Tuesday, March 10

Geek

NBASE-T: When 2.5 > 10

I've been seeing references recently to 2.5 and 5 gigabit Ethernet, and was wondering what the hell was going on.

The general run-of-the-mill Ethernet port these days is 1 gigabit per second - Gigabit Ethernet or 1GbE.  Only cheap-and-nasty notebooks still leave you with Fast Ethernet, which is ten times slower.

The next step up is 10GbE - ten times as fast, more than ten times as expensive, and requiring all new cables.  10GbE specifies Cat 6A cables, where basically 100% of installed network cables worldwide are Cat 5e or Cat 6.

NBASE-T, as it is called, takes the technology developed for 10GbE and eases up a little, allowing it to run at 5 gigabits per second over Cat 6 cables, and 2.5 gigabits over older Cat 5e.

Because of the cabling requirements, 10GbE hasn't expanded beyond the server room, where you can easily run a short length of cable to the switch at the top of the rack, and fibre from there to your core router. 

NBASE-T may finally release us from the gigabit tyranny.  Gigabit Ethernet came out in 1999.  To put that in perspective, the fastest networking standard available to end users in 2015 is as old as this thing:

/images/Clamshell_iBook_G3.jpg

There's a reason they're called "clamshells".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 "The general run-of-the-mill Ethernet port these days is 1 gigabit per second - Gigabit Ethernet or 1GbE. Only cheap-and-nasty notebooks still leave you with Fast Ethernet, which is ten times slower."
Of course, another problem is the wiring.  All the PCs in my office have GbE.  Probably all but one of the servers do, too.  But our switches are 100MBps and the wiring in the walls probably won't support GbE.
The perils of a small business--this stuff will probably never get replaced unless we move into a newer suite with faster cabling in the walls.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 11 2015 01:23 PM (0a7VZ)

2 That's the beauty of this; the fancy new controller logic will support higher speeds on old wiring.  Not the full 10Gb, but faster than you got before.

You'd still need to replace your switches, but that's something manageable.  Pulling out existing wires and replacing them is just not going to happen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 11 2015 02:41 PM (PiXy!)

3 My home network consists of really old 10BaseT hubs, so my net is really slow.  But some of my equipment is that old too (And my 4G wireless Modem, for that matter) I don't think you can really mix speeds on the network, at least not a simple one like mine.

Or perhaps my knowledge is out of date. Suggestions?

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 11 2015 07:39 PM (TJ7ih)

4 Pick up a cheap gigabit switch - or even a fast ethernet switch - and just plug everything into it.  The switch will automatically work out the right speed to talk to everything.  You can't mix speeds on a hub, but you can on a switch.
 
The only problem is that the speeds are multiples of 10, so things slow down a lot if you have a cable that isn't quite up to spec.  But that only applies to that one cable, and the switch will probably light that port in a different colour, so you can easily find the problem and swap it out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 11 2015 11:32 PM (PiXy!)

5 I suspect the wiring is cat 5, not 5e, so who knows what gains we could get.  It's probably from 1998 or earlier.  I forget when we got this office--it predates me by at least a decade.  Also, good luck getting the central office to pay for new switches--we can't get them to replace the UPS for our servers, which died about two weeks after the warranty expired.

Posted by: RickC at Thursday, March 12 2015 01:53 PM (0a7VZ)

6 Yeah, well...  I know my workplace is Cat 5e, and while there's no chance of getting it rewired, I could get them to buy a new switch if it wasn't too expensive.


Except that we moved all our servers out to colo and don't need the bandwidth locally.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 12 2015 04:41 PM (PiXy!)

7 Heh, my cables are hand-made with a Radio Shack crimper!  But my layout requires three hubs.  One in the living room where the wireless modem, Himawari, and an old PC live, one in the hallway that splits into the three bedrooms (one of which is designated the den) and one in the den to split the old mac and the Laserwriter. All of these cables are in the 20-25 foot range.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, March 12 2015 08:32 PM (TJ7ih)

8 In theory you need Cat 5e for gigabit ethernet, but that's if you want the official spec distance of 100 metres - more than ten times what you have.  So you'd probably be fine.

