5 reasons you don't need 10GbE networking in your home office

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For the longest time, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard, or 10GbE, was the pinnacle of connectivity to aim at for home lab, NAS, or home server owners. It never really caught on in consumer-level gear, except for a few halo products, and advancements in wireless connectivity standards outpaced the speed of wired adoption. It's also been replaced in the data center, with 40GbE and 100GbE taking its place. Those are faster than you really need at home, though, and so is 10GbE wired networking. Outside a few enthusiast needs, most computer users are better off investing in their wireless router to ensure it has the latest Wi-Fi standards.

Take some time to research and plan out your home network, to save yourself from regret and rework in the future

The biggest drawback to using 10GbE networking at home is the cost. Although, it's not quite as simple as it seems. That's because of a few factors, like ISP service offerings, the market segments 10GbE is usually equipped on, and the costs of 40GbE and 100GbE both dropping since launch. Most homes in the U.S. that can access fiber or cable internet are limited to 1 Gigabit as a maximum download speed. So, the 10GbE network speeds would only benefit devices inside your home network and only those devices with a hard-wired connection and relevant adapter.

The cost of 10GbE equipment depends on whether it uses 10G-BaseT RJ45 ports (copper ethernet cables like the ones used for 1GbE and 2.5GbE) or 10G BaseT SFP+, which uses multi-mode fiber cabling instead. To use fiber, you need cables, transceivers, and PCIe cards, but the overall costs are lower as switches that use SFP+ are more affordable, and you can easily get second-hand enterprise gear. The problem here is that most consumer-level devices, like motherboards or NAS enclosures, use 10GbE RJ45 sockets. Network switches that support 10GbE RJ45 are substantially more expensive than those that support fiber SFP+ transceivers, and so are RJ45-supporting transceivers if you want to convert an SFP+ switch. Add that to the already high price of the 10GbE-equipped consumer devices, and it all adds up really quickly.

With any recent CPU and motherboard, even the budget options are probably able to handle the extra processing load of 10GbE adapters. But it still does take up system overhead, and RAM, which might be enough to make you pause about picking up 10GbE for your desktop. Granted, some of the overhead is handled by the network adapter if you have a PCIe one, but that doesn't happen if your motherboard has 10GbE built-in. The other thing is that some PCIe cards also spike CPU usage, particularly Aquantia-based ones. While that might be driver or firmware issues, cards based on those chipsets have widespread issues. Given that part of the reason you'd want 10GbE in the first place is to have high throughput for database or virtualization use, any network adapter that eats up CPU cycles is a bad thing indeed.

Try these troubleshooting tips on your laptop or desktop.

Converting things into other things often creates heat, and doing it faster makes the rate of heating increase accordingly. Transmitting 10GbE speeds over either copper twisted-pair cables or fiber generates plenty of heat, with SPF transceivers rated to work between 0C and 70C. I don't think the SPF RJ45 transceiver I use between my NAS and my network switch gets quite that hot, but it's warm enough that I don't like picking up the network switch from that side, and significantly warmer than the other end of the switch which is 1GbE ports. It's also warm regardless of whether my NAS is actively sending data or not.

In my case, that heat is only being dissipated into thin air, as my networking equipment is all on open-air shelving. If I had a 10GbE network card in my PC, that heat would be dumped partially inside my case, and I'd have to worry about upgrading my cooling solutions to remove it.

If you're considering upgrading to 10GbE equipment, perhaps before considering specifications, heat, or even the cost, you should ask yourself if you really need this. Now, I'm not saying there aren't some reasons that you could need 10GbE at home. There are, from running a home media server to exploring networking and server equipment in a home lab, or if you have an all-flash NAS that can actually transfer data fast enough to saturate a 1GbE or 2.5GbE link.

But for most of us, those considerations don't apply. Gaming consoles don't use 10GbE, neither do laptops, and neither do TVs nor any of the other smart home devices that come with Ethernet ports. The majority of these come with 1GbE ports, which can be easily and cheaply connected to a home network with readily available and cost-effective copper wiring. If they even come with Ethernet ports, as many devices rely solely on wireless connectivity these days. Do you need 10GbE to wire your low-resolution video doorbell to your network? Or to check on surveillance cameras? No, you don't. Wi-Fi is fine.

