Would be more exciting and worth paying attention to if Google Fiber wasn’t basically living in an iron lung over at Alphabet these days since they halted major expansion.
If you’re struggling to think of a use-case, consider the internet-based services that are commonplace now that weren’t created until infrastructure advanced to the point they were possible, if not “obvious” in retrospect.
- multimedia websites
- real-time gaming
- buffered audio – and later video – streaming
- real-time video calling (now even wirelessly, like Star Trek!)
- nearly every office worker suddenly working remotely at the same time
My personal hope is that abundant, bidirectional bandwidth and IPv6 adoption, along with cheap SBC appliances and free software like Nextcloud, will usher in an era where the average Joe can feel comfortable self-hosting their family’s digital content, knowing they can access it from anywhere in the world and that it’s safely backed up at each member’s home server.
Video calls were all over 1950s futurism articles. These things do get anticipated far ahead of time.
4K Blu-ray discs have a maximum bitrate of 128 Mbps. Most streaming services compress more heavily than that; they’re closer to 30 to 50 Mbps. A 1Gbps feed can easily handle several people streaming 4K video on the same connection provided there’s some quality of service guarantees.
If other tech were there, we could likely stream a fully immersive live VR environment to nearly holodeck-level realism on 1Gbps.
IPv6 is the real blocker. As you say, self-hosting is what could really bring bandwidth usage up. I think some kind of distributed system (something like BitTorrent) is more likely than files hosted on one specific server, at least for publicly available files.
I was involved in one of these Google fiber roll outs several years ago, Google simply doesn’t know what the fuck they want or what they are doing as far as installing outside plant goes.
EDIT: To clarify, they simultaneously had no fucking clue what they were doing & also wanted to micromanage all of their contractors.
This is still a thing? I thought they crushed it like 10 years ago
I’ll never understand how you guys in the US are fine with having bandwidth limits on your broadband connections. I’d be pissed. I even have unlimited on my phone. Like wth?
What makes you think people are fine with it? ISPs have monopolies over service areas and can do whatever the fuck they want. They have monopolies because of corporate lobbying. No amount of voting gets these corrupt fucks out of office bc votes literally do not matter and there’s only two parties, they’re both to the right of center, and they’re both bought and sold. Just to really make sure, we’re all taught from birth that the US is peak civilization and all other countries are backwater shitholes.
Where in the world do you not have bandwidth limits? If there were no bandwidth limits I could just DOS my entire ISP by downloading petabytes between two of my own computers.
I think you are mistaking bandwidth limits with data caps?
At some point all devices have a bandwidth limit. Even if you somehow had a 10gb/sec phone data connection (which is absolutely not possible) your phone device literally cannot transfer data that fast.
I wouldn’t want to calculate what it’d cost to replace all my switches with 25G capable ones… then all the network cards… You’d have to have a really specific application to justify it.
Just cost me 1K to replace 3 NICs, 1 router, and 2 switches to freaking 2.5Gb.
10Gbps used enterprise equipment is pretty cheap on eBay. Biggest problem I’ve had is getting compatible SFP+ adapters for the NICs.
Flexoptix reprogrammable tranceivers are a godsend for that. We use them almost exclusively at work and so do quite a few of ours customers (Universities and other places of higher education). But it’s probably hard to justify the cost of a reprogrammer box for a household. You can buy their transceivers pre-programmed though.
FScom has something similar, but I can’t vouch for those, never tried. Their patch cables are fine though.
You won’t but I will
Switch: mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN ($799.99) Cabling: QSFP28 to 4 x 25G SFP28 DAC ($63.00 per cable) NICs: Intel XXV710 25GB ($349.0)
I don’t know how many machines you have so for two machine it’s cost you $1562.97 and maxing out the switch would cost you $6651.83 but do you really have sixteen machines that need or can even physically saturate a 25GB line?
I think it’s more reasonable to get something similar to ubiquiti’s USW-Pro-Aggregation and have three machines capable of the full speed and 28 machines capable of half rate speeds (at a much lower cost per machine)
What about a router?
Both switches mentioned are L3 switches meaning they are a routers too.
I have no idea how well a L3 switch would work on a residential WAN connection. But don’t L3 switches lack features like NAT, DHCP, DNS, Firewall, port forwarding, etc?
DHCP and DNS (and Firewall, but I guess you don’t have a 25 Gbit/s FW) are of course easily moved elsewhere, but what about the others?
Well this is getting into the weeds a bit but TLDR it depends on the L3 switch.
For the mikrotik switch I mentioned, it runs the same RouterOS v7 as their actual routers. Anything you can do on a single purpose router you can do on the switch albeit at a slower speed for applications as the CPU in the switch isn’t as good.
For the ubiquiti switch… I’m not actually sure as ubiquiti’s L3 implementation is not exactly ideal (bordering on broken depending on who you ask)
Thanks!
I have only played around with L3 switches in packet tracer and iirc they missed a bunch of router features, not sure though.
Either way, packet tracer uses pretty old IOS versions and Cisco is pretty annoying so it wouldn’t surprise me if they locked it down on purpose.