I just checked Amazon, and you can get a Netgear 5-port 100Mbit switch for $10, and a 5-port gigabit switch for $20.  Another $5 if you want the indestructible metal case version.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 12 2015 09:06 PM (PiXy!)

9 Neat.  This bears further investigation!

(My 4G wireless modem supports WiFi, but my laptop gets better results with a wired connection, so only my Kindle connects to it.)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, March 13 2015 05:32 PM (TJ7ih)

10 After perusing Amazon a bit.... Can these switches be daisy-chained like my hubs? (My Asante hubs include an extra jack on port 1 that has a built-in crossover, so no special cable is needed).  But it does sound like what I need.  And Gigabit will help future-proof things.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, March 14 2015 07:48 PM (TJ7ih)

11 Yep.  I use the Netgear switches myself, and they automatically daisy-chain without needing a special port or cable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 14 2015 08:31 PM (2yngH)

12 There's a limit on the total number of ports you have on the network, but it's something in the thousands, only a problem if you're wiring up a college campus or something on that scale.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 14 2015 08:33 PM (2yngH)

13 Righto!  So last night I ordered two gigabit switches (There's a $10 rebate, but limit 1, darn it) and a 50-ft cable, which will free up my longest homemade one and get rid of the hub in the hallway I use for an extension. In theory, I should be able to finally have a gigabit link between Etna and Himawari on opposite sides of the house, and yet still have Avie (A Mac 8600 with a G4 card in it) and my LaserWriter 12/640 available without bringing down the network speed.

I don't use Avie for much any more, an old eMail account, the FileMaker database I track my Comics orders in, and a bunch of old files I have to make available via FTP to the rest of the network, since no other networking solution goes from OS8.6 to Win7/8. Sad really, I still have a few games I never finished playing on it. The LaserWriter was tricky to get going. Win7 no longer supports it directly, so I have no access to the nifty features, but it prints well.

There's also a spare WinXP PC laying around that eventually will be used to drive a CNC router, since new machines don't seem to have Parallel ports any more.  I don't know what it's network speed is, but since it dates back to 2002, prolly not much.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 15 2015 03:09 PM (TJ7ih)

14 Mauser, you can buy a PCIex x1 parallel port card for $30.  Just Say No to XP.
Also  I've been seeing motherboards with, for example, Celeron J1900s soldered on, like this.

Posted by: RickC at Sunday, March 15 2015 03:47 PM (0a7VZ)

15 Well, a) I have it and I'm not using it for anything else, and b) it doesn't take a lot of horsepower to run a cam controller and c) I wouldn't want to put a nice machine in a shop environment.

The thing about most hobby CAM setups is that it works by bit-banging the parallel port to generate timing signals, not by clocking out parallel data bytes.  So I haven't read much about people having any luck with parallel cards.  But it's been a while since I last really looked at it.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, March 16 2015 12:07 PM (TJ7ih)

16 Oh, and last I'm going to say about this, by some miracle, my order placed Saturday arrived Monday even with the "Slow" free shipping.  Setting it up was trivial, and exactly as promised, I have a gigabit link between Etna and Himawari.  I don't have to copy video files to my laptop before I try to watch them....

Although monitoring my internet connection will be trickier, as the task manager graph probably won't bump up above 1% any more. (It used to be 40% = 4 Megabits, the max I ever saw.)  (Man the task manager graph in Win 8 is worthless.)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, March 17 2015 07:02 PM (TJ7ih)

17 Mauser, telling Windows your network is a metered connection might help. (There's caveats, though, including "you can't do it to an Ethernet connection" which seems stupid.)

Posted by: RickC at Wednesday, March 18 2015 07:37 AM (ECH2/)

18 It hasn't been a problem so far. The network adapter automatically sets its speed.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, March 18 2015 04:50 PM (TJ7ih)

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