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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: 2) by frojack on Friday September 30 2016, @06:42PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday September 30 2016, @06:42PM (#408489) Journal

    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?

    ...

    for bandwidth no home user needs per-client.

    ...

    640K ought to be eneough

    Its not too difficult to outpace typical home network composed of gigabyte network adapters.
    Its just fast enough that you are tempted use remote storage as if it were local, but you always find out in the end that it just doesn't work as well as your local hard drive.

    10 Gigabit Ethernet would be great, but its a daunting task to replace every NIC and Switch and Cable and Jack between you and your data.
    If you could get it down to just replacing the NICs and Switch it might be manageable.

    Then we could all launch off doing things that are probably unwise in the first place just because the technology allows us to do it.
    .

    Its worth while to bear in mind The relative Speeds of things we deal with even in home or small office networds.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 30 2016, @11:19PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday September 30 2016, @11:19PM (#408580)

    How? Raw 4k 60fps is 700 MB/s while compressed gets around 200MB/s. How is 1gbE not enough for homes in the foreseeable future?

    Mind you, we're also talking about GPUs + CPU lanes + RAM all needing to scale to match...

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @12:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @12:24AM (#408596)

      How? Raw 4k 60fps is 700 MB/s while compressed gets around 200MB/s. How is 1gbE not enough for homes in the foreseeable future?

      Because you never need to copy large amounts of data over the network, a home media server is always accessed by exactly one person, and no-one will ever use VR so we don't need to think beyond 4k.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday October 01 2016, @12:44AM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday October 01 2016, @12:44AM (#408603) Journal

      Don't know where you live, but there's far more than one person with a single device in most households.

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      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:55AM

        by RamiK (1813) on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:55AM (#408616)

        In my experience, 4k is only useful for avoiding pixelation in large monitors and for high dpi computer font rendering\hinting. So, unless everyone's bedrooms are cinema sized, three 4k 60fps streaming TVs is more then enough.

        Since monitors are produced to scale, I think it's still possible that in 3-5 years we'll be seeing 4k dropping enough in price to push out 1080p simply on costs. But for most people, unless fiber steps in with 100gbE, they won't rewire or change switches.

        But hey, that's just extrapolating how 1080p spread in the per-collapse health market conditions. Maybe some economic boom will speed things along... Will see.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:56AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @01:56AM (#408617)

      One byte is eight bits. 200MB/s = 1600Mbps =1.6Gbps. That's more than 1Gbps. Do you understand now?

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @03:08AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01 2016, @03:08AM (#408635)

        OP is following current industry practice in quoting lossless figures in MB\s since high quality H.265 compresses 1:8. It's why the "scale to match" bit follows immediately after. Since the entire stack, and not just the switches needs to be replaced.

        That is, lossless 200MB\s is 200mbps lossy.

        Practically speaking though, OP was being way too cautious. TV\Online broadcasters go bellow 100mbps since they're handling processed\blurred content and the compression algorithms are optimized to Gaussian blur as a result.

        Look up the 9p documents google put online. It's all in there.