Why don't routers have 10GbE ports?

[Razor512]

Moderator note: This post moved from another topic.

Gigabit ISP? What's that? Fiber? hahaha, must be dream land.
Heck, I'm in Silicon Valley and the highest I ever got is like 128megabits down. The WIFI industry wants us to buy new WIFI AP/router, then tell ISP to offer gigabit internet . Otherwise, last year gigabit WIFI router or the year before WIFI is good enough. What lacking is reliable in WIFI access point. Smallnet should do more test on how reliable some of the WIFI access point.

Faster WiFi helps, especially when you have wireless devices that need to be regularly backed up to your NAS.

Sadly while routers get frequent improvements, many device makers are really lazy with implementing better WiFi chipsets.

It is still rare to see a client device that supports 802.11ad, and most seem to keep forgetting to go with a 3 or 4 stream WiFi radio for laptops.

802.11ad would do well for smartphones when it comes to quick backups to a NAS.


Aside from that, I think the biggest thing holding people back from buying newer routers, is the router makers being unwilling to move to having 4-6 10GbE ports on the routers.

1 gigabit is really slow by modern standards, and really should have been replaced at least 7 years ago.

 

[jpham]

Faster WiFi helps, especially when you have wireless devices that need to be regularly backed up to your NAS.

I regularly backup to my NAS - about 1TB, I don't use WIFI, I don't use gigabit Ethernet - I just dump to laptop sata hard disk, then mount the HD/Sata to USB to the NAS box and click the button on the NAS box for auto backup. Done by the next morning

I generate 1TB in about 3-4hrs. Shooting 4K PRORES does that

 

[jpham]

Aside from that, I think the biggest thing holding people back from buying newer routers, is the router makers being unwilling to move to having 4-6 10GbE ports on the routers.

Hahaha, 10GE, you're in server dream land. Show me a laptop or desktop that has 10GE build in port
if the ISP still doing less than 100Mbit/sec, why bother update to the latest.

 

[System Error Message]

Actually the major factor is price. If wifi routers with 3-4 stream and 10Gbe ports costed below 100, they'd be mainstream by now. Even in mobile devices, the cost of making them has increased so much so that they have to cheap out where they can.

I regularly backup to my NAS - about 1TB, I don't use WIFI, I don't use gigabit Ethernet - I just dump to laptop sata hard disk, then mount the HD/Sata to USB to the NAS box and click the button on the NAS box for auto backup. Done by the next morning

I generate 1TB in about 3-4hrs. Shooting 4K PRORES does that

Get a laptop with thunderbolt 3, connect 10Gb/s card to NAS/switch at 10Gb/s and enjoy some fast transfers. Your drive however must also be equally fast too.

Hahaha, 10GE, you're in server dream land. Show me a laptop or desktop that has 10GE build in port
if the ISP still doing less than 100Mbit/sec, why bother update to the latest.

The answer is to do with LAN actually. For instance, despite slow internet, a fast network is helpful. You could have a cache for web and downloads and also for OS updates (both windows and linux now support mirroring and CDNs for their updates so only downloaded once), you could have your own NAS to store files, such as high quality CCTV footage from wifi AC (for a secure camera, it must have wireless and battery in it), many other uses too such as a place to dump drivers, softwares and so much more.

So its not a matter of internet is slow that discourages this. Its all about price and usage. The reason why ad is late to come out is because device manufacturers are slow to upgrade their networks. Do you see laptops that come with 10Gbe and also new desktops?

 

[Razor512]

Hahaha, 10GE, you're in server dream land. Show me a laptop or desktop that has 10GE build in port
if the ISP still doing less than 100Mbit/sec, why bother update to the latest.

Asus has one for $100 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072N84DG6/?tag=snbforums-20

Some motherboard makers also include them, though it is less common because router makers are being lazy.

They are showing no signs of waking up and looking at the calendar and realizing, "hey, we are no longer in the paleolithic era, we should really stop using the outdated gigabit Ethernet ports on the routers we sell and move to something a little more modern".

The primary issue now is that motherboard makers are reluctant to move to a more modern standard because there is no cost effective way to immediately take advantage of it, since the 10GbE hardware targeted at the enterprise market are overpriced for no reason (kinda like how some stores will sell a $700 plain white t-shirt to a rapper or other rich celebrity, it is for them to show off that they can spend $700 for a $5 shirt.

