Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings. https://community.tp-link.com/en/business/forum/topic/89181
I have confirmed this with my own version 1 SG108E (which additionally can't actually be managed without an ancient version of java and iptables /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward forwarding tricks. https://shred.zone/en/dev/setting-up-tp-link-tl-sg108e-with-...)
I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch. If you do buy make sure you know exactly what hardware revision you're getting. I've heard the version 5 fixes it.
I had the 24 port version of these. They're fine for 'cooperative vlans' where you trust everything (enough), but want a little separation. But they're not sufficient if you don't trust the devices. You can't restrict management to specific vlans and iirc, there was a least one auth bypass.
At least for the version I had. I replaced it with some used smb stuff with a few 10g ports, cause unnecessary 10g is more fun.
This bit me as well, FYI Zyxel switches seem to be among the few that do this properly, even on cheapest models. On the other hand their web interface cannot be used over SSH or other tunnels... The software side of network equipment is in a sad state, no wonder the hyperscalers moved to whitebox switches
> Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings.
I've got the SG108, since so many years I forgot how many... It's a little workhorse. I'm pretty sure it's totally unmanaged. I've got both a 192.x.x.x and a 10.x.x.x LAN, on two different switches (one being the SG108) and I've got an actual bridge (and firewall) between the two. It's not a managed switch but a NUC doing the bridging between 192. and 10. I also have got a 3rd switch near the fiber termination (apartment is wired with ethernet in the walls).
I did that years ago: even though I've got a "guests" network, I still wanted my own machines to be on a totally separate LAN.
> I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch.
Yeah exactly. I've got the SG108, because it's dumb. It's really fine. It never ever fails.
I'm using unmanaged switches at home because it's one less thing to configure/manage.
Now I only have about four desktop PCs (two being workstations used as headless servers), 4 NUCs, 3 laptops, and six Raspberry Pi. It's not a big network by any means.
A buddy of mine has got a 42U rack at home full of servers (and Mikrotik switches) and, well, that's another can of worms.
> given the price point of these switches when buying new I would highly recommend that you instead look for a used managed Gigabit switch.
Power, power, power .... one of these older gigabit switches is going to use 10x power at idle, compared with one of the crappy and cheapest realtek-based "unmanaged" switches. Which is kinda important for something that is going to be 24h on. And of course since no one reviews these things, you'll only know once you have spend the money.
So if you really can get away with a crappy web interface onto the crappy low-power realtek chip, you may get the best of both worlds.
Gigabit seems undersized for a home LAN these days. 2.5Gb equipment isn't significantly more expensive and any Cat6 should handle it. Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices. Only expensive thing is SFP ethernet adapters but you can put an SFP NIC in your PC and bypass the problem.
I've been using this equipment in my home LAN for a mix of 10Gb fiber, 2.5Gb ethernet, and a small number of devices that came with 10Gb ethernet ports (Tyan motherboards) get SFP ethernet adapters.
Unmanaged 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/08J99UjH - I daisy chain these with fiber connections to have a kind of 10Gb backbone that terminates at my main PC with the fiber NIC.
Managed 10x fiber - https://a.co/d/06927QeJ - This is the most economical 10Gb fiber switch I could find at the time and it's had no problems for the low price. Has a serial management interface in addition to web. Extensive management capabilities. I've used its link aggregation successfully.
Managed 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/0fud7jzF - First hope off my modem before the fiber switch, good management capabilities.
It's kind of funny, my LAN is all random Amazon brands people would warm against relying on, but I picked out ones that have been solid and reliable for years of use. No need to break the bank if you find the right stuff.
> 2.5Gb equipment isn't significantly more expensive and any Cat6 should handle it. Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices
You don't need Cat6 for 2.5G. Regular Cat5e that has been installed everywhere for years is fine for 2.5G.
Cat6 is enough for 10G ethernet within the lengths you find in a typical residential house. You don't need fiber.
For short runs even 10G works on quality Cat5e.