Upgrade your home network with a mesh

Another reason not to bother with 10GbE wired networking is that wireless speeds and adoption have outpaced that of wired networking. Outside the data center, Wi-Fi is king, and it's not looking like it will slow down any time soon, with millions of Wi-Fi 7 devices about to be in consumers' hands thanks to the iPhone 16 launch. Wi-Fi 6 was already getting close to 10GbE's max data rates, and Wi-Fi 7 blasts past that to a theoretical maximum of 46 Gbps. That's over four times the speed of 10GbE cables without having to run physical wires or do anything other than upgrade to a compatible router.

The only thing holding back Wi-Fi is signal consistency issues, but you can get around that by setting up a mesh network. That's also as simple as plugging in the mesh nodes to power and sitting back while the firmware connects them together. No fuss, no muss, and no struggling to pull cables through your walls. Wi-Fi 8 is in development already, with faster speeds and, more importantly, higher reliability. When that lands, the days of home networks needing wires are over.

If you need network coverage throughout the whole house, a mesh system is an easy solution, but running Ethernet can give you better performance

There probably will be a point where home networks do need 10GbE speeds. But, we haven't reached it yet, and by the time we do, faster wired connectivity standards will be cheaper and more available to home users. Using RJ45 Ethernet cables for 10GbE is only useful for short distances anyway, so you'd want to wire your home with multi-mode fiber for the best results, and then you can think about 40GbE or 100GbE because they all use the same fiber connections. But, with fewer devices coming with Ethernet ports, and faster Wi-Fi standards with high bandwidth, is wired connectivity becoming a thing of the past for home networks? It might just be, outside of enthusiasts and home labbers.

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Alternatively: why get 10 gig? Because you can

Better than that... Because it's essentially tossed in for free on 2.5gbe switches now and the upgraded Wi-Fi the article recommends depends on you upgrading to 2.5gbe first anyways! We're at the point of having to pay more to NOT have 10gb as an option.

I just bought a cheap Chinese switch with 4 2.5 ethernet ports and 2 SFP+ 10Gb ports, I paid just 50 bucks for it, and it's even managed! Add to that 2 old intel based pcie 10Gb SFP+ cards at 20 bucks each and 10 bucks for 2 SFP+ cables and you can see it's not that expensive. I tested it with iPerf (so storage speed isn't an issue) and it got very close to the theoretical speed, so it's alright, it works fine and I didn't have any problems. Of course if you have more than 2 PCs it can be pricey. I get the WiFi 7 argument but if you try to get a good WiFi 7 mesh even for a small home you'll end up spending 400 or 500 if not more.

Right? I could run fiber through my house for cheaper than a "basic" WiFi 7 router right now. The article completely glazes over the fact that while your router might be spec'd at WiFi 7, none of your devices use it, so all that "theoretical speed" they're boasting beats wired won't be seen for years unless they want to spend thousands of dollars upgrading everything with their router.

All of that being said, real world testing of WiFi 7 shows that it actually only nets about a 20% increase over WiFi 6 regardless of what the spec says it's capable of. I'm running 6 now and barely hit gigabit transfers with line of sight to my router, so I'll spend $500 on a new WiFi 7 AP so I can actually see gigabit speeds wirelessly? @Joe-Rice-Jones needs to give his head a shake.

If those are X520s, check if ASPM is working. On most it doesn't. Generally speaking Intel isn't recommended for SFP, Mellanox with a CX4-LX for $25 is the go-to anymore for budget. The X710s from Intel work decent for some people, but can be flaky and have a lot of knockoffs.

I remember a similar article arguing against gigabit ethernet and even further back arguing against 100mbit.

Wow.

All the fancy fast WiFi in the world won't help you if all your neighbors are also blasting their APs at full strength around you. You'll be lucky to get 1/10th your actual max speed.