Routers like the Netgear R9000 came close to modernizing, but stopped part way through and went with 1 SFP+ port where people need yet another adapter (all of which are overpriced), at which point, you will at best have 1 device on the network with acceptable performance, while all other devices are still stuck with slower connections. While there is still some benefit of allowing it to handle multiple devices at once, talking to a NAS or server on the 10GbE connection, it is less common in a home network to encounter those situations. Your average home network is likely to have a bunch of devices using smaller amounts of data, while their main PC may be performing a task where probably their video editor needs to access some raw footage stored on a NAS. In such a case, both systems need 10GbE to benefit.

Overall, for the consumer networking market to modernize, it needs a willingness to upgrade on both sides of the market. For example, new PCI express standards come out regularly since there is a willingness from multiple parts of the industry to make CPUs, motherboards, GPUs, and m.2 devices that support it, thus the new standard comes out and within a year, we have just about every new device taking advantage of it. Furthermore, when these changes happen across multiple companies at similar times, prices don't go up compared to older generations and standards.

 

[JeffLang]

I'd like 10G at home, but mainly 'just because'. Until multi-terabyte SSDs become common for storage, I can't see this being of noticeable benefit as people are still bottlenecked with single hard drives or NASes based on spinning disks. And fundamentally, home users hate cables, what they tend to want is 'fast enough' wifi. Or wifi with big enough marketing numbers attached to it to make them think that it's faster.

Anecdote: Last night I went and replaced the router at my uncle's place. He was talking about how he'd recently upgraded to a gig connection and everything was so much faster than his old 100Mbps connection. After I fixed his hardware, I ran a speedtest and got 90 up and down

 

[System Error Message]

My router has 10G, its the Mikrotik CCR1036 with 2 10G ports, im 10G symmetrical internet ready.

 

[sfx2000]

10G is coming down in price per port, but a long way from 1G - I think the next step is really N-Base-T, where the low cost options will be 2.5G and 5G - and the spec there is driven for both cost and capability.

Many of the SoC implementations released in 2016/2017 actually have 2.5G already baked in - for both Intel and ARM - at least for the network/comms processor market (good example would be the Marvell 64 bit chips, Intel's Xeon-D and Denverton SoC's).

For add-in-board - Aquanta is a good bet, and in a good place for the moment until Avago (Broadcom), QCA, Marvell, Intel, and of course, Realtek start releasing product.

Perhaps 2018 will be the year of N-Base-T for consumer devices and switches..

 

[MichaelCG]

10Gbps ports exist...just buck up and you can get it. There is no actual reason you can't have it today at your house. Just go buy a 10Gbps switch to handle all of your LAN high bandwidth needs and continue using your 1Gbps consumer router for access to the generally slower Internet side of things. Why would any typical consumer ever want to pay for 5-6 10Gbps ports on a consumer grade router? Heck a large percentage of consumers really still to this day have no need for 1Gbps. Or even if they do...it is just to burst over 100Mbps from time to time and generally no where near the limit of 1Gbps. There will always be those that want more...but I would say that is still the minority of most users at this time.

I really don't feel there is any real missing gap here....the market for 10Gbps in the home is just not there yet for the masses. The sales volume would be so low and the price would be too high. So for those that really want it...either build your own or buck up for some of the entry level commercial gear and enjoy the speeds.

 

[Razor512]

I am aware that they exist, the issue is that because the companies making the equipment are more targeting corporations which have more money than your average home user, and just like how fancy upscale stores may tack on a huge price premium to items sold to celebrates making millions of dollars. Companies selling 10GbE equipment are basically charging a rich corporation tax. It is like the apple tax but turned up to over 9000.

It is almost a tradition to price gouge corporations. From BOM + manufacturing analysis, it is common to see a consumer router have a $70 BOM + manufacturing cost, and then end up selling for $100 to $150, while a switch designed to be rack mounted, may have a BOM + manufacturing cost of $200, but end up selling for well over $2500. Enterprise networking price gouging, puts apple price gouging and gaming hardware price gouging to shame when it comes to the extent that they are willing to price gouge.

The price gouging is not even about recouping R&D costs like you would see with a CPU or GPU, as the insane markups have been going on for 10+ years now.

I bet that today if router makers only wanted to have 4-6 10GbE ports on a router along with 4 stream 802.11ac, they could do it for $300 and still make a hefty profit.

 

[System Error Message]

I am aware that they exist, the issue is that because the companies making the equipment are more targeting corporations which have more money than your average home user, and just like how fancy upscale stores may tack on a huge price premium to items sold to celebrates making millions of dollars. Companies selling 10GbE equipment are basically charging a rich corporation tax. It is like the apple tax but turned up to over 9000.

It is almost a tradition to price gouge corporations. From BOM + manufacturing analysis, it is common to see a consumer router have a $70 BOM + manufacturing cost, and then end up selling for $100 to $150, while a switch designed to be rack mounted, may have a BOM + manufacturing cost of $200, but end up selling for well over $2500. Enterprise networking price gouging, puts apple price gouging and gaming hardware price gouging to shame when it comes to the extent that they are willing to price gouge.

