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10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home

225 points by gpjt

by xxpor

9 subcomments

Unfortunately the blog didn't link to the SFP+ module they're using, but everyone should know there's effectively 2 different generations of 10gbit sfp+ to ethernet^H10BASE-T modules. The old gen, labeled as 30 meters, draws ~3 W, and gets extremely hot (to the point it'll usually cause link flaps), and the newer gen, usually labeled as 100m or 80m, draws ~1.5 W, and runs much, much cooler.
Example of the new gen: https://www.amazon.com/Wiitek-Transceiver-Compatible-UF-RJ45...
Old gen: https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-SFP-10G-T-S-Compatible-10GBase...
Typically the old gen uses a Marvell AQR113C, and the new gen uses a Broadcom chip that I forget the number of off hand.

by TexanFeller

9 subcomments

I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.

by Lwrless

2 subcomments

I went a slightly different route. My switches are linked with 10Gbps SFP+ across the apartment, but it was way too late (and too much hassle) to pull proper in-wall fiber. Instead I used one of those ultra-thin (around 0.1mm), unshielded fiber cables, and just snaked it through door frames and taped it along the walls. I'm genuinely impressed this stuff exists, it makes retrofitting fiber into a finished space so much less painful.
Most of my edge devices are still on 2.5GbE though, and I'm increasingly aware that for anything with plain SATA disks, the drives are the real bottleneck. Once I LAG'd 2×2.5GbE to get a 5Gbps pipe, it became obvious the network wasn't the slow part anymore in a lot of cases.
And yeah, the 10GbE SFP+ modules run hot, so hot that I would not lay my fingers on them for more than 2 seconds. I stuck 2 copper heatsinks on my module, not sure they do much but the module runs smoothly. Even so, I'm pretty happy with the overall setup: from my 10GbE-equipped Mac I can saturate multiple machines at once and I no longer think about the network most of the time, which was the goal.

by Jamesits

1 subcomments

I don't understand the decisions to use RJ45 copper cable for anything higher than 1GbE, unless

  a) You like small computers and these only comes with RJ45 ports and 0 PCIe slots
  b) You enjoy fighting with super rigid cables, port flaps and hot modules

I upgraded my home to full 10Gbps network at 2018. At that time:

  * 10Gbps SFP+ PCIe NICs (Mellanox CX3 and similar cards) are already dirt cheap ($15 for OCP adapted ones, $50 for native PCIe cards) because datacenters are upgrading to CX5
  * 10KM SM SFP+ modules are already dirt cheap (~$6) because 4G BBU-RRU communication uses these
  * Silent 10Gbps SFP+ switches start appearing (still a little pricey); 10Gbps RJ45 switches are not available anywhere

Those 10KM SM modules will happily run off <20m MM fibers so I just used whatever fiber I have at hand. The price is so cheap that I think the RJ45 upgrade path (2.5G has not been universal, 5G still very far away, 10G is so pricey) looks like a scam.

After 2024:

  * 25G/100G SFP+ PCIe NICs are dirt cheap (~$80 for single port 100G NIC)
  * 100G QSFP28 modules are in acceptable price; 25G SM/CWDM SFP+ modules area already dirt cheap (~$50 for 6-slot CWDM ones) because 5G BBU-RRU communication uses these
  * Silent 100Gbps switches start appearing (you can get 24*25G + 4*100G under 100W; still a little pricey); 100Gbps RJ45 switches are not available anywhere

I already have an experimental 6*25G CWDM fiber connection between my 2 rooms. Given that most of my devices wouldn't need anything higher than 10Gbps, I'm thinking of giving each room a single 100G port, split them into 4 lanes in the room with passive wavelength splitters for different devices, which further reduces cost on switches.

by xenadu02

1 subcomments

> The most important question was the structured cabling in the walls; was it CAT-5E or CAT-6, or even CAT-6A? Remember from the last post, 10GBASE-T might work over short runs of -5E (even though officially it's not meant to be able to).
This is not quite correct.
The primary problem is cross-talk. Copper wire itself will carry the relevant frequencies up to 100m without issue but even with balanced pairs the balancing is not perfect and the "dirty paper precoding" is not perfect so some cross-talk will occur. How long you can go with Cat-5e depends on how well the wire is twisted, how many wires are bundled together, are there any loops or tight bends, and other factors. Cat-6A guarantees less cross-talk with more twists, better balancing, and a plastic separator inside the cable to make the cross-talk more regular and thus easier to cancel out.
Bottom line is: for almost any normal home or apartment any quality Cat-5e cable properly terminated will carry 10GBase-T without issue. In fact if you have problems I would first re-terminate the cable before assuming you need to run new cable. Cat-6 or 6A just isn't necessary.
As a PSA: beware of "CCA". I've noticed Amazon and eBay are absolutely flooded with cheap chinese electrical and networking cable that shows nice shiny copper in the pictures but is actually "copper clad aluminum". If they mention anything at all they code it as "CCA" cable without explaining what that means.
CCA cable cannot, by definition, be ethernet cable. I won't get into the full technical details but the standard was amended to clarify that only pure copper wires are acceptable for ethernet. Personally I would not dare use CCA for anything. It has lower performance, lower current-carrying capability for the same wire diameter (inherent in aluminum), and introduces the risk of oxidation and loosening of connections as people will treat them as copper connections when aluminum needs special installation procedures and connections to avoid them coming loose over time. For electrical connections especially this not only can but absolutely will lead to a fire over time if not treated with the appropriate care. All it takes is a little bit of mechanical action scraping off the thin copper layer and you now have an effectively aluminum wire - a time bomb ticking away.

