What do you do with a 2.5 Gbps Internet connection let alone 10 Gbps.
I mean, seriously. Other than keep pressing f5 on speedtest.net ?
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*nix talk
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My question was more informative, I certainly I'm not going to use 10Gbit. Let's not forget the problem was the same when the 1Gbps subscription appeared, everyone is asking the same question, for what we going to use 1Gbps...
We have many devices and solid 4k streaming, plus solid traffic on YouTube ....
The problem is that you aren't just done with the router, that's easy (x86_64), but you also need switches and retrofit at least two or three of your internal systems to actually make use of it. That's where it gets expensive (switches in particular), WLAN on the other hand is easy again (wifi6, not quite apt for 10 GBit/s, but at least just over 1 GBit/s).
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Most people here in Ro with 1gbps say well if 10g it's just 2€/month extra then why not...
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That is all fine, most of us would.
But in order to actually leverage this performance gain (assuming the remote servers would actually deliver that much), you have keep an eye on the total costs of ownership:
- router, easy x86_64
- switches
- fibre/ SFP+
- copper
- 2.5GBASE-T
- 5GBASE-T
- 10GBASE-T
- WLAN
kind of easy, but that's still 'just' over 1-1.5 GBit/s at close range. At least the prosumer gear won't give you more than 2.5GBASE-T or at most 5GBASE-T for the uplink connection. - clients
expect >60 EUR per client to retrofit a copper based >>1 GBit/s card (availability is an issue, also the exact standard, see above); fibre based cards are often cheaper (second hand). Only very, very recent high-end PCs come with those onboard. - power consumption
the per-port power consumption of >= 5GBit/s gear is pretty noticably higher than 1000BASE-T (noise and electricity costs), 2.5GBASE-T is somewhere in the middle (but does a 2.5 times speedup warrant the effort/ investment..?) - existing cabling...
Would I go for >>1 GBit/s internet for <10 EUR/ month more, yes.
Would I hurry to match my internal network/ routers for those speeds, hell no.
...and I'm saying that as someone for whom 1000BASE-T has been a considerable bottleneck for his LAN speeds for at least the last half decade. But upgrade costs (switches, cards) have always been prohibitive on a home budget - at least with >= 8 ports and >3 clients to retrofit 'now'.
Would I use 2.5GBASE-T or 5GBASE-T, yes - if the markup when buying new devices (for other reasons) were negligible.
Would I invest in these standards when buying infrastructure, no! If I have to shell out big money, I'd want at least 10 GBit/s and be done with it for the next few years, rather than paying through the nose for every fractional step.
You still want 5 GBit/s internet to your systems now? Be prepared to shell out around 1000 EUR up front.
Do you still want to play, or are you content with having marked the checkbox and the knowledge that you may be able to actually leverage this on a budget in 3-5 years (assuming the internet servers as a whole would expedite upgrading as well).
Edit: tl;dr: Have your LAN 10 GBit/s ready, before bothering too much about the WAN uplink.
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This is not a question whether you should get it or not, thats noones else business other than yours. Certainly not mine.
Still, 4k stream is 20 Mbps, you can fit 4 of these into 100 Mbps and over 40 in 1Gbps if you feel like playing so many consecutive 4k streams at once and have hardware to terminate all of them.
So, still. What useful can you do with 10 Gbps?
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Seeding OpenWrt Images via BitTorrent..
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that actually is a very good answer
family working from home during lockdown ...
there is a catch here though: beyond 1Gb ISP device's usually serves the bw via multiple ports, a.k.a. 2Gb network means you can connect to two home devices simultaneously and leverage 1+1Gb. So the argument to match the home network aligned to higher bw still valid (unfortunately for a while seeing how much 10G home switches, network cards cost), but if you're happy to directly connect two devices (or networks via common 1gb switches) you can utilize that extra bw. But not necessarily as one single big bw.
yeah, Romania is the country of (almost) unrestricted file-sharing (aka piracy) so anything above 1gbps would definitely help
PS - not my case though - I've always been on the cheapest plan (now 500m dw/250m up)
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400 UHD streams? Think about extreme
binging streaming services full catalogs in record time...
Depending on the ISP going to a faster tier will move you onto a faster access link (e.g. 10 Gbps XGS-PON instead of 1Gbps GPON), where the probability of getting say 1Gbps access rate reliably is considerably higher (in spite of the typical massive oversubscription of access links). Take for example Switzerland, where some ISPs, offer either up to 32 users with 1Gbps plans on GPON or up t 32 users with 10Gbps on XGS-PON, but where the CPE they supply often can not actually deliver 10 Gbps to the home network, so relatively the XGS-PON segment will be less busy....
EDIT: it seems CPE have caught up and offer 10 Gbps ports on the LAN side, so my qualification seems purely historic, as I have no data on the actual performance.
Not first hand, some months ago I did a web-crawl over Salt's, Swisscom's, Initi7's, and free.fr's websites, as all of these offer 10Gbps plans.
Init7 has a decent hardware page describing the different CPE, the others, like salt and free seem to use their own branded CPE.
I guess not as helpful a response as I would like to have given....
I guess it's Zyxel AX7501-B0 for the 10g plans. Digi seems to be offering the same device in Spain (initial 10g service launch) and people on the forums expect the same in Romania. And you say it's not delivering the expected 10gbps?
I think I retract my qualification, this offers a 10Gbps LAN port, something the first generation of CPE did not. I have no data/opinion, whether that Zyxel can reliably NAT/firewall at 10Gbps, but unlike the first generation CPE from swisscom it at least has the ports required to do so.
I think with a 2.5Gbps connection you could for a reasonable amount of money use a 2.5Gbps port on the WAN and dual or triple 1Gbps in a LAG group to a managed LAN switch, and make use of most of the aggregate 2.5Gbps for not much extra money (since you can use gig switches). Beyond 2.5Gbps these days, it's much less convincing.
Actually transferring more than 2.5Gbps over your WAN on anything other than a speed test is unlikely, as most servers on the internet just won't give you that much bandwidth. It would have to be a coordinated transfer between multiple sites, such as a Torrent or similar. Even that's not super likely to happen.
1Gbps on the WAN is by far the sweet spot for performance / dollar
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Wow, that's nice. They even let you buy the optics for your own CPE separately. I like that.
On the face of it, https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qhora-301w might be an option with OpenWrt potential (ipq8072a) - but that is both betting on its performance in the face of 10 GBit/s throughput and getting OpenWrt working properly on this target (and with sufficient hardware acceleration). The advice would still remain on x86_64 and matching supporting network infrastructure (switches, APs).
I guess 10G would be nice for those hosting their own data via NAS.