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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, @04:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @04:11PM (#408422)

    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?

    Just copy a large file? 1Gbps = 125MB/sec. Even a single normal hard drive nowadays can do sequential transfers at that speed or higher. RAID10 arrays, SSDs can be much faster.

    I can get 120MB/sec on my home network copying from one Windows PC to another Windows computer via Windows file sharing (SSDs on both PCs).

    If you are using Samba you might need to tweak the config a bit. But be aware some NICs are crap - they support 1Gbps links but they don't have the internal bandwidth to actually transfer at that rate. For example the old PCI bandwidth is 133MB/sec so it's unlikely you're going to get 1Gbps from a 1Gbps NIC that uses PCI (there were indeed PCI 1Gbps NICs, they were faster than 100Mbps NICs). With modern hardware you should normally be able to hit 1Gbps easily - PCI Express, faster drives etc.

    If you are transferring VMs or backups of VMs then 1Gbps can feel a bit slow. Video stuff often involves large files too.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Friday September 30 2016, @08:14PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Friday September 30 2016, @08:14PM (#408524)

    I get 99.97% saturation on my gigabit links. I am copying from RAID 10s, RAID 5s and SSDs; otherwise, a generic desktop hard drive might hit 50MB/s (so, 40% or so utilization on a typical workstation depending on what stat and where you are looking).

    CPU availability matters in desktops, if you don't have a good quality nic (intel server cards are good, many broadcom cards turn out pretty well... realtek cards I have had success with if the CPU is not being taxed and the network is tweaked for it... performance can be hard to wring out of a realtek anything, but the price is often right.

    Decent switches with ASICs that do hardware based switching is important for the network; if you ever used a network simulator, they don't do much in the way of switches for the good reason that its hard to do that well in emulation. VMware etc is often configured to provide dummy virtual switches to either host it all internally or dump it onto the network.

    Jumbo frames help when you configure it right, as do the advanced nic settings for tcp offload, buffers, and so on.

    One size fits all for a typical user, but you likely need to tweak your settings on a server or intermediary switch if you want to see consistent levels of gigabit traffic from end to end.

    The OP that commented on his network configuration is spot on.

    If you buy something for $50 with green lights that say 1gb, you are getting ports that are electrically compatible with the IEEE signaling standard for gigabit ethernet. You might get 2gbps total out of all of the ports on that cute rectangle.

    If you drop a few hundred dollars, you probably will get many times the performance, but the lights will be just as green.

    I have seen elderly 100mb cisco catalyst switches outperform linksys and netgear gigabit hardware, so your mileage may vary depending on your traffic types and the amount of tweaking you do.