Seems like gigabit home networking is still far away. An $800 10 GbE switch is infinitely more expensive than a $20-30 gigabit switch (8 ports for both).
I wonder how much a cheap FDR infiniband setup (> 50 Gb/sec) would cost. Hopefully not much more.
Last time I checked FDR InfiniBand was comparable in price to high-end 10GbE gear per port; QDR can usually be had for quite a bit less and second hand DDR gear is really cheap and widely available.
That's pretty much how Gigabit was, back in the day. When it finally started becoming affordable, switches were $800 and PCs needed dedicated cards for Gigabit. By the next year, prices were down to $400 for the switch, and then continued dropping from there until they were mainstream 2-3 years later.
We'll see if the demand is here for 10GbE to drive down the price in a similar fashion.
It's mostly for professional users to share a lot of data If you consider that these switches are managed pretty well and have 12 or 24 ports, a comparable gigabit switch is going to be in the $100-400 range. So 10-20x more expensive. Still, them advertising this for home users for gaming, wifi, and security is absurd since none of those will benefit from going beyond one gigabit.
Granted things don't scale like this, but it's still 10x more switch than an 8-port GigE variant. As mentioned, a fraction of home users may actually take advantage of this, and even then, rarely.
The best option at the moment for someone that needs more than 1Gb throughput is find an inexpensive switch and channel them.
Yeah you could start at "Does the consumer even have *one* 10 Gbps capable device in their house?" I think only a few X99 workstation boards have a 10 GigE port, the rest is expensive server gear. And even if they have one they only need a 10 Gbps uplink port so it can serve wired/wireless <= 1 Gbps clients, not a 10 Gbps switch.
The MSRP of the XS1920-12 is $1,865, while the suggested retail price of the XS3700-24 is $3,860.
I read the headline as affordable 10g switches to home users. The headline writer needed to go back to the drawing board on that one. These are managed switches with fiber uplinks, etc and definitely not affordable to home users.
Of course, the headline really meant that UTM was for home users, though I don't think $250 is going to move many boxes.
I'm not sure I'd call that affordable yet... Maybe in a serious corporate environment where only a handful of highly specialized devices needed to interconnect at 10G and the rest of the network can be 100M/1G and you could get away with only buying one of these, but as far as a full 10G network infrastructure? No way.
It's not about connectivity to the Internet, it's about internal services. Home servers/storage, etc. That's the only feasible use case. There's a latency component, but for the purposes of these discussions, it's mostly irrelevant.
Not to mention the number of home users who would benefit from 10GbE is minimal at best, they just don't have enough data to transfer at a given time.
I find the Internet access speed comment very relevant, while its not directly related to home network throughout the likely driver for faster connections is the slow transition to 4k video, and the likely driver to home networking speeds will be the eventual ability to drive multiple 4k streams at the same time to different parts of the home, while still maintaining a reliable, quick web browsing and network experience.
Well, that's an interesting topic, but I still don't think that will matter in the long run. Redray, Red's player claims a 2.5MB stream. That's ~20Mb, which is easily achievable by most ISPs. Netflix claims 15.6Mb. I can't find what Amazon will do, but the point is that compression improvements will reduce what would be perceived to be a huge requirement at the expense of quality (IMHO). Instead of higher troughput, data caps will need to be removed, but that's going way OT.
This is about internal networking, not internet performance. Gigabit networking is definitely the bottleneck when I transfer files between computers on my home network.
Yeah I was kind of expecting awesome prices when mentioning "home users" in the headline. The UTM is vaguely "home priced" if you have a nice budget. $1800 for the 12 port switch is not a home price. That is someone with too much bloody money, or an SMB. For $1800, the price is deffinitely right if you need that many ports and 10GbE (if you need fewer, the Netgear 8 port 10GbE at only $800 is a significantly better deal per port).
We are still a few years away from 10GbE being "affordable" in the home. That said, you CAN get TwinAx SFP+ modules and and some 10Gbps NICs for them to go in to for only around $150-200 total if all you need is a couple of machines with 10Gbps and they are reasonably close.
I am honestly more interested in 2.5/5GbE, which MAY come around this year. Last I checked they are working on coming up with a concrete spec and standards based on existing chipset manufacturer specific 2.5/5GbE gear. The goal is to support either speed to 100m on Cat5e as well as something lower cost, heat and power than 10GbE.
Part of it is the faster wifi, without link aggregation, 802.11ac, especially once 160MHz channels FINALLY come around, is going to be pushing more bits through the air than the wired connection to the AP/Router can actually handle. So bumping to a minimum of 2.5GbE for the time being until 10GbE becomes truely affordable makes sense, especially in a business/enterprise environment.
I still wouldn't expect shipping 2.5/5GbE products until the end of the year at a MINIMUM and will of course be at a premium to 1GbE. Still and all, if I can get 2.5/5GbE at $25 a port, instead of $100 a port of 10GbE, I am all in.
