[whatever1]

Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.

Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.

[kohlschuetter]

The new low-power Realtek chipsets will definitely push 10 GbE forward because the chipset won't be much more expensive to integrate and run than the 2.5Gbps packages.

It all comes down to performance per Watt, the availability of cheap switching gear, and the actual utility in an office / home environment.

For 10 Gbps, cabling can be an issue. Existing "RJ45"-style Cat 6 cables could still work, but maybe not all of them.

Higher speeds will most likely demand a switch to fiber (for anything longer than a few meters) or Twinax DAC (for inter-device connects). Since Wifi already provides higher speeds, one may be inclined to upgrade just for that (because at some point, Wireless becomes Wired, too).

That change comes with the complexity of running new cabling, fiber splicing, worrying about different connectors (SFP+, SFP28, SFP56, QSFP28, ...), incompatible transceiver certifications, vendor lock-in, etc. Not a problem in the datacenter, but try to explain this to a layman.

Lastly, without a faster pipe to the Internet, what can you do other than NAS and AI? The computers will still get faster chips but most folks won't be able to make use of the bandwidth because they're still stuck on 1Gbps Internet or less.

But that will change. Swiss Init7 has shown that 25GBps Internet at home is not only feasible but also affordable, and China seems to be adding lots of 10G, and fiber in general.

Fun times ahead.

[Dylan16807]

But why is the gear progressing so very slowly? Why a 25 year gap between reasonable power 1Gbps and 10Gbps?

And while not every cat6 will do 10, it would still be worth a shot, and devices aren't using 5 instead they're using even less.

Not to mention that cat8 will happily do 40Gbps as long as you can get from your switch to your end devices in 30 meters.

[opan]

Perhaps because internet speeds have been under 1gbps most places until recently and the average person doesn't care about file transfers over LAN.

[AdrianB1]

Ethernet did not stagnate. Ethernet on UTP did stagnate due to reaching the limits of the technology, but Ethernet continues to advance over fiber.

For 10 Gbps I find it simpler and cheaper to use fiber or DACs, but motherboards don't provide SFP+, only RJ45 ports. Over 10 Gbps copper is a no go. SFP28 and above would be nice to have on motherboards, but that's a dream with almost zero chances to happen. For most people RJ45 + WiFi 7 is good enough, computer manufacturers will not put SFP+ or SFP28 for a small minority of people.

[mschuster91]

> Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.

Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.

> Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.

For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.

For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less PCIe lanes available to waste.

For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as there is a multitude of different options to provide high bandwidth connectivity.

[Dylan16807]

> Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.

Yes but a hogwash of several gigabits sometimes does give you real-world performance of more than a gigabit.

> Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.

It's been a bunch of years that a single lane could do 10Gbps, and a bunch more years that a single lane could do 5Gbps.

Also don't ethernet ports tend to be fed by the chipset? So they don't really take lanes.

[undersuit]

PCI-E lanes for consumers. Gigabit would saturate the PCI bus, but once you're on PCI-E you only need to give it 1 lane, usually off the chipset.

Servers had a reason to spend for the 10G, 25G and 40G cards which used 4 lanes.

There are 10 Gigabit chips that can run off of one PCI-E 4.0 lane now and the 2.5G and 5G speeds are supported(802.3bz).

[prmoustache]

> Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.

wifi is not faster.

However ethernet is not as critical as it used to be, even at the office. People like the conveniency of having laptops they can move around. Unless you are working from home, having a dedicated office space is now seen as a waste of space. If the speed of the wifi is good enough when you are in a meeting room or in your kitchen, there is no reason to plug your laptop when you move back in another place, especially if most connections are to the internet and not the local network. In the workplace, most NAS have been replaced by onedrive / gdrive, at home NAS use has always been limited to a niche population: nerds/techies, photographers, music or video producers...

[matt-p]

We have 400Gbe which is certainly faster than USB.. but;

On consumer devices, I think part of the issue is that we’re still wedded to four-pair twisted copper as the physical medium. That worked well for Gigabit Ethernet, but once you push to 5 or 10 Gb/s it becomes inherently expensive. Twisted pair is simply a poor medium at those data rates, so you end up needing a large amount of complex silicon to compensate for attenuation, crosstalk, and noise.

That's doable but the double whammy is that most people use the network for 'internet' and 1G is simply more than enough, 10G therefore becomes quite niche so there's no enormous volume to overcome the inherent issues at low cost.

[fulafel]

Wireless happened, I'd think. People started using wifi and cellular data for everything, so applications had to adapt to this lowest common denominator, and consumer broadband demand for faster-than-wifi speeds isn't there. Plus operators put all their money into cellular infra leaving no money to update broadband infra.

[Gigachad]

Wifi now can pretty realistically beat 2.5gbit/s while most Ethernet is still gigabit. It just seems strange to live in a world where the average laptop will get a faster connection speed over wifi than plugged in to Ethernet.

[fulafel]

Ethernet is following suit to 2.5G which is otherwise a nonsensical step for ethernet speeds, I think this is further evidence that everything just follows wifi now.

[wmf]

10Gbase-T requires a lot of transistors and power (maybe over 10x more than 1G) so it just wasn't worth the cost.