by zamadatix

0 subcomment

The only thing I'd caution anyone else looking to do the same is doing a software router/fw like the Portectli is it's usually not hard to get the raw bandwidth to look nice with big flows but the new connection latency, connections per second, jitter, and QoS handling tend to suffer vs something with hw offloads (which is what most are used to even with cheapo gigabit home AP+router+switch combos). It's also not usually the cheapest way to get the 10G class NAT/L4 FW bandwidth, but it is usually the cheapest way to get "full" FW functionality if you don't care as much about the performance.
If you want a full FW solution that can actually FW+NAT at 10G bidirectional without breaking a sweat then something like the FortiGate 90G is the cheapest thing I've found that performs really well across the board. Great QoS, great latency, amazing throughput performance (does well with even small packet sizes in a single stream), easy enough to use UI (once you get oriented), low power. If you want to enable all of the NGFW stuff (e.g. AV and IPS) then it'll dip below line rate though.
If you just want something that NATs/connection direction oriented filtering like a "normal" home router then something like the MikroTik CCR2004 can get you better than the performance they got on the VP2440 + give you 12 ports of 10G SFP+ to work with. If you were planning to do "fancy" FWing/functionality beyond a normal home NAT FW (with decent managed switching built in) then the feature set will be a bit limiting, of course.

by apelapan

5 subcomments

I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.
It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.
Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...

by mikepurvis

4 subcomments

That's pretty wild.
I have 1.5/900 fibre to my house, and I bring a 2.5 line from the modem to my home office where a 2.5 switch delivers it to my workstation, laptop, and unraid NAS. But those devices are all themselves just gigE I think, and I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.

by theYipster

1 subcomments

Yep... Did this 3 years ago in my home and came to the same conclusion. If I were to do it again, I'd run fiber through the walls instead of Cat-6a. It took forever to find SFP+ modules that would work with my Unifi setup... (not wanting to pay for more than one router or switch with native 10g RJ-45 ports, which are still very expensive.) I loose POE but, on the whole, it would've been much easier and much less costly--I think--to have just run fiber.

by TYPE_FASTER

0 subcomment

I was just reading this thread today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1sz9li4/invisible_...

by Arubis

2 subcomments

If you’re going to go to all this trouble, please do seriously consider pulling singlemode fibre instead. It is more planning up front, but when you’re ready for your next upgrade cycle, you can reuse the same fibre and change out the hardware on each end.

by glitchc

0 subcomment

One thing I'll add that I learnt in the process of doing my own house: It's not just the cable type but also the SFP module that can limit the distance. I used MicroTik hardware and their S+R10J modules are limited to ~30m for 10Gbps speeds.

by hapless

1 subcomments

10g-base-T is a sick joke
high latency, high error rates, and terrifying heat output from SFPs (which the author noted for himself)
the only cat6 left in my home network is the link to verizon's ont, because in their infinite wisdom the ONLY connectivity offered was 10g-base-t

by nl

2 subcomments

Has anyone tried the InvisiLight kits? They give you a 600 micron fiber optical link in the kit which you can hide down the side of carpet etc. I haven't tried it but a few YT vids made it look interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/InvisiLight/page/DFF3C042-0D2E...

by fulafel

1 subcomments

It's interesting how slow the uptake has been. 10GbE is from 2002, 24 years old. It's much worse than IPv6, at least we're up to 50% uptake there.
100 GbE is 15 years old too depending on which standard you think of. (The most common physical layer, SR4, is 11 yrs old)
Gigabit ethernet came much faster after 100 M.

by rconti

0 subcomment

I'm surprised they got a reliable 10Gbps USB adapter. I've tried 3 of them and they're all trash. They cannot sustain multi-gigabit speeds and end up doing like 400Mbps when you hit them hard. I think I have sabrent and ugreen and one other.
They all just sit in a drawer, if I need a USB-C ethernet adapter i just grab my trusty 1 gig one.