I think some home lab fans overestimate network cabling requirements. With Cat6 I could string a cable from one end of my house and back and not even be close to breaking the spec for 10G. For 2.5G ethernet cheap Cat5e will get you anywhere you need to reach in a residential home.
- Equipment with 10Gb ethernet ports is much more expensive than similar fiber equipment, and it runs hot at the ports - 10GBASE-T RJ45 runs at 2.0W – 5.0W per port, often enough to burn your finger. Especially if something's going to be inside your walls, generating less heat is a plus
- Fiber's somewhat easier to run since it's lighter; it's easier to break but the bend radius is much more forgiving than you might assume. I have yet to damage a fiber cable myself.
- More electronic isolation between equipment is always a benefit, which fiber naturally gives
The tradeoffs lead me to prefer running fiber for 10G which then branches out to 2.5G ethernet for most equipment in the house, but if I didn't have these Tyan boards prompting me to try out 10G equipment then I would probably stick to 2.5G ethernet for everything for simplicity. If you're aiming for 10G then I don't think ethernet would make sense in most situations for both upfront cost and heat generation/power usage.
The biggest problem with fiber is that you cannot do cable work without equipment, which partially neglects the advantages of the thiner wires since you have to always account for the plug.
But it is true that, otherwise, and in a surprising turn of events, fiber is cheaper to run than 10GBASE-T.
I think there's probably two ways to address this.
1) Most likely we make self retracting reels, or just very easy cable/slack management and sell fixed length cables with a hard connector one end and a snap on connector the other end (https://youtu.be/6dop-9_0_g8?t=43&si=DdAXLMU_A7wTuCTn). That solves the problem of accounting for the plug in drilling holes. We could easily do this tomorrow on 2mm white 1f or 3mm 2f cable. This size is important as it is about the maximum you can just use adhesive to stick to the top of skirting.
2) we use plastic optical fibre and build a whole bunch of infrastructure around that. That is much easier to terminate, cut and safer to use but a load of work will be required.
> Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices.
The problem with Fiber for now will remain that so few consumer devices can actually connect to it without first converting to RJ45. You are p much limited to some enthusiast networking gear and server gear and everything else needs you to convert.
I recently had my families home ethernet situation upgraded and we went with Cat8 for now (it wasn't meaningfully more expensive to doing any other Cat cable all things considered). It is compatibile with networking stuff that is commonly available today and hopefully in the future some switch will appear to make full use of it (I am slightly sceptical, but I assume 10G will at least still be seen over Cat for consumers).
I'm not sure if we'll see >10G over twisted pair/CAT but I'm sure we'll definitely see 5G and 10G baseT become far cheaper with 2.5G the baseline (e.g standard on cheap things like raspberry pi).
Base level Mac studio is already 10G as standard and it's only $100 extra on a mac mini.
Long time until 10G per device isn't enough at home.
I also doubt above 10G will be seen at least on consumer grade hardware, but until we start seeing SFP+ or similar on consumer hardware (and not just enthusiast and server hardware) there is a realistic chance. But that is so far out in the future making predictions on it doesn't make sense.
I'd call the web interface on low-end managed switches a liability [0]. It would be interesting to write one's own 8051 firmware from the ground up [1]. It shouldn't actually be terribly hard to have some basic thing that accepts a binary chip config image from the network, right? The existing 512KiB flash ought to be enough for that. And since Realtek switch chips seem to be so popular, it could even be made generic enough to work across models. Then a user would just need a flash programmer.
My core network is Mikrotik gear with 10Gb uplinks, but it would be nice to use my old unmanaged gbit switches (Netgear GS108 mainly) with vlans rather than going nuts with more Mikrotik or having lots of homeruns.
[0] high-end ones too, for that matter
[1] the alternative I thought of first was setting up an Arduino as an I2C slave. But then you'd also want to switch the switch's power supply, and need an ethernet port on the Arduino just to connect to the switch itself.
For slightly less dinky option rtl838x/rtl839x based switches are quite common and relatively cheap. What makes them special is that they are well supported by openwrt
In very cost sensitive applications where you want 'managed' and 'cheap' like security cameras for an ordinary house, the best non hack solution I've found is to have something like a basic managed non-PoE switch, and then hang a dumb switch downstream of it for the sole purpose of aggregating something like IP cameras.