The $800 Netgear 10GbE network switch is more appropriate for home users, with its much lower price and fixed UTP ports. Few home users need the modular SFP ports of the XS1920-12 and the higher price point that comes with it. I see the ZyXEL switch being used more for small offices, branch offices and small buildings within a campus.
What I'm waiting for is an industrial/hardened (-10C to +60C, 48VDC power) 10GbE managed switch with either five SFP+ ports or two SFP+ ports and a couple of copper UTP ports that support 802.1AX aggregation, 802.1Q tagging and 802.1aq paths. I can toss something like that in a warehouse or on a telephone pole and have fault tolerant SM or MM fiber uplinks.
Six years ago I bought a Procurve 24 port managed layer 2 gigabit switch for about $300 for my basement. It's been a great investment. I'm still using it today.
Six years is a long time when it comes to tech though. I certainly expected 10gig to have taken off by now, to the point where I could at least get a $300 managed Layer2 24port gigabit switch with a few 10gig uplink ports (preferably 10gBaseT so I don't have to deal with fiber and transducers that break) but this has yet to happen.
The cheapest 10GBaseT switches are 8 port units for $750. 24port GigE with 10Gig uplink ports exist, but are usually SFP+ units and cost $1200+
Once there is a ~$300 24port GigE + 4 port 10gBaseT or better managed switch, I'm going out and buying it right away, but at this rate that seems a LONG ways off.
I guess it is to be expected though, as consumers have pretty much shunned wired Ethernet in favor of the vastly inferior WiFi solutions. The truth is most people just don't care about networking speeds as long as its fast enough to not bottleneck their internet connection, which means 10Gig will never see mass consumer adoption like gigabit Ethernet has, and thus it will always stay in the Enterprise with occasional trickle down to pro-sumer market, and be way too expensive :(
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chlamchowder - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
Seems like gigabit home networking is still far away. An $800 10 GbE switch is infinitely more expensive than a $20-30 gigabit switch (8 ports for both).I wonder how much a cheap FDR infiniband setup (> 50 Gb/sec) would cost. Hopefully not much more.
Romulous - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
I looked into infiniband a while ago, and it was comparable to the cost of 10gbe although the cables are expensive.returnzer0 - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
It boggles my mind how you can set your boundaries and call it infinite in the same sentence.chlamchowder - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Haha, well, I guess I have to watch my language. How does "> 20x more expensive" or "an order of magnitude more expensive" sound?In any case, I hope you get the point - there's a massive price difference between gigabit and 10 GbE.
gsvelto - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Last time I checked FDR InfiniBand was comparable in price to high-end 10GbE gear per port; QDR can usually be had for quite a bit less and second hand DDR gear is really cheap and widely available.programcsharp - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
That's pretty much how Gigabit was, back in the day. When it finally started becoming affordable, switches were $800 and PCs needed dedicated cards for Gigabit. By the next year, prices were down to $400 for the switch, and then continued dropping from there until they were mainstream 2-3 years later.We'll see if the demand is here for 10GbE to drive down the price in a similar fashion.
geneiusxie - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
It's mostly for professional users to share a lot of dataIf you consider that these switches are managed pretty well and have 12 or 24 ports, a comparable gigabit switch is going to be in the $100-400 range. So 10-20x more expensive. Still, them advertising this for home users for gaming, wifi, and security is absurd since none of those will benefit from going beyond one gigabit.
geneiusxie - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
none of them will benefit from going beyond one gigabit in the near future, at least.Railgun - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Granted things don't scale like this, but it's still 10x more switch than an 8-port GigE variant. As mentioned, a fraction of home users may actually take advantage of this, and even then, rarely.The best option at the moment for someone that needs more than 1Gb throughput is find an inexpensive switch and channel them.
Railgun - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
That is, an inexpensive switch that can do port aggregation, with the appropriate client of course.r3loaded - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
"Affordable" and for "home users". Yeah right.Kjella - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Yeah you could start at "Does the consumer even have *one* 10 Gbps capable device in their house?" I think only a few X99 workstation boards have a 10 GigE port, the rest is expensive server gear. And even if they have one they only need a 10 Gbps uplink port so it can serve wired/wireless <= 1 Gbps clients, not a 10 Gbps switch.Joel Kleppinger - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
The MSRP of the XS1920-12 is $1,865, while the suggested retail price of the XS3700-24 is $3,860.I read the headline as affordable 10g switches to home users.
The headline writer needed to go back to the drawing board on that one. These are managed switches with fiber uplinks, etc and definitely not affordable to home users.
Of course, the headline really meant that UTM was for home users, though I don't think $250 is going to move many boxes.
