10GB Fiber network, yes/no?

chudak

Hello all,

It's not a pfSense per se question, but kinda related and I value the expert opinion of this forum, so...

Currently, I have a 1GB fiber network by Sonic. It seems that they are currently rolling out 10GB fiber.
I want to understand if I should get it, what it will take to utilize its speed etc.

Now I can't use my full 1GB speed ever, the most I saw was ~0.5GB during mass downloads. How would I see/feel the difference if I had 10GB?

Cableing, equipment upgrades. IIUC I will need to upgrade my router, switch, cables etc. to enjoy 10GB. Is it worth it for a home network?

Any feedback is appreciated.
TIA

AndyRH

IMO at this time 1Gb for home is fine. I have had my full 1Gb used by Steam and Origin for game DLs and I routinely send data off-site for safe keeping, but I cannot justify going to 2Gb or 5Gb and the new equipment cost it would require. It is rare for the 1Gb to be full.

However, you can proudly say "I got 10Gb" and check out these speed tests.

michmoor

@chudak 10G for home use?
If you have anything requiring that. I cant speak for your wallet but if arent even close to utilizing your 1Gbps service why pay extra for 10G?
That being said unless you are not set up already you will need to potentially upgrade your firewall and/or switches.

stephenw10

Mmm, I couldn't really justify a 10G link at home and I could probably think of a few excuses/reasons!

Realistically you'd probably only ever see anywhere near 10G when you are specifically testing it. With current typical usage at least.

chudak

@michmoor

I'd have to pay one one-time $300 fee + upgrade for my network, but the monthly price may even go down (!?)

AndyRH

New information... a one time fee and lower monthly. This becomes a math problem. Even if you can only get 1.1Gb out of it, cheaper for the same or better is always a plus.

stephenw10

I mean if I could get anything like that cost here I'd probably jump at it. Even if I never actually used that bandwidth!

bmeeks

I tend to agree with most everyone else here. If you are not currently routinely maxing out a 1 Gig connection, then upgrading to 10 Gig is not really necessary. If the monthly rate is cheaper, then maybe I would, but ...

Read all the fine print and make sure the monthly rate quoted is not a trial period "teaser rate" and the price jumps up to a higher amount after some time period. ISPs are sneaky, so read ALL of the fine print.
Even if the rate is truly cheaper over a long term, do the math to pit monthly rate savings with the $300 one-time upgrade fee. How long would it take to break-even on the upgrade fee and then start realizing any true monthly savings?
Lastly, without upgrading all of your local network infrastructure (switches and likely firewall hardware) you won't be able to take advantage of 10 Gig network speeds.

I've been in the IT business for a very long time. I started with 1200 and then 2400 baud dial-up modems. In the 1990s I got my first "high speed" home Internet access in the form of a 128K ISDN dial-up connection that cost me an arm and a leg for the modem and the service. Eventually that was upgraded to 1.5 megabit DSL service. The DSL then got upgraded to a 6 megabit circuit. Several years ago I ditched the DSL and moved to cable first at 12 megabits and then fairly quickly taking advantage of upgrades to 24 megabits, 50 megabits, 100 megabits, and finally 1 Gig (820 megabits or so actually) for download speeds until the first of this year (2023). A local ISP finally offered 1 Gig symmetrical FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) service. They began installing the fiber in the ground in late December 2022 and into January 2023, and I signed up and had active service in February of 2023. They also offer a 2.5 Gig down with 1 Gig up option, but I've stayed with the 1 Gig symmetrical for now as it meets all my needs including uploading lots of data to cloud storage. Speed tests at any time of the day routinely show 945 megabits/sec or so in each direction (down and up). I'm a happy camper at $89.95 per month which includes a $10 ONT/modem fee. I live in a small rural town with a population of around 13,000 or so. Having 1 Gig symmetrical FTTH in our area is really quite amazing when you think about it.

stephenw10

Mmm, I recall thinking that 500K DSL was very expensive and probably not worth it. Until I got it and then couldn't imagine going back.

But at that point my existing home network and hosts were all 10M or 100M so using that was no issue.

bmeeks

My first exposure to business networking was 4 megabit Token Ring (I think I'm remembering the data rate correctly) followed quickly by 10 megabits Ethernet. That morphed into 100 megabits, and then started growing quickly.

