[toast0]

> No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7,

Ethernet is media independent. Yes, yes, it was first classified for thick net, but ethernet over twisted pair (rj45 typically) is still ethernet despite the lack of vampire taps. You can run ethernet on thick or thin coax, twisted pair, dac, fiber, or even over the ether so to speak.

That said, 10g over rj45 is pretty handy when you have existing wire in walls. In my experience, it runs fine on the cat5 (not even cat5e) that's already there. Maybe it won't work on all my runs, especially if I tried all at once, but so far, I'm two for two.

The spec is for ~ 100m in dense conduit; real world runs in homes are typically shorter and with less dense cabling... and cabling often exceeds the spec it's marked for, so there's wiggle room.

[lukevp]

I have a fairly large house (2 story 3k sqft) with all cat5e. I iperf’d every run and they could all do 10gb negotiation and TCP, most of the runs could sustain very high UDP rates with low packet loss. There’s just one run (which is the one to the internet) which had a slightly higher UDP packet loss rate. So basically every run can do 10gb fine. Been running the whole network like this for a year. It’s been great! I just need a 10 gig capable NAS. My current one can only do 3.5 or so because it’s a usb 5gb/s which isn’t really 5 gb.