by bhouston

0 subcomment

My 10G experience is documented here, mine was TP-Link-based: https://ben3d.ca/blog/home-network-lessons

by rrevi

0 subcomment

The device nomenclature alone is worth the read! (otherwise an impressive feat to see)

by ziofill

1 subcomments

What’s the use case for 10Gb/s Ethernet over 2.5?

by afavour

1 subcomments

Both impressive and surprising that thermals were the biggest barrier!
Meanwhile I'm sat here wishing I could justify running any ethernet in my apartment, but improving wi-fi tech means I never can...

by Drdiamond

0 subcomment

10Gb Ethernet is incredible for this exact reason but optical SFP+ modules are far more affordable and reliable.

by cyberax

2 subcomments

The Mikrotik switch is awesome, and it's still the most compact 10G switch available.
You can fix the thermal issue either by adding a small fan (Noctua is great) or by adding more radiators: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...
I've been running it like this in a closed comm box for the last 3 years without any issues. SFP+ modules actually do not use that much power, it's just that it's concentrated into a small package, resulting in high temps.

by tamimio

0 subcomment

Regarding the proxmox cluster, I would advise not to set up a cluster unless you really need to, it adds complexity in order of shutting down the server, HA, Quorum votes, ceph monitor, among many others, and if one server goes offline, or even the wrong order, it will impact the others and sometimes some tough time in recovery, or data loss.

by globular-toast

0 subcomment

I put cat6a in my last house and plan to in my current house "just in case". The cable isn't that much more expensive and nobody wants to do cabling again so why not.
But I'll keep using a gigabit switch because I have absolutely no idea what I'd use 10G for. It's crazy that gigabit was affordable for me as a student in the early 00s and between then and now we've gone from DVDs to 4K and it's still plenty fast enough. In fact, most people are happy with WiFi (not me, though).

by gigel82

1 subcomments

I was surprised that the old Cat5e in my home supports 10Gbps without any issue, so went ahead and upgraded the rest of the network with 10Gbps switches (expensive Ubiquiti gear, but worth it to talk at 10Gbps between all my machines, even though the internet is only 5Gbps Fiber).

by shmerl

0 subcomment

That Mikrotik switch must be heating up like crazy if you fill all 4 ports, since it's using copper .
How about this one? https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in
You can use fiber optic SFP+ in it which should not run as hot.
Run fiber everywhere for the fun of it, instead of copper Ethernet. Here is an interesting post about it:
https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
You can simplify it and avoid splicing which is the most complex thing about it.

by tristor

0 subcomment

Using SFP+ modules for 10GbE is interesting, I deployed a full 10GbE network in my home connected by 5Gbit/s symmetric fiber from AT&T and a 1Gbit/s x 100mbit/s DOCSIS 3.1 connection from Spectrum as backup, I did this around August of last year and used UniFi/Ubiquiti for everything. Their new XG and XGS products all support 10GbE natively, without needing SFP+ modules to connect. I'm using the UDM Pro Max with an XGSPON ONU flashed with the community firmware from PON Wiki (see https://pon.wiki/category/att/ ) and the 2.5GbE port as my second WAN link to the Spectrum modem. I'm not doing any sort of bonding/load balancing, just failover so I'm almost always just using AT&T. There's a short DAC cable connecting the UDM Pro Max to a Switch Pro XG 24-POE which serves 10GbE to the rest of the house. The only SFP+ module involved is the XGSPON ONU. Most of the devices in the house connect to WiFi served by the UniFi U7 Pro XGS APs, which take 10GbE w/ POE and give off WiFi 7.
I pretty much always get at least 4600Mbit/s both directions over AT&T, and generally cap it out. Spectrum typically gives me at least 800Mbit/s down. The ISPs are definitely the bottleneck because neither provides dedicated infrastructure from each house to the CO, instead you have some sort of aggregation point which has a shared backhaul and that means you compete for resources, but having the largest plan on each at least gives you traffic priority.
Realistically, I don't need any of this, I was doing just fine with normal gigabit fiber with a 2.5GbE network before I moved last year, but it's nice knowing everything is as fast as possible in my path and that eliminates congestion and local network resource contentions as causes when a problem arises, I know it's pretty much always upstream of me somewhere.

by DeathArrow

0 subcomment

I wired my home with single mode fiber. It works like a charm and I can always upgrade the speed.

by thefz

1 subcomments

For me the threshold has always been "can I stream a 4K movie from the NAS downstairs or from my seed box". No real need for anything above. Still I ran 10Gb single mode fiber in all the ducts.

by Boss0565

1 subcomments

What's the point?