Our very early corporate "road warrior" setup was banks of 2400 baud (and later 14,400 baud) dial-up modems that users connected into the corporate network with using IBM ThinkPad laptops. The network backend was Novell NetWare.

My how things have changed since then .

I guess the next big revolution will be some kind of subspace link for the transport medium (a whimsical reference to my Star Trek avatar) and quantum computers for the processing . And probably with an option to have all that surgically implanted in your head. Oh, and anyone with a less than petabits/sec connection will be considered an "old fart" LOL!

mer

@AndyRH said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

IMO at this time 1Gb for home is fine.

At one point in time T1 speeds were more than adequate for big business.

:)

JKnott

@chudak said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

Any feedback is appreciated

10 Gb for home use is overkill. In fact, it's overkill for many businesses. The first time I came across 10 Gb in my work was at a datacentre for a major bank. Back in the late 90s, when I was at IBM Canada, we had a 45 Mb DS3 connection and there were about 5000 employees in the building, IIRC.

My own connection is 1.5 Gb down, but I'm limited to 1 Gb by my hardware. Even that is overkill, as it was when I had 500 Mb down. I have long passed the point where I see any real improvement from increased bandwidth.

BTW, my first Internet connection was via dial up modem, with 56K down and 33.6K up. That was fast back then.

JKnott

@bmeeks said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

4 megabit Token Ring (I think I'm remembering the data rate correctly)

Yep, then it was 16 Mb.

bmeeks

@JKnott said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

BTW, my first Internet connection was via dial up modem, with 56K down and 33.6K up.

Yea, I almost forgot about those higher dial-up speeds. Had some 33K and 56K modems for a bit before I moved to the 128K ISDN dial-up. My work location had T1 and then DS3 links in the early days.

bmeeks

I won't go so far out on the limb to say "you never need 10 Gig at home". But for today and the near future 1 Gig service is probably plenty for home use. My 1 Gig service really is not noticeable at all compared to my former 100 megabit service with day-to-day web browsing, email, or even streaming. Once you get to about 24-50 megabits down, and a reasonable upstream bandwidth, streaming will work fine.

The biggest benefit of the symmetrical Gigabit service I've personally seen for my purposes is downloading large files is really fast (like ISO images or videos, for example). But the even bigger plus is the high speed upload path lets me finally take advantage of personal cloud storage for an "offsite disaster recovery" scenario for stuff like personal photos and documents. I can send data to the cloud nearly as fast as I can send it over to a local file server on the LAN. That is a sort of "game changer" for backups.

I'm sure the time will come, though, where 10 Gig will be the new "standard". AI and virtual reality is going to continue to progress, and that will demand more and more bandwidth (especially virtual reality and its derivations).

Gblenn

I got the opportunity to upgrade my connection to 10G through my service provider, where I happen to know the CEO and owner... Although I am not really paying anything for it, it still cost quite a bit of money, and work, to make the upgrade anyway...

First and foremost I had to upgrade my ports on my pfsense machine, as well as some servers running on the same (all VM). Similarly I upgraded my TrueNAS server and at least one 10G switch was needed for this (to run DACs in the rack). One the cheaper one's I could find was an 8 port SFP+ only switch (TP-Link Omada). But it turns out that 10G RJ45 SFP-transcievers have some limitations in the length of cables they support (25-30 meters), at least when looking the reasonably priced one's. So I ended up adding another switch with RJ45 ports that can handle longer cables. And finally I upgraded my PC with a 10G NIC...
To summarize, the material "needed" for this upgrade came to:
3x Intel X520-T2 cards
1x 8 Port SFP+ managed switch
1x 4 + 2 port (RJ45 & SFP+) managed switch
1x 10G NIC for my PC
And quite a few hours to get things working as I wanted, not the least because of issues with cable lengths.

The 4 port switch supports 2.5G as well and it turns out that my Proxmox servers had 2.5G on the motherboard NIC's which was sort of a bonus.

Is it worth it... well, I am not paying anything more for the connection, and it was a great learning experience and a quite fun project. Also, the upgrade on the LAN side is actually quite good as I am now able to max out my disks (incl cache) on the NAS, rather than the network.

