[Cerowrt-devel] LCA 2018 talk available

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2018, Joel Wirāmu Pauling wrote:

> Kia Ora (Hi in Māori).
>
> Today I delivered my talk on 10Gbit(+) in the home at Linuxconf
> Australasia. Some specific shout outs to those on the list who helped form
> some of the content and especially for the continued efforts with FLENT
> which I have been making extensive use of both professionally and privately.
>
> Hopefully this is of some interest and use to people on the list.
>
> https://github.com/aenertia/lca2018-talk/tree/talk

Great presentation, thanks.

Some feedback. I have been told MOCA is widely used in USA, and this is 
in-house coax cabling used for providing IP based services in multiple 
rooms.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-set-up-a-coax-MoCA-network/

Now, this doesn't have much to do with your 10GE talk as it's not going to 
be that fast, but anyway. So back to > 1GE speeds.

It seems to me that 1GE is good enough for a lot of user needs. It's over 
100 megabyte/s, most HDDs won't even transfer faster than this. Most 
devices do not have anything faster than 1GE, so it's a chicken and egg 
problem. I have a 100EUR fanless managable 24 port switch with 4 SFP 
ports. I imagine anything faster than this would require fans and would 
bring up the cost a lot.

It would be ideal to have a 24 port 1GE + 4 (or 8) ports of 1/2.5/5/10GE 
for incremental migration, but I have 0 things in my home that speaks 
anything faster than 1GBASE-T (with RJ45 connector). I do have SFP+ based 
NIC cards and DAC cables, but I don't even use them (apart from occasional 
testing).

The upgrade was from 100BASE-T to 1GBASE-T was fairly cheap and addressed 
a wide need, since 10-11 megabyte/s was slower than most HDDs even 15-20 
years ago. Today, 100-110megabyte/s at 1GBASE-T speeds is actually still 
quite decent, and most people don't have huge amounts of data to move 
around. So for most people, anything faster than 1GBASE-T doesn't address 
a problem they actually have. Yes, for people handling 4k footage and 
doing video editing etc, they need faster. But most people don't. For them 
a 8-24 port 1GBASE-T switch is fine, and provides a networking solution 
that is not bottlenecking them in any significant fashion.

2.5G and 5G would be a good compromise, but it seems to be stuck in 
chicken/egg problem space. Most people actually don't even wire their 
computers today, it's all wifi, and even if they do wire them, the only 
NIC available is 1GBASE-T based.

The iMac Pro is the first prosumer device I have seen that actually 
supports faster networking. If Apple or someone else actually released a 
thunderbolt based NIC that was decently sized/priced that did support 2.5G 
or 5GBASE-T, then this chicken/egg problem could perhaps be solved. Most 
people don't feel the need to connect these kinds of things to their 
laptop:

https://www.startech.com/uk/Networking-IO/Adapter-Cards/thunderbolt-3-10-gbe-nic-chassis~BNDTB310GNDP
https://www.akitio.com/adapters/thunder2-10g-network-adapter
https://www.promise.com/Products/SANLink/SANLink2/10G-BaseT

http://www.tehutinetworks.net/?t=LV&L1=3&L2=0&L3=0&L7=157 is interesting, 
as this is not huge. It also does 2.5G and 5G.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12422/akitios-thunder3-10g-adapter-now-available

300USD is still a significant chunk of money compared to the 29USD 
1GBASE-T thunderbolt2 adapter that Apple sells.

But still, with these kinds of products, there might be hope!

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