For example some of the cheaper unmanaged 8-port 802.3af/at switches with enough power budget for 7 cameras. Average traffic from a single camera isn't a lot, easily fitting in a single 1000BaseT link to the managed switch. Put the whole dumb switch in the camera vlan.
Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).
Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!
> The TL-SG108 uses a 4Mbit (512KiB) SPI flash chip from Cfeon, which is too small to contain any assets for a web management interface
The https://github.com/logicog/RTLPlayground alternative firmware for RTL8372/RTL8373 based 2.5GBit Switches does fit into 512KiB, including web management interface.
8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.
But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.
Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.
1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.
I believe this to be a utility issue. In the average home network, having greater than a gig networking provides little value for the center of the bell curve of users.
Maybe its different outside of America but most people in America have less than 1gbps internet connections, and have little need to transfer data in-house from one location to another that the time saved by having a 5, 10, or 25gbps connection would benefit them in any measurable way.
Even for those people who run NAS systems for extra storage will only saturate gigabit connections occasionally, and being able to save a few hours a year waiting for transfers to complete is likely not worth the initial setup effort and costs for them.
I'm a bit of a techie, and my house is wired for 10gbps internally, but no isp in my area offers more than 1gbps, and I live in a well-to-do and densely populated area near to many tech companies.
So, in short, 1gbps is not obsolete. It probably should be, but it still meets the needs of the great majority of people that use it.
I think about 80-90% of the UK can order >1G broadband, fairly similar in most of europe, though some countries do lag behind. Realistically the number of homes with more than 20metres of cat5 structured cabling is very very low (much less than 1%). Typical new builds might give you a CAT5 from the utility cupboard to the TV and study if you're lucky. As such for now it's fine as 10G is 'OK' and even in the case the cabling doesn't support 10G, it should at least do 5Gbase-T.
Most providers are topping out at 2.5Gbps and big part of that is that you can't actually use even that much over Wi-Fi and anything >2.5Gbe consumer side is comparatively expensive/rare and no hard wired cabling in most houses anyway. So as such most ISP routers are 2.5Gbe LAN with only a few exceptions (https://www.choose.co.uk/broadband/sky/reviews/sky-gigafast-...).
At home, I have 10G only between machines that actually do transfer between each other. The rest is either 1G or Wi-Fi 7 (which in my use case is faster than 1G and cheaper than 10G)
As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.
I dunno, I'd like to see faster options taking off but last time I checked they were just starting to get cost-effective. I'm not paying a factor more for 10GbaseT when I don't actually need that kind of speed.
1 Gbps is perfectly adequate for things such as Apple TV's, smart home controllers/gateways (heck even 10 Mbps is fine for them), networked printers, UPSes (also would be fine with as low as 10 Mbps), KVMs, etc etc etc
I think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.
Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.
POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.
I'm a bit irked that there aren't more, less expensive 10gb 10baseT ethernet switches available. I have one that I have as my main connection in the wiring closet (need to get my NAS back in there), and a few 2.5gb switches off of that (one in my office)... mostly because I just didn't want to shell out the dramatically more expensive option.
Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings. https://community.tp-link.com/en/business/forum/topic/89181
I have confirmed this with my own version 1 SG108E (which additionally can't actually be managed without an ancient version of java and iptables /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward forwarding tricks. https://shred.zone/en/dev/setting-up-tp-link-tl-sg108e-with-...)
I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch. If you do buy make sure you know exactly what hardware revision you're getting. I've heard the version 5 fixes it.
I had the 24 port version of these. They're fine for 'cooperative vlans' where you trust everything (enough), but want a little separation. But they're not sufficient if you don't trust the devices. You can't restrict management to specific vlans and iirc, there was a least one auth bypass.
At least for the version I had. I replaced it with some used smb stuff with a few 10g ports, cause unnecessary 10g is more fun.
