Too bad this is 10Gbase-T, that energy-wasting hot-running garbage needs to die sooner rather than later. Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use.
(Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)
The problem with fibre isn't the sensitivity. It's that most endpoints have a 1Gbps copper port on them and then Cat6A ports can be used with the common devices but also allow you to add or relocate 10Gbps devices without rewiring the building again.
However — unlike copper twisted pair — the bandwidth current fiber media can carry is nearly limited by nothing but the optics at each end.
That doesn't solve the chicken and egg problem.
What probably would is something like having PCIe and USB to 1Gbps fiber adapters that cost $5.
You've been able to get Intel X520 NICs [0], with transceivers included for ~40USD on Newegg for a long time. This is a little more than double the price of Newegg's cheapest single-port 10/100/1000 copper card, but even the cheapest available such card is three times your "chicken and egg"-solving price point.
I suspect the combination of the absence of cheap-o all-in-one AP/router combo boxes with any SFP+ cages and fiber cabling's reputation of being extremely fragile have much more to do with its scarcity at the extremely low end of networking gear than anything else.
[0] This is a two-port SFP+ PCI Express card
In practice though 10G via copper requires pretty perfect terminations. The slightest error leads to crosstalk issues.
Ymmv. I've got a mix of cheap premade patch cables and some I crimped from solid core, all cat5e, all holding 10gbe totally happily. I suspect that only works because they're a meter or two long but that reaches across the rack.
Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use.
Anyone who talks about 25GBASE-T like it actually exists, doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.
Or is speaking in future terms.
40Gbase-T will never exist, sure. 25Gbase-T very likely will.
Is the energy consumption inherent to 10Gbase-T? Or is it that 1Gbit nics have been around forever and optimised ad infinitum?
To be fair, the power consumption is also my biggest gripe with my WiFi 6 AP, they run extremely hot.
It's inherently worse than anything fibre, or even DAC cables (which are kinda cheating.) It needs a shitton of analog "magic" to work with the bandwidth limitations of copper cabling.
Just wondering why you considered DAC cables cheating, is the analog magic mainly the impedance matching or I'm missing something?
How easy can an ordinary home user install fiber in his home compared to a good old wire?
There’s nothing hard about it if you can run pre-terminated patches. Which you typically can since the connectors are so small.
So you're saying users could buy stuff like this? "25m (82ft) Fiber Patch Cable, 1 Fiber, SC APC Simplex to SC APC Simplex, Single Mode (OS2), Riser (OFNR), 2.0mm, Tight-Buffered, Yellow", https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/282133.html?attribute=1031...
Heck, I don't even know what I should buy for 10G SFP+ ports and a distance of say 30 meters. Guess, I'm back to CAT6 :-)
> Guess, I'm back to CAT6 :-)
If you learned what you need for 10GbT you can learn what you need for 10GbLR. Which is:
LC connector, PC or UPC, duplex, OS1 or OS2, and SFP+ modules saying "LR".
Any of the following is wrong: SC, FC, LSH, E2000, ST, APC, simplex, OM[1-5], "SR" or "ER" SFPs.
And that's short enough.
LC connectors are smaller and what the actual SFP+ modules typically have. If you want to run a link with just one fiber, you need BiDi optics.
FS does custom multi-fiber cable assemblies too (beyond the duplex patches which is basically the standard), and they can also include pull eyes on them if that’d be helpful.
Single mode is a good choice, common wisdom used to be multimode for short runs but the single mode stuff is not much more expensive and the standard 10km optics will likely brute force the signal over any mistakes like cable kinks or dirt on the connectors.