ETHERNET
The wire to faster Ethernet
Searching for faster than Gigabit Ethernet, the ever frugal Neil Mohr does that compromise thing his ex told him about.
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr won’t spend a penny on anything new and fangled – his children rarely visit.
Ethernet is 50 years old. We ran a feature wondering why it E hadn’t died off back in LXF310, and the simple answer is that it just gets faster. Most home users have been pootling around with Gigabit since the early 2000s, things for consumers are not really any faster 24 years on. In data centres, 40GbE and 100GbE are common, with even 200/400GbE being experimented with.
Here in the home office, uploads may top 20Mbp/s and downloading at 108Mbp/s over fibre, moving PDF files around, remote desktoping, SSHing to servers, and accessing the odd networked VM locally. It tends to be things that Gigabit is fine for, but faster is always better, so what are the options?
For a long while, 10GbE was the only game in town if you wanted to move from Gigabit, and it was hellishly expensive. So, around 2016/17, slower 2.5GbE and 5GbE were devised as intermediary options, but even so, these have remained expensive until recently. The good news is that 2.5GbE switches and network interface cards (NIC) have dropped to commodity prices. We’re playing with a five-port 2.5GbE switch that cost less than £60 and a PCIe add-in card that was £20. Meaning you can upgrade your local network for about £100 and likely keep the same cabling, too.