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.
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.
https://www.eetimes.com/debunking-10gbase-t-myths/ (published 10 years ago)
https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_view/136209-ne...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T