Why are Ethernet speeds so stagnent?

[KenjiUmino]

1 hour ago, pyrojoe34 said:

Why is it that Ethernet speeds have been so stagnant for years and the standard found on almost all consumer hardware is a measly 1Gbps which has been a thing since like 1999?

was ethernet as we know it today a thing in 1990? - yes

 

could the average consumer afford ethernet at home in 1990? - no

 

 

was 1Gbps ethernet a thing in 2000? - yes

 

was 1Gbps ethernet affordable for the average consumer in 2000? - no

 

it took about 10 years for gigabit ethernet to become interesting for the mainstream. maybe another 5 to actually be widely adopted in consumer households.

 

 

was 10Gbps ethernet a thing in 2010? - yes

 

was 10Gbps ethernet affordable in 2010? - no 

 

it's 2017 and the prices for 10Gbps hardware slowly start to drop to sane levels - see where this is going ?

[The Benjamins]

1 hour ago, Blebekblebek said:

The bottleneck is consumer grade drive that can't keep up with the speed.

Regular Hard drive still averaging at 1Gbps.

My few year old 4TB drives can do 180MBps and my 8TB drives can do over 200MB/s.

My NAS drives can do around 600MB/s with its Raid 10 setup.

all of my desktops use only SSD which can do 400+ MB/s.

all of this is bottle necked by ethernet, for me to get 10Gbe I need top spend about $500 on a switch (due to poor planning) wish it cost a lot less.

[Blebekblebek]

10 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

My few year old 4TB drives can do 180MBps and my 8TB drives can do over 200MB/s.

My NAS drives can do around 600MB/s with its Raid 10 setup.

all of my desktops use only SSD which can do 400+ MB/s.

all of this is bottle necked by ethernet, for me to get 10Gbe I need top spend about $500 on a switch (due to poor planning) wish it cost a lot less.

Good.

Now make a wish so 95% for other users so we can afford these setup on regular house.

[The Benjamins]

14 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

Good.

Now make a wish so 95% for other users so we can afford these setup on regular house.

is a 4TB hard drive really to expensive? Hard drive speeds have passed 1Gbpe for years, and a lot of newer consumer devices use SSD's.

people might not need 10Gbpe but they could defiantly use the 2.5 and 5 Gbps speeds. I don't see why a consumer network couldn't be 2.5Gbps with out increasing cost by much, but that would help NAS systems a lot.

[Blebekblebek]

1 minute ago, The Benjamins said:

is a 4TB hard drive really to expensive? Hard drive speeds have passed 1Gbpe for years, and a lot of newer consumer devices use SSD's.

people might not need 10Gbpe but they could defiantly use the 2.5 and 5 Gbps speeds. I don't see why a consumer network couldn't be 2.5Gbps with out increasing cost by much, but that would help NAS systems a lot.

Do you even consider regular person would have a NAS inside their home?

Take a pool here and ask if them had a NAS, you might shocked with reality.

[The Benjamins]

1 minute ago, Blebekblebek said:

Do you even consider regular person would have a NAS inside their home?

Take a pool here and ask if them had a NAS, you might shocked with reality.

why advance technology at all then, you have to start some were. and as stated the move to 2.5Gbpe shouldn't cost that much more then 1Gbpe. WiFi is faster then 1Gbps now why can't Ethernet be?

 

on a kinda side note, Comcast offers 2Gbps (down and up) to standard consumers, and I can't wrap my head around how anyone could use that with the limit of 1Gbps devices.

[Blebekblebek]

You're only as fast as your slowest team member

 

There's no wifi is faster than 1gbps yet (theoretical yes, real speed? no)

And 100gbps network do exist, if you can afford it.

http://www.hitechglobal.com/boards/x16pciexpress-gen3.htm

 

 

 

[The Benjamins]

12 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

You're only as fast as your slowest team member

 

There's no wifi is faster than 1gbps yet (theoretical yes, real speed? no)

And 100gbps network do exist, if you can afford it.

http://www.hitechglobal.com/boards/x16pciexpress-gen3.htm

 

 

 

basically what I am saying is I would prefer if they moved to 2.5Gbps now then try and push 10Gbps over then next few years. I would love 10Gbps but 2.5Gbps would be a nice bump that should cost more to make. and existing tech can utilize 2.5Gbps now, NAS and windows share drives (HDD OR SSD) would all benefit for a affordable 2.5Gbps solution.

[luigi90210]

most consumers dont use ethernet let alone care for how fast it is, all consumers care about now is wifi and making sure their device can connect to their wifi everywhere in their house
most consumers stick their wifi routers in a corner of their house or in the basement/garage/ect. and then use wireless range extenders(which halves your speeds) to get coverage in the rest of their house

i mean i can go on and on about what typical consumers do vs what they should do

[dalekphalm]

18 hours ago, luigi90210 said:

most consumers dont use ethernet let alone care for how fast it is, all consumers care about now is wifi and making sure their device can connect to their wifi everywhere in their house
most consumers stick their wifi routers in a corner of their house or in the basement/garage/ect. and then use wireless range extenders(which halves your speeds) to get coverage in the rest of their house

i mean i can go on and on about what typical consumers do vs what they should do

Agreed.

 

@pyrojoe34 you want the price of 10GigE to go down? Convince more people to buy the current over-expensive stuff. There's no incentive for manufacturers to innovate or drive prices down for 10GigE on the consumer level because there's very little demand for it. The equipment and network cards do exist, for those who want to jump on it now. If you go out and fully equip your home network with 10GigE, you'll help drive the cost down.