>You can't restrict management to specific vlans
This bit me as well, FYI Zyxel switches seem to be among the few that do this properly, even on cheapest models. On the other hand their web interface cannot be used over SSH or other tunnels... The software side of network equipment is in a sad state, no wonder the hyperscalers moved to whitebox switches
> Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings.
I've got the SG108, since so many years I forgot how many... It's a little workhorse. I'm pretty sure it's totally unmanaged. I've got both a 192.x.x.x and a 10.x.x.x LAN, on two different switches (one being the SG108) and I've got an actual bridge (and firewall) between the two. It's not a managed switch but a NUC doing the bridging between 192. and 10. I also have got a 3rd switch near the fiber termination (apartment is wired with ethernet in the walls).
I did that years ago: even though I've got a "guests" network, I still wanted my own machines to be on a totally separate LAN.
> I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch.
Yeah exactly. I've got the SG108, because it's dumb. It's really fine. It never ever fails.
I'm using unmanaged switches at home because it's one less thing to configure/manage.
Now I only have about four desktop PCs (two being workstations used as headless servers), 4 NUCs, 3 laptops, and six Raspberry Pi. It's not a big network by any means.
A buddy of mine has got a 42U rack at home full of servers (and Mikrotik switches) and, well, that's another can of worms.
> given the price point of these switches when buying new I would highly recommend that you instead look for a used managed Gigabit switch.
Power, power, power .... one of these older gigabit switches is going to use 10x power at idle, compared with one of the crappy and cheapest realtek-based "unmanaged" switches. Which is kinda important for something that is going to be 24h on. And of course since no one reviews these things, you'll only know once you have spend the money.
So if you really can get away with a crappy web interface onto the crappy low-power realtek chip, you may get the best of both worlds.
Gigabit seems undersized for a home LAN these days. 2.5Gb equipment isn't significantly more expensive and any Cat6 should handle it. Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices. Only expensive thing is SFP ethernet adapters but you can put an SFP NIC in your PC and bypass the problem.
I've been using this equipment in my home LAN for a mix of 10Gb fiber, 2.5Gb ethernet, and a small number of devices that came with 10Gb ethernet ports (Tyan motherboards) get SFP ethernet adapters.
Unmanaged 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/08J99UjH - I daisy chain these with fiber connections to have a kind of 10Gb backbone that terminates at my main PC with the fiber NIC.
Managed 10x fiber - https://a.co/d/06927QeJ - This is the most economical 10Gb fiber switch I could find at the time and it's had no problems for the low price. Has a serial management interface in addition to web. Extensive management capabilities. I've used its link aggregation successfully.
Managed 4x2.5Gb ethernet 2x10Gb fiber - https://a.co/d/0fud7jzF - First hope off my modem before the fiber switch, good management capabilities.
It's kind of funny, my LAN is all random Amazon brands people would warm against relying on, but I picked out ones that have been solid and reliable for years of use. No need to break the bank if you find the right stuff.
> 2.5Gb equipment isn't significantly more expensive and any Cat6 should handle it. Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices
You don't need Cat6 for 2.5G. Regular Cat5e that has been installed everywhere for years is fine for 2.5G.
Cat6 is enough for 10G ethernet within the lengths you find in a typical residential house. You don't need fiber.
For short runs even 10G works on quality Cat5e.
I think some home lab fans overestimate network cabling requirements. With Cat6 I could string a cable from one end of my house and back and not even be close to breaking the spec for 10G. For 2.5G ethernet cheap Cat5e will get you anywhere you need to reach in a residential home.
- Equipment with 10Gb ethernet ports is much more expensive than similar fiber equipment, and it runs hot at the ports - 10GBASE-T RJ45 runs at 2.0W – 5.0W per port, often enough to burn your finger. Especially if something's going to be inside your walls, generating less heat is a plus
- Fiber's somewhat easier to run since it's lighter; it's easier to break but the bend radius is much more forgiving than you might assume. I have yet to damage a fiber cable myself.
