no driver support for non server OS's

10g cat 6 in a somewhat affordable fashion would be nice for my house. Doing big file transfers / backups over 1g can suck.

I remember when I went from 100 full to 1g at home... NICs were $100ish and the switch was $250. 15 years later, 1g 8 port switches are $20.

LOL I still have an old Linksys 100g 16 port switch in my closet.... thing cost $100 or more back in the day, can't bring myself to chuck it.
 
It semi-surprises me that fiber never got consumer-level. Like back in the 90s I was at work running some fiber and talking all like it was gonna be the future and UTP would go the way of coax ethernet cable .... then in 2011 I bought my house and was planning to wire it for networking and welp, fiber is still stupid expensive so nope, copper all the way.

High bandwidth organizations like cloud companies and such are gonna eat this stuff up.
 
Sycraft said:
It is, it just isn't cheap.
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A big part of something being mainstream is cost and 10Gbe still costs too much though the prices have been dropping the last couple of years by a fair amount.

When you can pick up a router that has 10Gbe for ~$100 you'll see it become mainstream. Until then its still gonna be for niche performance applications. The NIC's are finally affordable at least.

Sycraft said:
Also expensive either way.
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Yeah I wired my house with heavily shielded CAT6a a few years ago. The cable itself was cheap even then. Around $300 for a 1000' roll of in wall rated cable and yes it was huge and hard to work with. Almost like dealing with coaxial cable in terms of thickness and you can't bend it as much as CAT6 or CAT5 either. Keystones weren't bad, around $10 a pop I believe. The real cost was all tied up in putting the cable into the walls for existing construction. That was well over $1000 for like 24 drops. I want to say just shy of $1500.

I still ended up having to redo most of the keystones myself since the installers had some of the wires touching the case inside! It all works great now and I don't have to ever deal with any WiFi BS anymore either!! If you can install it while the drywall isn't up yet in new construction its very easy and cheap though.
 
I’d be happy with 2Gb/s over CAT6. That’s more than a platter drive can do, and that’s probably the biggest concern home users would have (transferring movies to a disk based server). What else are home users transferring many gigabyte files for on a regular basis?
 
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mesyn191 said:
Yeah I wired my house with heavily shielded CAT6a a few years ago. The cable itself was cheap even then. Around $300 for a 1000' roll of in wall rated cable and yes it was huge and hard to work with. Almost like dealing with coaxial cable in terms of thickness and you can't bend it as much as CAT6 or CAT5 either. Keystones weren't bad, around $10 a pop I believe. The real cost was all tied up in putting the cable into the walls for existing construction. That was well over $1000 for like 24 drops. I want to say just shy of $1500.
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20 years ago, I bought a fixer that needed a lot of work. As I redid each room/area I ran multiple Cat 5e (best available at the time) to every room.
Still works fine with 1GB I'm now running. Considering how short most the runs are, I wonder if I could even run 10gb.
 
westrock2000 said:
I’d be happy with 2Gb/s over CAT6. That’s more than a platter drive can do, and that’s probably the biggest concern home users would have. What else are home users transferring many gigabyte files for on a regular basis?
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Only time I usually need the speed is when I'm copying movies to/from my HTPC.
Don't think I would see much of an improvement with 10gb, since I'd be limited by the speed of the 5400 RPM drives.
 
nutzo said:
Only time I usually need the speed is when I'm copying movies to/from my HTPC.
Don't think I would see much of an improvement with 10gb, since I'd be limited by the speed of the 5400 RPM drives.
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Sorry, I forgot to say when transferring movie rips.
 
Gone are the days when people actually purchased a NIC for their computer, people use integrated, which means that if 10G doesn't come into chipsets its not going main stream. On top of that Ethernet is stagnated because the average consumer uses Wi-Fi only now days. Tablets, phones, laptops most of them don't come with Ethernet jacks of any kind. The motivation to invest in affordable 10G just doesn't seem to be there. Its already been so painfully long. What was it 1999 when 1G was finished and 2002 when 10G was finished, here we are in 2018 and 10G just isn't happening at any meaningful level in the consumer space. Personally I would almost rather we skip this and just move to 40 or 100G at this point so we could get a standard in that would last a while. Pushing in a standard that leads to fiber deployment in the home would be nice too. Get contractors actually installing on new builds.

westrock2000 said:
I’d be happy with 2Gb/s over CAT6. That’s more than a platter drive can do, and that’s probably the biggest concern home users would have (transferring movies to a disk based server). What else are home users transferring many gigabyte files for on a regular basis?
Click to expand...