The price gouging is not even about recouping R&D costs like you would see with a CPU or GPU, as the insane markups have been going on for 10+ years now.

I bet that today if router makers only wanted to have 4-6 10GbE ports on a router along with 4 stream 802.11ac, they could do it for $300 and still make a hefty profit.

Switch brands, some brands actually have good pricing, and i've seen offers from some suppliers with good pricing for 10,40 and 100Gb/s networking.

 

[sfx2000]

Switch brands, some brands actually have good pricing, and i've seen offers from some suppliers with good pricing for 10,40 and 100Gb/s networking.

Price per Port is coming down... no where near where we are with 1Gb...

In my experience in the telco data center arena (I'm ex-ATT and Leap Wireless) - most 10Gb and above links were all fiber - at Leap we tinker with 10Gb over copper, but it was fairly finicky even in the controlled environment of a telco/carrier grade network (Leap was all about keeping the costs as low as we could), so fiber it was...

And most folks don't really need 10Gb over fiber or copper - many of our links inside the data center weren't fully utilized unless they were major site to site or backbone.

From a vendor standpoint - going back to @Razor512 comments - yes, there's a fair amount of profit being made right now in the BHR space, as BOM's are going down, and ASP's are going up - and even accounting for the NRE - I did a BOM breakdown a couple of years back for a certain vendor's high end devices, and folks were a bit defensive about that - but hey, folks will gladly spend $800USD for a smartphone that has a $200 BOM, and trust me, the NRE isn't $600 - the certification and regulatory costs might account for about $120 or so.

(I used to do this stuff for a living before joining the dark side of Telco operators)

I'm still more encouraged with the N-Base-T trend - as it's compatible with current copper installs in most places - CAT5 for short runs, and CAT6 for longer runs - and since copper - one still has the capability for POE, which fiber doesn't have.

N-Base-T, IMHO, is easier to set up, more friendly for consumer and small business due to budgetary concerns, and like I mentioned previously in the thread, many of the ARM SoC vendors have it in place already for devices introduced in 2017.

 

[Benson87]

Hahaha, 10GE, you're in server dream land. Show me a laptop or desktop that has 10GE build in port
if the ISP still doing less than 100Mbit/sec, why bother update to the latest.

There are some consumer, albeit high end, motherboards with 10Gb integrated, dual 10Gb integrated, or separate 10Gb NICs included. A few places in the USA where you can get 10Gb at home for about $300. Over here in the midwest USA 1Gb/1Gb at-home dedicated business connection was about $1,000/mo several years ago, but now it's only $200. 500/500 for $100 and 250/250 for $80. In the past 5 years, I went from paying $2 per mbit for a dedicated connection to $0.33/mbit and is as low as $0.20/mbit for higher end packages.

From what I read, 100Gb is around the corner. Huge advances in optics in the past decade. Multiplexers went from 100Gb/s to ~40Tb/s about 5 years ago and have been falling in price ever since. The same tech is maturing and trickling down and turning into "off the shelf" parts. About 2 years ago, R&D labs were talking about 2.5Tb/s PON with 100Gb ONTs using "off the shelf" parts "slightly" higher cost than NG-PON2.

GPON ISPs have several upgrade paths that are cheap, like WDM-PON that has 32 lambdas of 1.25Gb/1.25Gb for a total of 40Gb/40Gb, that will give 32 customers their own 1.25Gb each without sharing, and is fully and transparently backwards compatible with regular GPON by using a simple passive in-line optical filter. NG-PON2 is one of the newest hotness that is 80Gb(up-to 80Gb in increments of 10Gb lambdas), and backwards compatible(consumes a lambda) with GPON in a way that it can run NG-PON2 and GPON at the same time. In 2016, they showed off a 320Gb WDM-XG-PON, allowing 32 customers to each have 10Gb.

Much of this tech is both forward and backward compatible, typically via optical filters, making them easy to transition and to quickly benefit from new tech. All I know is prices keep dropping and I now pay 1/2 what I did 5 years ago even though my connection is 3x faster.

For some people, the future is now, for others it's right around the corner.

 

[sanke1]

Now it is possible.
1. ASUS XG-C100C NIC for $99 (For my PC)
2. Netgear 8 port 10GBE XS708Ev2 switch for $600
3. Intel X540-T2 for my Qnap TS653B NAS for $90 (Its original chipset with replica PCB. But works OOTB without any hassle.)

Everything was plug and play. CAT6 wires not exceeding 20 mts.