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posted by janrinok on Friday September 30 2016, @11:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the bits-of-whoosh dept.

There's fast and then there's fast! I found this story at Ars Technica which is reporting that the IEEE has approved the 802.3bz standard: 2.5Gbps over Cat 5e, 5Gbps over Cat 6:

A new Ethernet standard that allows for up to 2.5Gbps over normal Cat 5e cables (the ones you probably have in your house) has been approved by the IEEE. The standard—formally known as IEEE 802.3bz-2016, 2.5G/5GBASE-T, or just 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet—also allows for up to 5Gbps over Cat 6 cabling.

The new standard was specifically designed to bridge the copper-twisted-pair gap between Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps), which is currently the fastest standard for conventional Cat 5e and Cat 6 cabling, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which can do 10Gbps but requires special Cat 6a or 7 cabling. Rather impressively work only began on the new standard at the end of 2014, which gives you some idea of how quickly the powers that be wanted to push this through.

[...] The new 2.5G/5GBASE-T standard (PDF) will let you run 2.5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 5e or 5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 6, which should be fine for most homes and offices. The standard also implements other nice-to-have features, including various Power over Ethernet standards (PoE, PoE+, and UPoE)—handy for rolling out Wi-Fi access points.

The physical (PHY) layer of 2.5G/5GBASE-T is very similar to 10GBASE-T, but instead of 400MHz of spectral bandwidth it uses either 200MHz or 100MHz, thus not requiring a super-high-quality mega-shielded cable. ... Other differences from 10GBASE-T include low density parity checking (LDPC) rather than CRC-8 error correction, and PAM-16 modulation rather than DSQ128.>

These last acronyms are all designed to deal with errors in data transmission. low density parity checking, CRC, Pulse amplitude modulation, and DSQ128 is a 128-bit implementation of Double Square QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation).

As this standard was just approved it will still be a while before commercial products are available, let alone for them to become affordable for regular consumers. I'm curious if there are any Soylentils who are already maxing out their gigabit networks, and if so, what are you doing to max it out? How much would this additional speed help?


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Friday September 30 2016, @01:49PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday September 30 2016, @01:49PM (#408372) Homepage

    10 Gigabit Ethernet, which can do 10Gbps

    Wait... wait... carry the one... subtract the number you first thought of...

    Yup, math checks out. Carry on.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 30 2016, @04:59PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday September 30 2016, @04:59PM (#408441)

    Actually, it doesn't, especially if you mostly transfer small packets.
    The transport is not 10Gb/s, and the payload is not 10Gb/s
    /pedant

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 30 2016, @06:47PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday September 30 2016, @06:47PM (#408494) Journal

      Exactly.

      Actual throughput is never anywhere near cited throughput, even in the most elaborately contrived test environment.
      You are doing well to get 50% on average.

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      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 30 2016, @06:50PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday September 30 2016, @06:50PM (#408496)

        My FPGAs get really close to max theoretical capacity, but that's easier when you know exactly what traffic you are dealing with.