I think the average home user can benefit from 10G for video streaming. To each other, from networks to displays etc... Increased color space, HDR, 4k, 8k, 120hz there is just a lot of capacity to eat up bandwidth coming down the line. We have things like steam link, etc... A LAN needs to have plenty of ability to take higher capacity than the pipe that is feeding it IMO. As we start to see mass deployment of 1G fiber to homes I think we need to see LANs upgrade to 10G or more.
 
Wireless has already surpassed 400Mb/s. Anybody trying to sell me networking hardware better have 10Gb or better at a reasonable price or GTFO.
 
Oh man you'll be waiting for a decade at least for mainstream 40Gbe and up in the consumer space.

10Gbe and 5Gbe really could become mainstream within the next few years.

10Gbe NIC's are already starting to show up integrated on some high end mobo's. Usually once you see stuff like that start to happen it'll migrate to more affordable and then mainstream stuff within reasonable time frames.

jfreund said:
Wireless has already surpassed 400Mb/s.
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In a real world setting WiFi performance is usually faaaar from what is listed. 1/10 to 1/50th of listed performance is typical. And delivery of even that performance is often inconsistent, less secure, and have much higher latency than 10Gbe or even plain old 1Gbe ethernet.
 
The most cost effective (only?) way to get 10Gbe is eBay. Old adapters (eg: Mellanox Gen 2) for $20-$50 + SFPS at $10-$30 each or DACs...

Then add in either an ubiqtuti switch for $600 or mikrotik $350 switch. Add SFPS as needed.

That is the "cheap" way....

My next purchase is most likely the 10G Mikrotik for $350. I've recycled short OM1 runs from the garbage at work (they do only OM3/OM4 now) and it seems to work OK for my needs.

For super cheap, you can buy 2 nics, 2 sfps and a single fiber cable & swap the pairs to hook 2 machines together. That should be sub $100 for 10G between 2 machines.
 
Instead of paying for a switch, pfsense and a couple of dual port 10gb Chelsio NICs, $30 a pop w/ SFPs.

Probably want to look at other vendors for your clients though. I'm seeing tcpip.sys blue screens on Win10. I've a Mellenox inbound to see if they've better drivers, $22 shipped.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
No joke here. That's enough to satisfy just one M.2 NVMe drive... and I have more than one slot ;)


[and NAS boxes are coming with them too; I'm about ready to move my photography stuff off permanently, but I want something faster than the paltry ~110MB/s of 1GBit...]
Click to expand...

IM done with network storage at home. Its never going to be fast enough and i get sick of windows deciding it doesnt want to connect to my SMB shares.. Every machine gets a huge hard drive, an internal bay for adding/removing a HDD for sneakernet and a local copy of all my media.
 
Until internet and hard drive speeds increase, anything more than 1Gbps in home networking is just a waste of money.

You can say it would be great for transferring movie rips to an HTPC, but I'm pretty sure they transfer fine at 1Gbps while you sleep for a few hours at night when no one is using your network.

I've been dreaming of 10Gbps and more since the mid 2000's, but I still don't really need it since I don't do movie rips (isn't that still illegal?).
 
Not enough HD space to make it worthwhile. Regular coax will already easily do 300 Mbps. That will fill up a 3 TB drive in a day if you thinking of downloading.
 
i-have-a-need-for-speed.jpg
 
JSumrall said:
Until internet and hard drive speeds increase, anything more than 1Gbps in home networking is just a waste of money.

You can say it would be great for transferring movie rips to an HTPC, but I'm pretty sure they transfer fine at 1Gbps while you sleep for a few hours at night when no one is using your network.

I've been dreaming of 10Gbps and more since the mid 2000's, but I still don't really need it since I don't do movie rips (isn't that still illegal?).
Click to expand...

Lots of normal HDDs can keep up with a 1Gbps line, no less an SSD, and don't even get started with NVMe drives.

However most uses for this is not from a single point to another single point, but from a single server to lots of users/boxes. So anything over 1Gbps might be a waste of money for YOU, but not everyone has your same work loads in mind.
 
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