I'm starting to regret buying all those Mellanox NICs and pulling SM fiber runs through my house now.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Thunderbolt can create a network link between computers. A co-worker and I tried it out and we are excited to test what transfer speeds we can get with it.
Ya know, it's sorta funny that this kind of connectivity is what started 'workgroup' networks... ThickNet, ThinNet, etc. Ring topology is a good idea until you mix people and their computers in!
I'm frustrated that wired networking equipment faster than one gigabit is still expensive. My employer at the time upgraded to Gigabit equipment in 2016. Since then we have been on Gigabit. It's sad to me that even today 2.5 Gbps network equipment is uncommon.
Depends on use case. 10Gbps between switches (core, distribution, and access) is fairly commonplace and cheap. Per access to the host... only new access switches have multi-Gig ports (1,2.5,5,10Gbps). Those are expensive and are reserved for wireless APs, IME, as they service more than just a host.
For the vast majority of users, particularly corporate users, anything over 1Gbps is unnecessary. A lot of people spend their entire working day in a web browser and/or a VDI client plus something like Teams Slack or Zoom. For those use-cases bandwidth is less important than latency and higher network speeds don't have a huge impact on latency.
I work at a university and we're probably going to go to 2.5Gbps for our next network refresh in a year or two. The initial driver for that are the next-gen APs but we expect the engineering and media departments to notice the difference. The other 90+% of users will be oblivious.