Broadcom Has 200G Ethernet Link Speed Support Coming To Its Driver For Linux 5.10

[torsionbar28]

The current situation (as per pcpartpicker, filtering by ethernet) is that you either pay $500 instead of $200 for a motherboard that support 10G... or get a 10GbE nic under $50.

Reasonably priced motherboards will give you 2.5G at best.

Except there are no consumer switches that give 8 ports of 2.5G, and the only 10G switches have horrid noisy little fans making them unsuitable for use in a home office setting. So 1G it is then, for the time being.

[torsionbar28]

99% of consumers use 1GbE because 99% of the equipment they connect too still use 1GbE. If/When the gods of retail home routers add those kinds of ports to their equipment instead of obsessing with draft unobtamium WiFi speeds, then you will see it in the OEM price tiers.

If the transition to 1G was any indication I wouldn't hold my breath for 10G routers any time soon. Gig-E was ubiquitous in the consumer space with on-board Gbe ports and $50 eight port gigabit switches, *years* before the first home routers with 1G ports became available. Not sure what the delay was about, but home routers were years behind the Gigabit trend. I would expect the same for 10Gbe.

[pal666]

If the transition to 1G was any indication I wouldn't hold my breath for 10G routers any time soon. Gig-E was ubiquitous in the consumer space with on-board Gbe ports and $50 eight port gigabit switches, *years* before the first home routers with 1G ports became available. Not sure what the delay was about, but home routers were years behind the Gigabit trend. I would expect the same for 10Gbe.

well, routers are for wan, which is slower than lan

[Sonadow]

Actually is getting worse. A lot of mid range routers out there are regressing to 100mbps in lieu of those unobtamium WiFi speeds. I was shopping a while back for a new router, and I kinda got the impression you have to go higher end to get gigabit Ethernet.

Now I'm highly temped in transforming my AM1 mobo in a router, since as long as it works I can upgrade it to newer stuff cheaper than buying a hot shit router.

It appears to be a global practice. Was shopping on TaoBao and TMall for a WiFi repeater to bridge to a small NAS at home and all the cheap units had 80211.AC wifi with 100mbps bridge ports. The same unit with a GigE port cost almost 2x the cheap unit. What the hell...

[zyxxel]

If the transition to 1G was any indication I wouldn't hold my breath for 10G routers any time soon. Gig-E was ubiquitous in the consumer space with on-board Gbe ports and $50 eight port gigabit switches, *years* before the first home routers with 1G ports became available. Not sure what the delay was about, but home routers were years behind the Gigabit trend. I would expect the same for 10Gbe.

A 8-port switch for home use just has an ASIC for doing the switching by just caring about the MAC available on each port. Easy and relatively cheap. The router needs to be able to process, firewall and route all data so it has a real processor - and depending on speed that processor needs more or less hardware acceleration to be able to have time to run firewall and routing rules on all the packets. So for a cheap router for home use, it's very much a question of availability of decent processors capable of handling the routing functionality. And right now, that availability is very bad. A common Layerscape processor choice might have one 2.5G, one 1G and a 4x 2.5G switch. And for more ports, the hardware needs to add external networking using PCIe or similar. So hard to make a cheap 10G router for home use.

This is also the reason why it takes quite some time for cheap managed switches for home use.

[Jabberwocky]

Cool, but where is our consumer-grade 10G ethernet?

Single interface solutions have been available for years thanks to aquantia aqc107. Unmanaged switches are still quite expensive. That said Aquantia's Linux support is/was not that great.

IMO It's the same problem as M.2 vs U.2 consumers and enthusiasts are happy paying flagship prices for suboptimal hardware. Logically it doesn't make sense to fill an ATX (or larger) motherboard with M.2 and regard it as an market-worthy feature. It only makes sense for laptops or tiny computers where consumers pay more for compact storage devices. If majority of consumers hype/demand 10gbe or U.2 then manufacturers will supply them.

[grok]

well, routers are for wan, which is slower than lan

Not so much actually, people are using 802.11n to access their fiber wan so the wan can be 20x/50x faster than the LAN. Another esoteric result is people downloading to a USB drive or SD card - wan speed is greater than the drive's write speed.

An ISP there released a new router and plan. they claim 5 gigabit wan (I don't know how wrong or true that is) with one 2.5Gb lan port, two 1Gb lan ports and 802.11ax which they claim is 0.5 Gbps. They've always had custom modem/routers - in this case, router only as it only does fiber.

[zyxxel]

Not so much actually, people are using 802.11n to access their fiber wan so the wan can be 20x/50x faster than the LAN. Another esoteric result is people downloading to a USB drive or SD card - wan speed is greater than the drive's write speed.

An ISP there released a new router and plan. they claim 5 gigabit wan (I don't know how wrong or true that is) with one 2.5Gb lan port, two 1Gb lan ports and 802.11ax which they claim is 0.5 Gbps. They've always had custom modem/routers - in this case, router only as it only does fiber.

You can always find the exception to the rule. But LAN normally is faster than WAN.

So I have 1G to the building, but 10G for LAN. And the majority of people with 1G at home has less than 1G WAN. One reason why it's logical with more bandwidth on the LAN is so a computer can make use of max WAN speed and still have good bandwidth for other in-house communication.

[grok]

You can always find the exception to the rule. But LAN normally is faster than WAN.

So I have 1G to the building, but 10G for LAN. And the majority of people with 1G at home has less than 1G WAN. One reason why it's logical with more bandwidth on the LAN is so a computer can make use of max WAN speed and still have good bandwidth for other in-house communication.

This is logical indeed ; what happens in my market is ISPs have one or two consumer offers so moms and grandmas are signing up for stupidly fast Internet - this is the only option in new constructions, too. The scam instead is you don't get consumer support when it stops working.
So I'm expecting more of this, as well as more people using cheap 4G/5G because they get one bill and carriers have an incentive to fix their outages.

[torsionbar28]

well, routers are for wan, which is slower than lan

Not so much in a home setting, where a single multi-purpose device is the norm, integrating a 4+ port switch with a router/firewall and often a wifi access point as well.