[AshleyAshes]

I have a 33.5TB media server that serves media files to multiple HTPCs in a one bedroom apartment that has six PCs in it if you include the laptop and server itself.  Meanwhile, 1gbps is more then enough to serve media concurrently to every machine I own, even adding the tablet and phone over wifi, the 1gbe network is not saturated.

 

Sure I could copy new media to the server a LITTLE faster if I had a faster network but the payoff for the investment would be minimal.  I'd have to be moving some big data sets and basically be working from home on free lance visual effects projects to need a network that could serve at 10gbps.  In short, any 'consumer' who needs 10gbps is no longer a 'consumer', they're now 'professional/SOHO' and that's when you start investing better hardware to run the business.

 

For consumers, the fact that the HDD in your little off the shelf NAS could hit 180MB/s, meaning if you ONLY had 10gbps you could copy that home video over in 25 less seconds is irrelevant to them.

[pyrojoe34]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

I have a 33.5TB media server that serves media files to multiple HTPCs in a one bedroom apartment that has six PCs in it if you include the laptop and server itself.  Meanwhile, 1gbps is more then enough to serve media concurrently to every machine I own, even adding the tablet and phone over wifi, the 1gbe network is not saturated.

 

Sure I could copy new media to the server a LITTLE faster if I had a faster network but the payoff for the investment would be minimal.  I'd have to be moving some big data sets and basically be working from home on free lance visual effects projects to need a network that could serve at 10gbps.  In short, any 'consumer' who needs 10gbps is no longer a 'consumer', they're now 'professional/SOHO' and that's when you start investing better hardware to run the business.

 

For consumers, the fact that the HDD in your little off the shelf NAS could hit 180MB/s, meaning if you ONLY had 10gbps you could copy that home video over in 25 less seconds is irrelevant to them.

It's not just about NAS use for me though. I also remote desktop and/or stream steam games from my primary PC to my HTPC/TV and would really like to have uncompressed (or less compressed) video data which would take 12+ Gbps for 4k60 and 3+ Gbps for 1080p60. Is that realistic without using TB3 or a fiber network? Maybe not, but it sure would be nice to have:)

[luigi90210]

OP if you want you can just hook up your NAS on 10gb using a switch like the XS708E-200NES and the rest of your devices can connect on 1gbe and that would allow your NAS to essentially have more bandwidth when it comes to streaming and file transfers since you can saturate multiple 1gbe connections

[AshleyAshes]

1 hour ago, pyrojoe34 said:

It's not just about NAS use for me though. I also remote desktop and/or stream steam games from my primary PC to my HTPC/TV and would really like to have uncompressed (or less compressed) video data which would take 12+ Gbps for 4k60 and 3+ Gbps for 1080p60. Is that realistic without using TB3 or a fiber network? Maybe not, but it sure would be nice to have:)

Ethernet is a pretty stupid thing to use as a real time uncompressed video transport.

[pyrojoe34]

40 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Ethernet is a pretty stupid thing to use as a real time uncompressed video transport.

What other options do I have for sending video between rooms and without buying a bunch of specialized hardware? As far as I know it's the only practical way to do it without spending a bunch of money doing what Linus did with his home PC using TB3.

[AshleyAshes]

34 minutes ago, pyrojoe34 said:

What other options do I have for sending video between rooms and without buying a bunch of specialized hardware? As far as I know it's the only practical way to do it without spending a bunch of money doing what Linus did with his home PC using TB3.

ThunderBolt obviously.  Thunderbolt is PURPOSE BUILT to natively carry DisplayPort data and that's a good and smart way to do it.  Ethernet on the other hand is just built to move Ethernet packets; Any data over Ethernet needs to be transformed and encoded into a data format that it can transport, get it to the other hand, and then transform and decode it back into the original data at the other end.  Ethernet is a terrible way to move that kind of data when there's much more efficient and purpose designed means of doing so.  I mean, I GET that there's plenty of real time streaming applications that relies on the local network but that's basically because 'Well, the network is already there, so let's use that, it'll more or less get the job done' but there's latency issues and all sorts of other downsides.  But when you are talking about uncompressed video data in real time, crying about 10gbe is not what will solve that for you, Thunderbolt or other specially designed systems are what will do it.

 

If this whole thread is basically you dreaming that 10gbe brings you zero latency uncompressed video then you are going to be sorely disappointed.

[NZLaurence]

Its also worth pointing out that 10gb is very affordable at the moment.

 

You can get pcie 10gb SFP+ adaptors on eBay for under $100. Switches for $200-300.  However you will need 10gbit optics and fibre cable with will cost abit.

 

If you want to go 10gbit-t then it gets more interesting. Cards and switches are a lot more expensive but cables are cheaper. However this is a very new spec. I have only been seeing the copper 10gbit ports on switches for the last 3-4 years. It will be awhile before they hit consumer gear. Also if you check the power requirements and the heatsinks on those cards you will understand why they are not standard. Probably adding $10-20 to the COST of a device where margins are thin and competition high.

 

I remember buying my first 100mbit Ethernet card and it costing $300+ at the time that was a enterprise cars with huge heatsinks. Until the cost of the copper ports goes down a lot (probably require some new chips with a die shrink for heat and a way to use cheaper power chips but still be reliable) its unlikely they will be a consumer product. Also most people don't wire there house anymore. Makes more sense to invest in wireless for your average consumer.