- More electronic isolation between equipment is always a benefit, which fiber naturally gives
The tradeoffs lead me to prefer running fiber for 10G which then branches out to 2.5G ethernet for most equipment in the house, but if I didn't have these Tyan boards prompting me to try out 10G equipment then I would probably stick to 2.5G ethernet for everything for simplicity. If you're aiming for 10G then I don't think ethernet would make sense in most situations for both upfront cost and heat generation/power usage.
The biggest problem with fiber is that you cannot do cable work without equipment, which partially neglects the advantages of the thiner wires since you have to always account for the plug.
But it is true that, otherwise, and in a surprising turn of events, fiber is cheaper to run than 10GBASE-T.
I think there's probably two ways to address this.
1) Most likely we make self retracting reels, or just very easy cable/slack management and sell fixed length cables with a hard connector one end and a snap on connector the other end (https://youtu.be/6dop-9_0_g8?t=43&si=DdAXLMU_A7wTuCTn). That solves the problem of accounting for the plug in drilling holes. We could easily do this tomorrow on 2mm white 1f or 3mm 2f cable. This size is important as it is about the maximum you can just use adhesive to stick to the top of skirting.
2) we use plastic optical fibre and build a whole bunch of infrastructure around that. That is much easier to terminate, cut and safer to use but a load of work will be required.
> Fiber is cheap enough too if you want some 10Gb devices.
The problem with Fiber for now will remain that so few consumer devices can actually connect to it without first converting to RJ45. You are p much limited to some enthusiast networking gear and server gear and everything else needs you to convert.
I recently had my families home ethernet situation upgraded and we went with Cat8 for now (it wasn't meaningfully more expensive to doing any other Cat cable all things considered). It is compatibile with networking stuff that is commonly available today and hopefully in the future some switch will appear to make full use of it (I am slightly sceptical, but I assume 10G will at least still be seen over Cat for consumers).
Cat8 is very rigid and hard to work with. For my house backbone I used multi-mode fiber (OM4) cables which are much easier to work with and support up to 100 Gbps for 150m (https://www.fs.com/blog/om4-multimode-fiber-faq-highspeed-co...).
Cat5e/Cat6 is extremely easy to work with and does 10G at 30 metres. I take the view that's enough for me on any one link.
I'm not sure if we'll see >10G over twisted pair/CAT but I'm sure we'll definitely see 5G and 10G baseT become far cheaper with 2.5G the baseline (e.g standard on cheap things like raspberry pi).
Base level Mac studio is already 10G as standard and it's only $100 extra on a mac mini.
Long time until 10G per device isn't enough at home.
I also doubt above 10G will be seen at least on consumer grade hardware, but until we start seeing SFP+ or similar on consumer hardware (and not just enthusiast and server hardware) there is a realistic chance. But that is so far out in the future making predictions on it doesn't make sense.
zyxel gs1900 series - can be low power, or go up to 48 ports, and even with POE (of course more power because, POE)
runs openwrt
There are realtek multigig/2.5GBASE-T switches that idle at 1W, or 2W for 8 port. Even the 4 port version here does 5W, and is just gigabit.
do they run openwrt?
no, even though I'm not sure they cannot.
I'd call the web interface on low-end managed switches a liability [0]. It would be interesting to write one's own 8051 firmware from the ground up [1]. It shouldn't actually be terribly hard to have some basic thing that accepts a binary chip config image from the network, right? The existing 512KiB flash ought to be enough for that. And since Realtek switch chips seem to be so popular, it could even be made generic enough to work across models. Then a user would just need a flash programmer.
My core network is Mikrotik gear with 10Gb uplinks, but it would be nice to use my old unmanaged gbit switches (Netgear GS108 mainly) with vlans rather than going nuts with more Mikrotik or having lots of homeruns.
[0] high-end ones too, for that matter
[1] the alternative I thought of first was setting up an Arduino as an I2C slave. But then you'd also want to switch the switch's power supply, and need an ethernet port on the Arduino just to connect to the switch itself.
