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 going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 use the older cat5e cable standard which was designed to handle up
to one gigabit per second over a distance of 100 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 100 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 cat 5e cable that was built to spec can actually handle a two and a
half gigabit per second signal just fine over 100 meters and even a 5 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
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freshbooks.com techwiki and enter techwiki in the how did you hear about
us section thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and
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