Why go 10 gig internally? Maybe not to every endpoint, but certainly to my AP, and to the switches that feed back to the server. Why? Well if the 3 kids are each streaming a 4k movie, the wife's watching YouTube in 4k, I'm streaming two 4k 120hz remote desktop sessions, and I'm streaming a video in the background. None of that's going to go well over WiFi, and it sure as heck overwhelms a gigabit network. Not to mention the security cameras all dumping back to the server 24/7.

Also, my ISP offers 3gig fiber. Patches directly into my firewall. That being said, I don't particularly care about that, but I do like ripping a Blueray on my desktop upstairs and being able to send it to the server in about 16 seconds.

If you want deterministic latency, or throughput at the theoretical maximum instead of just a fraction of it, or reliability/consistency, wifi is not a substitute for wired networking.

It's not just for esoteric things, either. Play multiplayer games? Your experience on wifi may be acceptable, but never ever better than wired.

So why go 10Gb networking now? Because you'll end up wanting it sooner or later anyway.

Wait you say don't go 10gig then recommend going Wifi 7 which is probably even more expensive to switch to.

Can easily find 10gig nics on ebay and amazon on the cheap and fairly cheap switches that support 10gig. Heck most newer mobos are including 10gig.

The whole "X reasons you don't need Y thing" troupe is getting old.

RJ45, not RF45

The more I read this article, the more it had me scratching my head, and then eventually doing a full facepalm. I think others have mentioned some of this already, but what kind of reasoning does the author have saying 10GbE is so costly, and then recommending WiFi 7??? 🤦

Has the author even looked at WiFi 7 hardware prices? It's north of $400 for a good WiFi 7 router that will do 19Gb/s, let alone the 46Gb/s the author mentions, and I couldn't even find a consumer level WiFi 7 adapter that could reach even 10Gb/s speeds.

CAT6 is cheap. Adapters are $50-70 nowadays, and I just bought a nicely rated 5 port 10GbE switch for about $220. My Mac has the 10GbE port. My trusty wifi 6 router has two 10gbe ports on it. Some of the best "prosumer" NASes have 10gbe ports now.

With all due respect, this author is disconnected from current trends & tech and giving flat out bad advice.

Nonsense click-bait article. How is anything like the theoretical performance claimed by WiFi6 or WiFi7 to be achieved without a serious wired backhaul infrastructure? Oh, and as mentioned in one of the other comments, what about latency? And good mesh WiFi is really expensive.

10GbE is cheap nowadays, Cat6 is cheap too and good enough for 10GbE over the lengths needed in most homes.

I run a heavy duty NAS for file hosting and photo editing, media streaming (Blu-ray rips and hi-res audio) and a whole bunch of PoE IP cameras. The main link to it is 10Gb fibre. Why? It was inexpensive, easy to do, I learned some new stuff along the way, and it's future-proof.

CPU load? RAM use? Not an issue.

SFP+ modules are pocket change nowadays, fibre patch leads and even pre-terminated armoured cables are cheap too. Ebay is littered with low-cost used enterprise switches.

If you want/need it, a high performance, high-bandwidth network is cheap and easy to deploy.

ISPs are getting faster too - many are now offering >1Gbps, which means 2.5 or 10GbE interfaces.

I recently upgraded my FTTH to a 1600/1000 connection, which meant my ISP had to supply a new ONT. The upgraded unit has a 10GbE RJ45.

No need for 10GbE? Really?

Ahh I think its supposed to be rj45 and rj45 is the connector not the cable the cable will be either cat5E or cat 6 also 10gigabit is not overkill if you have a nas with raid 5 or zero configuration you will surely be able to utlise the speed of your drives and when using zfs with true nas the CPU usage is really not that high because people mostely have incompressible videos or photos anyways still love to hear your thoughts

Wireless is crap for most things, saying it's fine is disingenuous at best unless you think everyone lives in a 1200sqft home in the center of a 3 acre plot. I do agree that having more than a peer-2-peer 10gbe rj45 network is silly for home users. The lack of ASPM on older 10g+ gear is also a major problem. That all said when buying a motherboard you can save FAR more than the $25 cost of a CX4-LX by just planning to use the pcie card and efficient spf+ /2.5gbe rj45 switches are extremely cheap now, to the point of $50 for 8 2.5gbe and 2 SFP+. The updated wifi gear you recommend doesn't even offer much real world benefit beyond 2 generations back unless you've already upgraded your switches to 2.5gbe, so they're a waste for anyone that hasn't already made the wired networking upgraded anyways.