I have 10 gig at home, and powerful enough networking hardware that can take advantage of it (Ubiquiti stuff)
Nothing can ever saturate the line. So it’s great for aggregate, but that’s it
Man, I’d love to sit on that. Growing up with 56k and living with 100Mb/s now is already a big difference, but it shows when I push and pull docker images or when family accesses the homeserver. 1Gb/s would be better, but probably I’ll somehow use up the bandwidth with a new toy. 10Gb would keep me busy for a long time. 20Gb would allow me try out ridiculous stuff I haven’t thought of yet.
Why are people doubting this? This opens up massive possibilities for people, especially those who want to start businesses outside of city centers.
You could:
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host your own home-servers and never be worried about bandwidth
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get 8k streams and not stutter (a low-end 8k stream requirs 50Mb/s, a family of 4 would need minimum 200 Mb/s just for videos)
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send 8k streams and not stutter
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offload most of your data to a datacenter on the other side of the planet and not worry about access speeds
- boot into a browser or a minimal frontend with a low powered device and mount your home directory
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offload computing to the cloud (no need for a gaming PC if you can just play them online)
The biggest thing would be 8k streams. 360 8k streams would be even crazier. 360 videos are filmed using 3-6 cameras depending on how much fish-eye you want. True 360 requires at least 6. If each is filmed at 1080p that’s ~6k total resolution, but since you’re only watching one section of the video at a time, you’re really seeing 1080p.
Those “8k 360 videos” up on youtube are a lie! They aren’t 6x8k, but most likely
8k / number of cameras. True 360 8k video would be 6x8k cameras.A single 8k stream at minimum requires ~50Mb/s. Multiply that by 6 and you’re at 300Mb/s just for a single 360 8k stream. Family of 4 –> 1.2Gb/s just for everybody to watch that content - and that’s the minimum. If you have a higher bit rate and aren’t streaming a 30 fps, you can quite easily double or quadruple that. Family of 4 again means 5Gb/s if everybody’s watching that kind of content in parallel.
But this is just the beginning. Why stop at “video”. These kinds of transfer speeds upon you up to interactive technologies.
It would still not be enough to stream 8k without any compression whatsover to reach lowest latency.
8k = 7680 × 4320 = 33,177,600 pixels. Each pixel can have 3 values: Red Green Blue. Each take 256 (0-255) values, which is 1 byte, which means 3 bytes just for color.
3 * 33,177,600 = 99,532,800 bytes per frame
99,532,800 bytes / 1,024 = 97,200 kilobytes
97,200 kilobytes / 1024 = ~95 megabytesSo 95MB/frame. Let’s say you’re streaming your screen with no compression at 60Hz or about 60 fps (minimum). That’s 60*95MB/s = 5,695GB/s . Multiply that by 8 to get the bits and you’re at 45,562Gb/s which is way above 25Gb/s. Hell, you wouldn’t even be able to stream uncompressed 4k on that line. 2k would be possible though. I for one would like to see what an uncompressed 2k stream would look like. In the future, you could have your gaming PC at home hooked up to the internet, go anywhere with a 25Gb/s line, plop down a screen, connect it to the internet and control your computer at a distance with minimal lag as if you’re right at home.
In conclusion, 25Gb wouldn’t allow you to do whatever you like. You could do a lot, but there’s still room. We’re not at the end of the road yet.
20 gig networking — even just a switch — is so expensive. 10 gig is already out of reach for 99% of the population, even network nerds. We’re just now in the past couple years seeing a standard of motherboards with 2.5gbps rj45. A lot of brand new nvme ssds can’t saturate 25gbps. There are just so many bottlenecks. I’m not saying I wish dearly those didn’t exist, but I know from my experience upgrading to 10 gig just how many there are.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-pro-aggregation
Personally I am more excited for high speed networking for homelabs to come down in price. At this point in my life I don’t feel the need to access my network outside of my house at super high speeds. My 100mbps up is fine for when I’m out of the house, and 10gbps is more than I need when I’m home.
Wouldn’t they provide you with a 20Gb compatible router? I was curious and cat8 LAN cables support 40Gb/s. They are 3x as expensive as Cat7, but with I’m just a few meters away from the router, so about 10-15€ and that’s the cables done.
Ah… the PCI-e ethernet card is where it gets pricey 😮 250€ for 10Gb card.
Damn…
Although, I’d be future proof for sure. That kind of speed will probably be enough for 20 years or so.
FWIW 10 gig cards can be much cheaper than 250€ as long as you’re willing to use SFP+ (I got a used pair of cards with a 10m optical cable for $90 CAD) but 25gig is where it gets stupid.
Even if they do supply a capable router, you will probably want at least a switch since most ISP supplied routers only have a few ports. Plus, it’s not uncommon for an ISP router to deliver their advertised speed over only one port, even if the router has several. At the end of the day, though, if you’re paying for >gigabit you probably want to set up your own firewall with a fancy router so you can properly configure your network.
Crazy that gigabit Ethernet is 25 years old and still the de facto standard. IMO we should all be able to afford 100gig inside our homes, finding the bottleneck inside our machines, not between them. Alas, 10gig is for the enthusiasts, and anything above that is for the elites.
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You could start your own VPC data center with this lmao
Always wanted to be my own datacenter 😄