Mushkins - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
$1800 for a twelve port switch?I'm not sure I'd call that affordable yet... Maybe in a serious corporate environment where only a handful of highly specialized devices needed to interconnect at 10G and the rest of the network can be 100M/1G and you could get away with only buying one of these, but as far as a full 10G network infrastructure? No way.
baii9 - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Don't see 10gbps gonna get popular at all in home segment until WiFi/w.e wireless they have catch up.CuriousHomeBody - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
With most homes in North America Unable to buy 1GB service how can anyone expect to sell the home user a 10GB managed switch?Railgun - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
It's not about connectivity to the Internet, it's about internal services. Home servers/storage, etc. That's the only feasible use case. There's a latency component, but for the purposes of these discussions, it's mostly irrelevant.Deelron - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Not to mention the number of home users who would benefit from 10GbE is minimal at best, they just don't have enough data to transfer at a given time.I find the Internet access speed comment very relevant, while its not directly related to home network throughout the likely driver for faster connections is the slow transition to 4k video, and the likely driver to home networking speeds will be the eventual ability to drive multiple 4k streams at the same time to different parts of the home, while still maintaining a reliable, quick web browsing and network experience.
Railgun - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
Well, that's an interesting topic, but I still don't think that will matter in the long run. Redray, Red's player claims a 2.5MB stream. That's ~20Mb, which is easily achievable by most ISPs. Netflix claims 15.6Mb. I can't find what Amazon will do, but the point is that compression improvements will reduce what would be perceived to be a huge requirement at the expense of quality (IMHO). Instead of higher troughput, data caps will need to be removed, but that's going way OT.Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
This is about internal networking, not internet performance. Gigabit networking is definitely the bottleneck when I transfer files between computers on my home network.azazel1024 - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
Yeah I was kind of expecting awesome prices when mentioning "home users" in the headline. The UTM is vaguely "home priced" if you have a nice budget. $1800 for the 12 port switch is not a home price. That is someone with too much bloody money, or an SMB. For $1800, the price is deffinitely right if you need that many ports and 10GbE (if you need fewer, the Netgear 8 port 10GbE at only $800 is a significantly better deal per port).We are still a few years away from 10GbE being "affordable" in the home. That said, you CAN get TwinAx SFP+ modules and and some 10Gbps NICs for them to go in to for only around $150-200 total if all you need is a couple of machines with 10Gbps and they are reasonably close.
I am honestly more interested in 2.5/5GbE, which MAY come around this year. Last I checked they are working on coming up with a concrete spec and standards based on existing chipset manufacturer specific 2.5/5GbE gear. The goal is to support either speed to 100m on Cat5e as well as something lower cost, heat and power than 10GbE.
Part of it is the faster wifi, without link aggregation, 802.11ac, especially once 160MHz channels FINALLY come around, is going to be pushing more bits through the air than the wired connection to the AP/Router can actually handle. So bumping to a minimum of 2.5GbE for the time being until 10GbE becomes truely affordable makes sense, especially in a business/enterprise environment.
I still wouldn't expect shipping 2.5/5GbE products until the end of the year at a MINIMUM and will of course be at a premium to 1GbE. Still and all, if I can get 2.5/5GbE at $25 a port, instead of $100 a port of 10GbE, I am all in.
Lucky Stripes 99 - Saturday, February 28, 2015 - link
The $800 Netgear 10GbE network switch is more appropriate for home users, with its much lower price and fixed UTP ports. Few home users need the modular SFP ports of the XS1920-12 and the higher price point that comes with it. I see the ZyXEL switch being used more for small offices, branch offices and small buildings within a campus.What I'm waiting for is an industrial/hardened (-10C to +60C, 48VDC power) 10GbE managed switch with either five SFP+ ports or two SFP+ ports and a couple of copper UTP ports that support 802.1AX aggregation, 802.1Q tagging and 802.1aq paths. I can toss something like that in a warehouse or on a telephone pole and have fault tolerant SM or MM fiber uplinks.
mattlach - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
"Affordable" sure is a relative term.Six years ago I bought a Procurve 24 port managed layer 2 gigabit switch for about $300 for my basement. It's been a great investment. I'm still using it today.
Six years is a long time when it comes to tech though. I certainly expected 10gig to have taken off by now, to the point where I could at least get a $300 managed Layer2 24port gigabit switch with a few 10gig uplink ports (preferably 10gBaseT so I don't have to deal with fiber and transducers that break) but this has yet to happen.
The cheapest 10GBaseT switches are 8 port units for $750. 24port GigE with 10Gig uplink ports exist, but are usually SFP+ units and cost $1200+
Once there is a ~$300 24port GigE + 4 port 10gBaseT or better managed switch, I'm going out and buying it right away, but at this rate that seems a LONG ways off.
I guess it is to be expected though, as consumers have pretty much shunned wired Ethernet in favor of the vastly inferior WiFi solutions. The truth is most people just don't care about networking speeds as long as its fast enough to not bottleneck their internet connection, which means 10Gig will never see mass consumer adoption like gigabit Ethernet has, and thus it will always stay in the Enterprise with occasional trickle down to pro-sumer market, and be way too expensive :(