10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home

1Gb Internet service seems low these days, much less 1Gb LAN. I have 3Gb Google Fiber service and actually get 2+ for individual downloads from some internet services like Steam. Even at 2Gb it's annoying to wait tens of minutes for 100+ GiB games to download. If I go on vacation I come home with 10s of GiBs of photos and videos on multiple devices that start syncing with cloud storage.

During the day I need to pull large data files from the work VPN so it's nice that that can happen at full speed even when Steam and movie streaming are also at full throttle. Combine that with backups and moving various files back and forth to my NAS and I'm very happy to have 10Gb local wiring.

BCM84891L. I like these modules (select 80 or 100 m in the drop down): https://www.luleey.com/product/10gbase-t-sfp-to-rj45-copper-...

Using this module, I was able to get a stable 10 gig over a 75 feet long, 20 year old run of Cat 5e.

Yeah but home users already often have 75-100 foot runs of cat 5e in the walls, and those work fine for 10G-baseT.

This is one of those things where I just have to express that a lot of the HN crowd is entirely divorced from the reality the rest of the world experiences. ;)

Nearly nobody has multigig anything in the home, a probably surprisingly large percentage of business networking is 1gig LAN or less. And most people would not notice the difference if they did.

I am glad it works for you, but everyone else most certainly doesn't need it. (Yet.)

Personally, I do try for mostly gigabit in my home, because I do selfhost, but I have a ~800 Mbps download service (200 Mbps upload, it's asymmetric) that was only 500 Mbps when I signed up. And to be honest most of my patch cables are CAT5e because I'm cheap. I do make sure to run CAT6 through walls though because I don't want to ever have to do it again.

Also, I used to have Astound, and I feel so much sympathy for Google Fiber customers, you have no idea what's coming. If you thought Google had a reputation for bad customer service... just wait!

> The most important question was the structured cabling in the walls; was it CAT-5E or CAT-6, or even CAT-6A? Remember from the last post, 10GBASE-T might work over short runs of -5E (even though officially it's not meant to be able to).

This is not quite correct.

The primary problem is cross-talk. Copper wire itself will carry the relevant frequencies up to 100m without issue but even with balanced pairs the balancing is not perfect and the "dirty paper precoding" is not perfect so some cross-talk will occur. How long you can go with Cat-5e depends on how well the wire is twisted, how many wires are bundled together, are there any loops or tight bends, and other factors. Cat-6A guarantees less cross-talk with more twists, better balancing, and a plastic separator inside the cable to make the cross-talk more regular and thus easier to cancel out.

Bottom line is: for almost any normal home or apartment any quality Cat-5e cable properly terminated will carry 10GBase-T without issue. In fact if you have problems I would first re-terminate the cable before assuming you need to run new cable. Cat-6 or 6A just isn't necessary.

As a PSA: beware of "CCA". I've noticed Amazon and eBay are absolutely flooded with cheap chinese electrical and networking cable that shows nice shiny copper in the pictures but is actually "copper clad aluminum". If they mention anything at all they code it as "CCA" cable without explaining what that means.

CCA cable cannot, by definition, be ethernet cable. I won't get into the full technical details but the standard was amended to clarify that only pure copper wires are acceptable for ethernet. Personally I would not dare use CCA for anything. It has lower performance, lower current-carrying capability for the same wire diameter (inherent in aluminum), and introduces the risk of oxidation and loosening of connections as people will treat them as copper connections when aluminum needs special installation procedures and connections to avoid them coming loose over time. For electrical connections especially this not only can but absolutely will lead to a fire over time if not treated with the appropriate care. All it takes is a little bit of mechanical action scraping off the thin copper layer and you now have an effectively aluminum wire - a time bomb ticking away.