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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @02:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @02:57PM (#408400)

    It seems that 1Gb/sec devices never even come close to getting 1Gb/sec over Ethernet. So will these new standards actually come close to getting their advertised speeds?

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Friday September 30 2016, @03:42PM

    by ledow (5567) on Friday September 30 2016, @03:42PM (#408415) Homepage

    Because:

    a) People confuse gigabits and gigabytes (that's gigabit cable can only do 128Mbytes / second).
    b) People use cheap cable and connectors not to spec (yes, even the connectors, crimps, patches etc. have to be standardised too).
    c) People run the cable past mains cable, noisy electrical fittings, etc. and expect full speed, no errors.
    d) People buy cheap junky switches that "talk" at gigabit speed but have such poor backend bandwidth that even a single gigabit-connection flooded to max will make them slow to a crawl. I found a Netgear 5-port switch in an installation once that could barely handle 1.2Gbps over it, let alone 5 x 1Gbit. If you buy a 8-port switch, it needs to be able to switch 8Gbps for it to work at max speed on all ports, it's not rocket science.

    Hint: I run multiple, redundant multi-gigabit LACP links around a site, with LACP links to serious servers, gigabit guaranteed to every desktop and port, and it costs a FORTUNE. But we rarely get anywhere close to maxing out even a single port unless we try. Normal use just doesn't manage that, even on a large network. We can MAKE it do that (as the servers will happily provide 60Gbps of traffic to the network). You can max out the interlinks and the port and the desktop, no problem at all, but you won't get close to maxing out the switching capacity or the server.

    But that's because we spec stuff properly. Even then, you'll find that what hits first are cable quality, the NIC in the computer (Gigabit doesn't mean it can write your network profile to disk at the same speed while it's doing everything else to log you on, for example), then individual switch limits (unless you have seriously expensive switches or switches doing nothing else).

    But you want to max out a Gigabit connection? I can do that to every port on every switch if I so desire. The problem is doing that with useful data from a server, or doing that cheaply, or doing that when your upstream or other things are the bottleneck anyway.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @04:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @04:23PM (#408426)
    Huh? I regularly get 1Gbps or close enough. What are you doing? Using really small packets? Or transferring to/fro the "Cloud"? Or actually using WiFi at some point?