Re: [Cerowrt-devel] LCA 2018 talk available

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>]

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On Thu, 15 Feb 2018, Joel Wirāmu Pauling wrote:

> Again it's not the speed, it's the throughput. TB3 delivers near to what 
> my local x86 can do in terms of throughput. Also network should never be 
> slower than disc. Since NVME has been around this is no-longer true. 
> It's an unnatural order of things.

Having done networking since mid 80-ties, having the network be slower 
than disk has been the reality, forever, for me. The only time this might 
not have been true would be in the beginning of 1GBASE time, where single 
HDDs were slower than network. With in 10BASE-2 days, HDDs were doing a 
magnitude higher transfer speeds compared to network. Running NFS was slow 
compared to local drive.

> Cabling is the issue in my mind right now. Every laptop with tb3 ports
> has 10G+ capability, if passive optical long run was cheap and easily
> available for tb3 then half the problem would already be solved.

Cabling fiber is unfortunately always quite a lot harder and more 
complicated than copper, that's why RJ45 won. Having factory-made fiber 
cable with USB-C connectors at each end might work, if the active 
electronics can be made small enough. Think pulling these through holes in 
walls, through cable management etc. Unfortunately I doubt these will 
reach enough volume in near time to really become widely used due to their 
initial high cost.

> Maybe 10G over cat6a will be ok as the evolution. But you have to go to 
> cat8 to get anything beyond 10G... so the cabling situation and 
> incentive to upgrade to future-proof isn't there.

If we need higher than 10G speeds, then yes, fiber is the next natural 
evolution. I don't know how we're going to make single-mode fiber 
something that the average user can handle without problems. There are 
advantages though.

I am getting FTTH now. The cable they're putting is looks like this:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154951833141595&set=p.10154951833141595&type=3&theater

It has 3 strands and it's single mode.

So if we can light up these at a good cost/power/size compromise, the 
cables can be made extremely thin. Still wondering how the connectors etc 
are going to look like to make this end user friendly.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se