An internet connection with 10G is definitely overkill as most have stated already, and for the most part there is no difference whatsoever. EXCEPT for when there are any one of all these huge upgrades to Call of Duty...!! Luckily the CDN's used by Blizzard and Steam seem to be extremely capable and I get 60-70 GB upgrades in minutes where my friends wait for an hour or two... :)

As far as home broadband goes, I think 2.5G is a better option probably. Most or all new computers/motherboards support it. 2,5G switches are not horrendously expensive, and cabling isn't as sensitive as for 10G...

chudak

@Gblenn said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

I got the opportunity to upgrade my connection to 10G through my service provider, where I happen to know the CEO and owner... Although I am not really paying anything for it, it still cost quite a bit of money, and work, to make the upgrade anyway...

First and foremost I had to upgrade my ports on my pfsense machine, as well as some servers running on the same (all VM). Similarly I upgraded my TrueNAS server and at least one 10G switch was needed for this (to run DACs in the rack). One the cheaper one's I could find was an 8 port SFP+ only switch (TP-Link Omada). But it turns out that 10G RJ45 SFP-transcievers have some limitations in the length of cables they support (25-30 meters), at least when looking the reasonably priced one's. So I ended up adding another switch with RJ45 ports that can handle longer cables. And finally I upgraded my PC with a 10G NIC...
To summarize, the material "needed" for this upgrade came to:
3x Intel X520-T2 cards
1x 8 Port SFP+ managed switch
1x 4 + 2 port (RJ45 & SFP+) managed switch
1x 10G NIC for my PC
And quite a few hours to get things working as I wanted, not the least because of issues with cable lengths.

The 4 port switch supports 2.5G as well and it turns out that my Proxmox servers had 2.5G on the motherboard NIC's which was sort of a bonus.

Is it worth it... well, I am not paying anything more for the connection, and it was a great learning experience and a quite fun project. Also, the upgrade on the LAN side is actually quite good as I am now able to max out my disks (incl cache) on the NAS, rather than the network.

An internet connection with 10G is definitely overkill as most have stated already, and for the most part there is no difference whatsoever. EXCEPT for when there are any one of all these huge upgrades to Call of Duty...!! Luckily the CDN's used by Blizzard and Steam seem to be extremely capable and I get 60-70 GB upgrades in minutes where my friends wait for an hour or two... :)

As far as home broadband goes, I think 2.5G is a better option probably. Most or all new computers/motherboards support it. 2,5G switches are not horrendously expensive, and cabling isn't as sensitive as for 10G...

Good summary thx
How much did you end up in dollars?

Gblenn

@chudak I got the X520 cards as refurb server cards which cost me somewhere around $80-85 each. I use all Omada switches and AP's and therefore ended up with the TL-SX3008F and TL-SX3206HPP. These are 260-550 USD roughly.
The ISP sent me two RJ45 10G modules free of charge and the SFP+ DAC's I use are Unifi or some Chinese brand version (12-15 USD each). And then it was the TP-Link tx401 NIC for the PC at around 80 USD.
So all in all I ended up spending about 1200 USD I believe... perhaps a bit more with all the DACs. Plus I had to modify the SX3008 by putting fans inside it as it was overheating when using the RJ45 modules...

chudak

@Gblenn said in 10GB Fiber network, yes/no?:

@chudak I got the X520 cards as refurb server cards which cost me somewhere around $80-85 each. I use all Omada switches and AP's and therefore ended up with the TL-SX3008F and TL-SX3206HPP. These are 260-550 USD roughly.
The ISP sent me two RJ45 10G modules free of charge and the SFP+ DAC's I use are Unifi or some Chinese brand version (12-15 USD each). And then it was the TP-Link tx401 NIC for the PC at around 80 USD.
So all in all I ended up spending about 1200 USD I believe... perhaps a bit more with all the DACs. Plus I had to modify the SX3008 by putting fans inside it as it was overheating when using the RJ45 modules...

Great thx

No ethernet cable upgrade? Are you using CAT5E?

pwood999

@chudak Out of curiosity what speed are you actually seeing on the 10G connection. If it's standard XGS-PON, that usually maxes out around 8.5Gbps data payload due to overheads in the PON system. If the ISP is using 25Gb PON, then they could theoretically deliver 10Gb data rates.