For slightly less dinky option rtl838x/rtl839x based switches are quite common and relatively cheap. What makes them special is that they are well supported by openwrt
https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/realtek
In very cost sensitive applications where you want 'managed' and 'cheap' like security cameras for an ordinary house, the best non hack solution I've found is to have something like a basic managed non-PoE switch, and then hang a dumb switch downstream of it for the sole purpose of aggregating something like IP cameras.
For example some of the cheaper unmanaged 8-port 802.3af/at switches with enough power budget for 7 cameras. Average traffic from a single camera isn't a lot, easily fitting in a single 1000BaseT link to the managed switch. Put the whole dumb switch in the camera vlan.
Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).
Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!
> The TL-SG108 uses a 4Mbit (512KiB) SPI flash chip from Cfeon, which is too small to contain any assets for a web management interface
The https://github.com/logicog/RTLPlayground alternative firmware for RTL8372/RTL8373 based 2.5GBit Switches does fit into 512KiB, including web management interface.
Aliexpress managed sfp+ 10 gigs with 8 ports have also gotten remarkably affordable
If you’re willing to go the no name brand route
Archive.md link: https://archive.md/BXov8
In case you were also inexplicably blocked by Cloudflare.
8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.
But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.
Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.
1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.
I believe this to be a utility issue. In the average home network, having greater than a gig networking provides little value for the center of the bell curve of users.
Maybe its different outside of America but most people in America have less than 1gbps internet connections, and have little need to transfer data in-house from one location to another that the time saved by having a 5, 10, or 25gbps connection would benefit them in any measurable way.
Even for those people who run NAS systems for extra storage will only saturate gigabit connections occasionally, and being able to save a few hours a year waiting for transfers to complete is likely not worth the initial setup effort and costs for them.
I'm a bit of a techie, and my house is wired for 10gbps internally, but no isp in my area offers more than 1gbps, and I live in a well-to-do and densely populated area near to many tech companies.
So, in short, 1gbps is not obsolete. It probably should be, but it still meets the needs of the great majority of people that use it.
I think about 80-90% of the UK can order >1G broadband, fairly similar in most of europe, though some countries do lag behind. Realistically the number of homes with more than 20metres of cat5 structured cabling is very very low (much less than 1%). Typical new builds might give you a CAT5 from the utility cupboard to the TV and study if you're lucky. As such for now it's fine as 10G is 'OK' and even in the case the cabling doesn't support 10G, it should at least do 5Gbase-T.
Most providers are topping out at 2.5Gbps and big part of that is that you can't actually use even that much over Wi-Fi and anything >2.5Gbe consumer side is comparatively expensive/rare and no hard wired cabling in most houses anyway. So as such most ISP routers are 2.5Gbe LAN with only a few exceptions (https://www.choose.co.uk/broadband/sky/reviews/sky-gigafast-...).
At home, I have 10G only between machines that actually do transfer between each other. The rest is either 1G or Wi-Fi 7 (which in my use case is faster than 1G and cheaper than 10G)
As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.
I dunno, I'd like to see faster options taking off but last time I checked they were just starting to get cost-effective. I'm not paying a factor more for 10GbaseT when I don't actually need that kind of speed.
1 Gbps is perfectly adequate for things such as Apple TV's, smart home controllers/gateways (heck even 10 Mbps is fine for them), networked printers, UPSes (also would be fine with as low as 10 Mbps), KVMs, etc etc etc
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
No, this is more like "we have multi-megabyte machines, and yet a surprising amount of home and small business software is happy in 640K or less".
> there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture
because dealing with fiber is easier than cat8 copper. unless you want poe there is very little reason to use base-t.
I think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.
Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.
but why bother? basic fiber is dirt-cheap and optics are not that expensive either.
POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.
I'm a bit irked that there aren't more, less expensive 10gb 10baseT ethernet switches available. I have one that I have as my main connection in the wiring closet (need to get my NAS back in there), and a few 2.5gb switches off of that (one in my office)... mostly because I just didn't want to shell out the dramatically more expensive option.
Faster is only needed when you need the speed. 2.5G and 10G NICs eat power - all the ones I seen have heatsinks.