Maybe don't chase it unless you have the money but the requirement is there for a few.

Eg eap783 you need dual 10ge to get the full speed out of the wifi7, and yes there are plenty of 10g ispsfor a sane amount

One reason I need - my SSD is faster than my network even on 10G.

Even the USB managed to be faster than 10G without those drawbacks, the issue is not in technology, it's in manufacturers that want to squeeze each penny from the enterprise, while doing anything to stop the penetration of 10G to the home. 2.5G and 5G should have never happened, it's a disgrace.

10gb is addicting, when I transfer 4k files like 24gb in size on gigabit used to take many minutes, now about 30 sec. My zfs NAS, backup server, desktop, wifi 7 router all run fiber 10gb.

I tried using cat cable for 10gigabit, when testing latency with ping and mtr, fiber consistently did better than copper, a heads up for gamers. While learning fiber has a learning curve with understanding transceivers, fiber cable type, setting mtu to 9000 etc, in the end it's worth it. Imagine trying to tuck a ton of bulky cat7 cable under baseboards, fiber no problem.

Honestly wish I would have went 40 or 100gb get that 30 sec down to a second or less, but we'll have to wait till nvme prices come down to zfs raid those over mechanical drives.

A good article that genuinely asks a sensible question to consumers who are just always sold big numbers for stuff. Don’t get me wrong, amazingly in a few years time we will start to saturate our current run of the mill 1Gbe networks, but we are a few years away yet. My prediction is 5 years from now folk will be upgrading from 2.5Gbe to 10Gbe. We need to be careful as a species and not continue you to put so much bandwidth hungry devices out there that lazy developers and money men full with fluff and dross. A 4K movie at upto 60fps (granted with no offensive compression) equates to around 70Mbs, providing your local network doesn’t have too much other rubbish causing too many drop packets then 8-10 devices should work simultaneously. For most home wired setups that is ample, Wi-Fi well that another story. We will go beyond 4K probably, but 8K may come however beyond that there is no real point, think eyesight and 8K being above the detail that our human eyes can pick up on. Of course there will be tech I have no concept of yet, think holographic imagery, VR experiences, smelly vision and so on, which may well burn through way more bandwidth than we can imagine in our current world.

For me I will probably invest in 10Gbe in the next year for more of a backbone network with nothing more than 2.5Gbe and in some cases 1Gbe for actual devices and edge networking. I think with the current pricing of 10Gbe switches/hubs from AliExpress etc it will become commonplace for folk who have a rough idea of what they are doing at home (I put myself in that bracket… ha in brackets). Most 1st world countries infrastructure mega-corps will need to pull their fingers out to achieve the 10Gbe to every home over the next 8-10 years as generally the telcos are so backward and crap at what they do and are just interested in milking $ out of what they currently have deployed. We still haven’t seen much in the SA (StandAlone) world of 5G so I'm not holding my breath

RJ45 and not RF45... Or even more precisely 8P8C.

While I agree you might not need that speed now on most endpoint, a NAS with a 10GBe is way to go, especially if you are streaming a 1:1 copy of one of your blurays. If you copy stuff from/to your PC to organize your NAS you probably want your PC to also be on the same speed unless you wanna see that 100MB/s cap

If you live in apartments like it's usual in EU is also easy to have an immense number of wifis around you which makes your wifi speed a little less reliable.

I am in a low density area and with a wifi 5 with 160mhz channel setup I can reach about 850mbit.

