Consumer Ethernet has pretty much followed the rule of each generation having 10 times the maximum speed of the previous one.
However, the game is changing. There are actually some quarter and half measures in the works. Yes, my friends, that's right.
You're gonna be seeing 2.5 gigabit and
5 gigabit Ethernet devices popping up all over the place.
But why? To answer, we spoke to Ben Hacker and Ben Benson over at Intel and we'd like to thank them for their contributions to this episode.
As internet speeds get faster, it's becoming clear that we're gonna need something that is faster than the gigabit Ethernet
that's supported by lots of our home modems and routers.
Even if you don't have fiber to the home, new versions of the DOCSIS cable internet standard can support speeds beyond one gigabit per second.
In fact, two gigabit connections are becoming common in tech mechas like South Korea and Japan, which is all fine and good.
But why bother with this tweener stuff when you can go out and buy a 10 gigabit network card and 10 gigabit switch today?
Well, the issue is that the 10 gigabit standard doesn't work very well over most of the existing Ethernet
cabling that's out there. So if you go out and buy a
theoretical cable modem with a 10 gig port on the back of it,
chances are that you're gonna end up needing to change out every network cable in your house in order to get the full benefit of it.
And in commercial installations, this problem is much worse.
You see, many buildings have been pre-wired with Ethernet jacks in the walls that used the older
Cat5e cable standard, which was designed to handle up to one gigabit per second over a distance of a hundred meters.
And for a long time, that was just fine. But 10 gigabit Ethernet requires a newer cable called Cat6 to go 50 meters and an even higher-end cable called Cat6a
with the A4 augmented to do the full hundred meters. The reason that Cat5e can't carry a 10 gigabit signal
effectively over those distances is that it doesn't have as much protection against interference and
crosstalk. So what this means is that getting 10 gigabit to work in many places
would mean ripping the old cables out of the wall and putting in new ones.
And that is alongside all of the equipment in the networking room and all of the client PCs.
That is a tough triple whammy to the old corporate pocketbook.
So the powers that be are instead introducing a two and a half gigabit Ethernet solution.
Because it turns out that a Cat5e cable that was built to spec can actually handle a two and a half gigabit per second signal
just fine over a hundred meters and even a five gigabit per second signal will
usually work. The hold-up was just that the industry doesn't like to bother rolling out a new spec for less than 10 times the previous speed.
Because they typically view it as not being worth the effort it takes.
But given how excessive the 10 gigabit speed is for general consumers and the fact that 10 gigabit equipment is still a lot more expensive.
The industry has finally developed an interest in being able to sell faster equipment at a price that consumers can actually handle.
So faster Ethernet speeds then are going to have immediate benefits for enthusiasts and prosumers who want the additional bandwidth
for things like transferring files between
PCs and network attached storage or running home media servers. As for the regular consumer,
well, the benefits today might actually be limited.
But two and a half or five gigabit Ethernet jacks rolling out in computers, network adapters, and modems
over the coming years means that our underlying infrastructure is going to be ready for future advancements like
8k streaming video to multiple household members and other amazing technology that makes it so we just don't actually have to talk to each other anymore.
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