Why did you feel the need to leave this comment? How could 2.5Gbps ever be construed as planned obsolescence? 10Gbps ethernet stayed too expensive for too long, so everyone was stuck on 1Gbps for like a decade. Eventually, manufacturers decided 2.5Gbps (and 5Gbps) would be more cost effective options for the time being, and would allow increases in network performance beyond 1Gbps.
It's a completely positive outcome for end users, since they now have more options, and pretty much all 10Gbps ethernet ports are compatible with "multi-gig" 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps connections as well.
10Gbps is effectively the end of the line for copper anyways... 10Gbps is already really hot and power hungry, and AFAIK, datacenters never really bothered to deploy any copper faster than that. Fiber is the present reality in datacenters. What I really want is for SFP+/QSFP+/QSFP28 to make their way into home networks and consumer devices.
It's true that newer 10GBE ports mostly support 5 & 2.5, but not always, and the older ones don't. It's also true (unfortunately) that the 2.5 & 5 GBE hardware mostly does not support 10GBE. You can get a 10GBE SFP+ module for less than $50 (and dropping), so why not manufacture hardware that is future compatible? I am seeing more and more 2.5GBE hardware on the market that does not support 10GBE.
This is the basis for my speculation about planned obsolescence.
$50/port is still prohibitively expensive for consumer networks... and that's just the module, it doesn't include the cost of the SFP+ cage (and supporting hardware). Spot checking one OEM, they charge $100 to upgrade to copper 10GbE on a desktop computer. I'm sure others charge less, but 1GbE has been effectively "free" for forever, and 2.5GbE has been becoming "free" over the last year or two.
Nothing presented so far even comes close to making me believe this is a conspiracy. People just got tired of waiting for 10GbE to come down in price. Cost and impatience are the driving factors. Gigabit ethernet was introduced in the late 90s... it was time for some increase in speed, and basically no one has been able to justify the continued high cost of 10GbE in home networks yet, 20+ years after 1GbE, so 2.5GbE it is.
I did not claim a conspiracy, I only raised the question of whether the observed behavior amounted to planned obsolescence.
I think the current dilution of 10GBE products by 2.5GBE hardware is a bad thing. I don't want to upgrade my switches every few years when the higher speed interfaces become more common.
10GBE hardware prices have not dropped in the same manner as most other computing hardware because the market is largely "enterprise" customers, and they'll willingly pay more.
Perhaps you are right and most SOHO consumers want 2.5GBE more than 10GBE. I am not one of them.
As an annoying related topic, it's also interesting that although there has been a PoE standard for 10GBE copper for a long time, there doesn't seem to be ANY hardware that supports it. There are however, plenty of 2.5GBE PoE products available. This trend also supports an argument for planned obsolescence, but does not prove anything by itself.
"Planned obsolescence across the entire industry" is by definition a conspiracy. Without a conspiracy, any one of the involved companies would be striving to meet customer demand in order to gain an edge over their competition... if it were practical. As it turns out, they are doing what they consider practical.
You keep using the term "planned obsolescence", but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Intel producing better processors every year isn't planned obsolescence... it's just the progress of technology, which naturally makes old technologies obsolete. It can't "amount to the same thing" as planned obsolescence. It's either planned or it isn't. 10gig has not reached the consumer space yet. It doesn't matter that it was standardized a long time ago. It's not a conspiracy or planned obsolescence... it's just price vs benefit, and 2.5gig is cheaper because it uses simpler technology.
Calling something "planned obsolescence" is a fairly serious accusation of intent. It obviously annoys me when people make statements like this without evidence.
1) Poor affordability/availability of 10GBE despite its big head start over 2.5GBE. (The 10GBase-T standard was released in 2006, while the 2.5GBase-T standard was released in 2016.)
2) The flurry of 2.5GBE products we are now seeing. The number of 2.5GBE products available now far exceeds the number of 10GBE products available.
3) Zero availability of PoE on the few 10GBE products that do exist despite the generic PoE standard being in place for nearly two decades.
4) The abundance of 2.5GBE PoE products.
Your explanation is "market forces", or in other words, it's cheaper to deploy 2.5GBE than 10GBE because you (may) need to upgrade your cabling when you switch to 10GBE. But is it really cheaper? 10GBE is the end game and we could be there now, but the "market forces" that would normally bring down costs aren't happening because of the artificial scarcity of available products. Cable is the least expensive element of networking hardware, and it may not even need to be upgraded in many cases. (Note that this situation is nearly identical to the transition from 100Base-T to 1000Base-T about 20 years ago.)
Paying for 2.5GBE infrastructure that will be obsolete (or is already obsolete) and then paying again just a few years later for 10GBE infrastructure does not save anybody money. Both SOHO and enterprise consumers will end up paying more. The winners are the network hardware producers.
> Your explanation is "market forces", or in other words, it's cheaper to deploy 2.5GBE than 10GBE because you (may) need to upgrade your cabling when you switch to 10GBE.
I never talked about the price of Ethernet cable, or whether people would need to upgrade it. It’s honestly irrelevant, and a strawman.
10gig is expensive because 10gig is expensive… the switching hardware, the chipsets, the PHYs, everything but the cable. Device manufacturers and customers don’t care about the cost of the cables, especially when 10gig hardware is backwards compatible with lower speeds. They can keep using 1gig if they don’t want to upgrade, just like people continued using 100Mbps networks for quite awhile after gigabit Ethernet became a thing.
My argument is that everyone got tired of waiting for 10gig to be affordable. They waited decades, hoping the price drop was just around the corner so they could jump straight from 1gig to 10gig, and it never happened. After literally 20 years since 10gig was standardized, I’m extremely glad that we’re seeing an abundance of Ethernet hardware that is faster than 1gig. That stagnation had to come to an end.
You can start your own company providing affordable 10gig hardware and prove that the industry players are wrong. For the same price, everyone would snap up 10gig hardware in a heartbeat.
Your argument would have made sense 20 years ago when it seemed like Ethernet standards were rapidly evolving and 10gig adoption was just around the corner. 10gig will be affordable eventually… but 20 years was too long to wait for it, and it still didn’t happen.
If you want 10gig, it has been attainable for years… for the right price. But there’s no need to come in and bother other people who are benefiting from the low cost rollout of better-than-1gig technology.
I would love to have a 10gig or 25gig network, if someone wants to pay for it. Datacenter-class networking hardware (like ConnectX-7) operates at 400+ Gbps today. The sky is the limit, so why bother stopping at 10gig?
> Zero availability of PoE on the few 10GBE products that do exist despite the PoE standard being in place for nearly two decades.
This is incorrect. 10GBASE-T only gained support for PoE in 2018 with the IEEE 802.3bt-2018 standard.
It's a completely positive outcome for end users, since they now have more options, and pretty much all 10Gbps ethernet ports are compatible with "multi-gig" 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps connections as well.
10Gbps is effectively the end of the line for copper anyways... 10Gbps is already really hot and power hungry, and AFAIK, datacenters never really bothered to deploy any copper faster than that. Fiber is the present reality in datacenters. What I really want is for SFP+/QSFP+/QSFP28 to make their way into home networks and consumer devices.