Nevertheless I agree that with higher wifi speeds probably the 10gbit becomes less usefully in a home or even small office setup, however reliability of wiring, lower pings, less degradation due to crowding, make a wired connection still usefully.

I have 10gbit internet (and my ISP provides also 25gbit home connections btw) and got a mikrotik router to be able to use it, with a 1gbit link to a wifi 5 access point, which is plenty enough for phones and laptops and security cameras (for now). I plan to upgrade my gaming PC to 10gbit because nowadays an SFP+ host card is about 50eur, you can find SFP+ modules for MM fiber for less than 20eur and the fiber itself you can find at around 2.5eur/m and price it usually scales down with length.

Yes it is more expensive but... My router is 450 with2 SFP+... Any home grade router with wifi able to ingest 10gbit, from Netgear or other top brand have crazy prices above 500 (if not above 600) and usually have 10gbe copper. With the price gap of a small office 20gbe router you can easily buy a full 10gbe fiber connection for your strategic devices and the get a wifi access point. Total price difference? Maybe 100/200eur? Maybe?

If we want to talk ease of use that is different story.

10 gig networking is incredibly cheap nowadays. If you're not looking at new. I have a juniper ex 3300 with 10 gig SFP+ for $50. 10 Gtek bidi single mode fiber transceivers for $35 a pair, solar flare SFP plus pcie e cards are about 20 bucks. Can ax11000 AP with 10 gig and a power injector and you're done

What's going on with a lot he pointless articles on xda nowadays? 10Gbe at home is cheap, like seriously cheap and it's future proof. Do you need to buy the latest 10Gb Cisco gear? No. You can pickup 10Gb switches used now for around $100, sfp+ fiber modules for dollars and even spend $150 or so and just get a 10Gbase-T switch without needing sfp+ modules.

Networking cards are $20-30 on eBay.

If you are smart enough to setup your entire home network, you are smart enough to get some enterprise grade second hand equipment for dirt cheap.

If you have a modern NAS or anything that is serving NVME over the network, you can ABSOLUTELY saturate a 2.5Gb connection. 10Gb is only 1250MB/sec while 2.5Gb is just over 300MB/sec.

Just because a wifi speed is capable of something doesn't mean that it can actively achieve that in most environments or that it does so reliably.

#5 10GBE is not expensive. My Synology to Unifi with copper SFP was $55 for the SFP+ nic card on my Synology and $17 for the 1.2m direct cable. The 66 foot dual mode fiber cable that I ran from my Unifi Switch to my main PC was $18, $25 for two multi mode SWP+ modules, and $69 for the SF+ card in my PC. Had I gone with RJ45, it would have been much more expensive and that's what I did at first but the SFP+ RJ45 10GBE module ran like 170F degrees in the Unifi slot which convinced me to use dual mode fiber which was less expensive and the modules basically run a few degrees above room temp

#4 - My CPU sits about 4 to 5%, mostly because of Blue Iris. Transferring 8 gigabyte video files to and from my nas doesn't move it more than a percent, so I guess all of the processing is offloaded to the card.

#3 - Like I said before, sustained transfers didn't raise the temperature by more than a few degrees above room temperature. Not so when I briefly tried cat6/RJ45. That got VERY hot when doing transfers.

#2 - It's not superfluous - I find it quite useful to transfer very large files to and from my nas in seconds instead of minutes.

#1 - Now you're talking wireless which has a ton of other issues solved by being wired.

Basically, every reason in this article is not an actual reason, just a caution for making sure you don't doe 10GBE the wrong way.

500 Reasons why you need it

1-500: Cause it's faster!

Yes 1gbps or 2.5gbps is more than enough for home user.

640kb memory also

It might not occur to you, but you can connect many devices to your PC using its Ethernet port

A great time to upgrade

Will the world ever make it into IPv6 completely, and why is the transition taking so long?

Designed to be an alternative to running Ethernet, powerline adapters are more trouble than they're worth.

I turned an old phone into a NAS using MiXplorer, and it's a great basic way to keep files available.

Easily open up access to services within your LAN.