how widespread is 2.5G and 5G ethernet hardware?

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Being aware that many people are making the jump from 1gig to 10gig, and even if I agree that's probably the best, I find myself intrigued about the new interim speeds that came out about a year ago primarily intended for using existing cable infrastructures: 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T - Wikipedia

Yet despite knowing of it, i'm not seeing much advertised as supporting it! Is this a dead in the water thing, something just waiting to get legs, something soon to be rolled out or what? I find myself desiring a bit faster than 1G for some uses but even with dropping 10G HBA card prices they still take an x8 slot if I remember which will not always be available on all consumer level boards.
 

pyro_

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There are not that many chipsets that support it yet as it really only got finalized this year, also most cards that support it right now also support 10gbe. For the most part it is more so going to be used for wifi rollouts. you will need to have at least x4 PCIE slot for most of the cards that are currently available.
 

_alex

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Guess Netgear recently announced some Switches with 5 / 2.5G ports.
Don't know about NIC's but would bet there will be some showing up the next months, too.

If you have x4 open end slots or x4 electrical in x8 some of the 10Gbe NIC should work and i would certainly go this route.
 
Actually that makes me wonder... could a 10gig NIC simply be used in 'degraded' speed via an x4 electrical connection (even via one of those PCIe risers they use for bitcoin crap) yet still be compatible? I may not get 10gigabits out of it, but would it drop to 1gigabit, or would it give me 'more than 1 gigabit' just not full speeds? Any ideas?

Since 2.5g/5g is so new I don't expect switches to have much support for awhile - and it's guaranteed i'll be using "last gen enterprise" gear for awhile, but before such switches push to the common secondhand sources, maybe that would be a trick setup? (and more compatible/futureproofed)
 

pyro_

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If you are looking at a single 10gbe connection then a PCIE2.0 4x slot is more than enough, it should give you about 16GB/s each way
 

i386

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PCIE 3.0 x4 ~ 4 gbyte/s
It's almost enough bandwidth for 40gbe, more than enough for 10gbe and slower.

My problem with 2.5/5gbe are the switches/routers. The few I have seen were >45 dba, that's louder than my supermicro server and I don't want to be in room with such a loud device for a long time.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Actually that makes me wonder... could a 10gig NIC simply be used in 'degraded' speed via an x4 electrical connection (even via one of those PCIe risers they use for bitcoin crap) yet still be compatible? I may not get 10gigabits out of it, but would it drop to 1gigabit, or would it give me 'more than 1 gigabit' just not full speeds? Any ideas?
A 10Gb NIC plugged into a 10Gb switch would still negotiate at 10Gb/s, even if the NIC itself was bottlenecked at the client side - so the speed you'd get out of it would be, say, 250MB/s (~2.5Gbps) for a PCIe 1.0 1x lane rather than dropping all the way down to 1Gbps.
 
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K D

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With 10/ 40/ 100gbe, how relevant are 2.5 and 5 anymore? Especially with 10gbe becoming more prevalent in the low end gear (netgears and dlinks) Why would there be a push for 2.5/5?
 

T_Minus

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With 10/ 40/ 100gbe, how relevant are 2.5 and 5 anymore? Especially with 10gbe becoming more prevalent in the low end gear (netgears and dlinks) Why would there be a push for 2.5/5?
Wondering this too.

The newer gen 10gbe is lower power too.
 

i386

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10g base-t needs "special" cables for longer distances, the switches and routers are loud and consume more power.
But there is a need for more bandwidth that 1gbe can't deliver (for all the mobile devices, sensors and cameras, iot and what not).
 

zunder1990

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The 2.5 and 5 specs mostly came from the wireless vendors. With AC and newer aps having 1gbit is to slow. With the 2.5 and 5 spec you can reuse your single cat5e or cat6 run to provide more than 1gbit and power to the AP.
 
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pyro_

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With 10/ 40/ 100gbe, how relevant are 2.5 and 5 anymore? Especially with 10gbe becoming more prevalent in the low end gear (netgears and dlinks) Why would there be a push for 2.5/5?
For those places that can’t/won’t rewire with cat6a or fiver and already have cat5e or cat6 in place it give them a cheaper option to get a network upgrade from gig
 

T_Minus

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A bit lower... but still not low power it seems
Yeah.
Sadly, like NVME and Fusion-IO I don't see how (within near future) network performance is going to go up 10x performance and not go up :/ in power either like drives are doing!

Performance cost power :(
 

bitrot

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A bit lower... but still not low power it seems
In the case of the Intel X550, it’s 3.4W per port for 10Gbase-T. Give it another generation or two and power consumption shouldn’t really be that much of a factor, especially for switches (it already isn’t for NICs). Say 2W a port and fanless switches with a reasonable amount of ports could be reality soon.

NBase-T will help to bring the technology to the mainstream and improve power efficiency.
 
With 10/ 40/ 100gbe, how relevant are 2.5 and 5 anymore? Especially with 10gbe becoming more prevalent in the low end gear (netgears and dlinks) Why would there be a push for 2.5/5?
Mostly just using existing cabling infrastructure. If a whole building is wired with CAT6 they don't want to rewrite it for CAT8 but they'd like a performance boost if they could especially when 1gig isn't massively deficient but even a simple doubling would be worth alot.

I'm all for and interested in it - you can saturate 1gigE with modern hard drives, but I dont think 2.5gigE would saturate yet (though it's close) and even after the next 2-3 years of shrinking I doubt 5gig will saturate by then either. 2-5gigs is a nice sweet spot for a single channel to a PC where the network probably isn't the bottleneck most of the time ie to spinning rust. Plus the jumps of 0.5w to 5w per channel, $20 to $400 it seems for new cards, the costs of 10gig are nontrivial since its not ubiquitous.



2.5/5 still allow for PoE. You give that up with anything faster. That's one reason it's attractive for WiFi access points. You're not bottlenecked on the Ethernet side, but you can still drive the AP with a single cable and centralized power.
Really? So PoE drops any support for 10gig speeds?

That gives me another reason to like 2.5/5gig - i'm designing up a house rewiring and wanting to PoE everything (security cameras, access points, low watt terminal PC's) I can to get rid of wall wart power.
 

bitrot

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No PoE support with most 10Gbase-T products yet, indeed. But there is no technical limitation today anymore, so it’s just a matter of time for it to be implemented more widely. Example:

Pulse Electronics Releases New 10GBASE-T Integrated Connector Module with Power over Ethernet (PoE) Capability

NBase-T still has its merits, though. Think of cabling wireless access points, for example, as newer ones exceed 1Gbit speeds already. PoE support plus less energy used than 10Gbase-T, basically as much energy as necessary for each scenario.
 
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