10 Gbps use cases

[mgoldburg]

I'm curious about folks' use cases for residential 10 Gbps Internet connections (inside the house, it's more clear: NAS, etc.).

Are there services -- e.g., cloud data storage or corporate VPN access -- that can reliably source or serve data at more than 1 Gbps over the Internet? Or is this more about future-proofing or homes with multiple data-intensive residents?

Thanks.

[aforkosh]

It's more future-proofing, I believe. I remember when home networks first became popular, almost all switches, routers, and devices maxed out at 100Mbps; now nearly all are 1Gbps (1 Gigabit--10 times the capacity of the original standard). Some consumer routers have upped the capacity of the WAN port (the one that connects to the Internet) to 2.5Gbps so that 2 1GPS devices could communicate to the outside world without throttling and the system still would have the capacity to handle more traffic. In a few years, 10Gbps will probably be the norm.

I like that ISPs like Sonic are planning ahead with their newer installations. While they are probably paying more now, they will not need to retrofit these for years to come.

[ngufra]

Before Gbps and 100Mbps, on a lan level, there was 10Mbps (10Base2 and 10BaseT (over coax and over twisted pair)
Gigabit at the home is probably fine for a fairly large number of 4K netflix streams..

Switching at 10 Gbps is still fairly expensive.
Not sure about the future proofing argument if hardware price goes down dramatically in the next few years.
Bragging rights may also play here.

What is the interconnection from sonic with other networks?

[artakamoose]

The one current use case I've read about is to segment the network into VLANs for each user/location in the household so that they each get a dedicated gig. So mom's office get's a gig, dad's office gets a gig, kid's room gets a gig, etc.

[dane]

Big downloads such as game and operating system updates also happen quick at higher speeds. MS Flight Sim for example ships updates that can take minutes on 1Gbps access, but are very rapid when you’ve got 10Gbps.

The other benefit of top line speed is lower latency. That can benefit many applications.

[daniel15]

Multiple people being able to download large files at the same time is a good use case (e.g. multiple Xboxes, PlayStations, PCs, etc all downloading large game updates). And of course, you can always use the bandwidth to do speedtests to show off to friends

Are there services -- e.g., cloud data storage or corporate VPN access -- that can reliably source or serve data at more than 1 Gbps over the Internet?

In data centers, 40Gbps and 100Gbps transit are definitely becoming more popular. A lot of hosting providers offer 10Gbps VPSes, albeit with shared bandwidth rather than dedicated.

Switching at 10 Gbps is still fairly expensive.

I'm hoping MikroTik or TP-Link release some cheaper 10Gbps Ethernet switches.

I think fiber will be the future though. One of the issues with 10Gbps Ethernet is that it draws a lot of power: ~3 to 5W per port depending on cable distance, vs ~0.25 to 0.5W for Gigabit ports. This results in more heat, so a lot of the switches need noisier fans.

SFP+ with fiber (and probably with DAC cables too) is only ~0.7 to 1W per port regardless of distance, and the switches are cheaper. For example, an 8-port 10Gbps SFP+ switch from MikroTik is $269 retail (CRS309-1G-8S+IN), whereas a similar one with 12 10GbE ports is $659 retail (CRS312-4C+8XG-RM). Because of the lower heat, the SFP+ switches can sometimes be passively cooled.

[jfa_roy]

I work on game streaming. I regularly download large game disk images, VM images, control plane containers, and run multiple game streams at the same time, from multiple data centers across the world. I can use as much bandwidth as I can get. My internal network is mostly WiFi devices, but my office is all 10 GbE and my network gear is able to route at that rate. I just need that fiber connection upgrade.