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The 10GbE, all-fibre home network rabbit hole

My paltry AliExpress-special 8-port 2.5G switch

When I moved out of home in 2015, I needed my own home networking equipment. And unfortunately, moving back to ADSL2+ from FTTP NBN was every bit as awful as it sounds. I absolutely don’t remember why I ended up choosing the venerable Asus DSL-AC68U for my all-in-one home wireless modem and router, so I won’t pretend to, but I did, and for the past nine years, it’s done an absolutely bang-up job making sure I have the internets/pipes filled with cats/access to the information superhighway on all my devices. That means it’s time for an upgrade!

Or it was, anyway. Read part one and two of that saga.

Enter: the 10GbE home networking rabbit hole, and cue the OCAU thread with over 1500 posts discussing when 10GbE will become consumer-level technology.

Home networking gear has changed a bit in the past 10 years. 2.5Gb network interfaces are becoming more and more common; my Thunderbolt 4 dock has one, as does the B660 motherboard I built my new NAS with. And at the upper end, it’s not uncommon to find 10GbE RJ45 ports as standard, whether that’s on your top-of-the-line PC motherboard, or the iMac Pro (RIP), or today’s Mac Studio.

Which is why it’s strange that plain ol’ gigabit still seems to be the standard for home networking. Yes, home internet speeds haven’t increased anywhere nearly as much; only within the last couple of years has gigabit internet become possible in Australia, but it’s still uncommon. I think we have other countries to thank for even the adoption of 2.5G as a kind of gateway to faster wired networking speeds, given that in other countries multi-gigabit internet is not only possible, but common. But within that same time period, NVME SSDs have become near-ubiquitous, bringing speed increases of over 20 times their spinning rust predecessors, trading storage capacity for speed. So why are we just now upgrading to home network technology that’s only a paltry two and a half times faster than what we currently have?

There’s a myriad of reasons, including slow internet, but I think the main reason is that for most consumer uses, there’s just not many real reasons to have a faster network connection between your devices. Your Netflix experience isn’t noticeably improved by having a faster connection between your phone or computer, because even mediocre NBN connections can handle a 4K stream of your favourite TV show. Most people aren’t transferring huge files between their computers, so the practical applications of faster network connections are limited, despite computer-specific storage getting faster, not larger. Because if you’re not storing files in the first place, there’s also no need to transfer them between computers. I suspect it’s also why successive Wi-Fi releases have been focused on better Wi-Fi more than they have been about raw speed increases; more efficient usage of the wireless channels we have available, opening up new wireless spectrum, smarter usage of airtime, that sort of thing. If Wi-Fi is already fast enough, even faster speeds benefit few, but more efficient Wi-Fi benefits everyone, even those who aren’t hitting theoretical maxes.

But what if you’re a nerd?

A version of the trickle-down philosophy applied to technology says that as businesses and enterprises upgrade their own equipment, you can often grab upgrades to your own gear for fractions of the cost of what said business would have paid for it originally. I’m not saying that this has completely happened with 10GbE networking gear, but running a 10GbE fibre optic network at home is now within the realms of possibility, and more importantly, at something of a reasonable cost.

If you only have two devices that you want to connect up at 10GbE speeds, you can pick up two SFP+ PCIe cards for about $100 each, connect them directly with a Direct Attach Copper cable for $50-100, and still use standard Ethernet to connect to your switch and your actual internet connection. If you have more than two devices that you want to connect, that’s probably where you’ll need a SFP+ switch of some kind. But even at $130 for an 8-port 10G SFP+ switch on AliExpress, roughly $50 for each SFP+ module, then your optical cables on top of that, it’s still well within the realms of possibility to go to a mostly-fibre home network. And unlike other IT equipment, networking hardware has a lifetime measured in decades. Barring incredible breakthroughs in technology, there’s every possibility that any 10GbE equipment you buy today will be useful in 20-30 years from now, although I’d be slightly concerned about the longevity of your 10GbE SFP+ PCIe cards. For that reason, I’m on the fence about splurging on the 25Gb SFP+ versions. Even though they’re backwards compatible with 1/2.5/5/10Gb, who knows what kind of PCIe tech we’ll have in 20 years. For reference, that’s about the same period of time that it took for PCI to die out and be overtaken by PCIe. Although the PCIe train doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, it’s foolish to think it’ll be around forever.

The only problem with going to an all-fibre 10GbE home network is that you will, inevitably, have devices that you can’t plug an SFP+ transceiver into. As far as these devices go, you basically have two options. Either you keep using them on standard 1/2.5G copper, or you put them on wireless. Unfortunately, there aren’t any options for an all-in one switch that has 4+ 10G SFP+ ports as well as 4+ 1/2.5G RJ45 ports, so either you’re stuck using 1/2.5G/10G RJ45 transceivers in your SFP+ ports, or you run two switches, one for your optical network, and one for your standard copper one. You can upgrade your copper transceivers to optical ones eventually, but for heat concerns you want to limit how many copper transceivers you’re using, although at 1/2.5G speeds this probably isn’t too bad, I’ve only read about heat issues with 10G copper transceivers.

As it stands, I think it would make little financial sense to upgrade some parts of my network to fibre 10G links. I could direct connect my PC and new NAS with 10G or even 25G, then do my router and switch with at least fibre, but from there it gets tricky. There are few practical ways to do 10G or fibre on laptops and even fewer economically friendly ones — despite Thunderbolt 4 being 40G — so it doesn’t seem worthwhile, and especially not when it would be a downgrade in terms of speeds over the current 2.5G connections. My end-game home networking setup would be 10G between my router and switch, then 10/25G from a switch to every computer that supports it, 2.5G to everything that doesn’t, and wireless everything else.

As fun as a theoretical mostly-fibre network is, its practical uses are limited at best. Probably why faster home networking hasn’t caught on. I’d consider running fibre between my router and switch in the future, just because fibre cabling is slightly less noticeable when I’m skirting it around the edge of my rooms.

But otherwise, 2.5G between computers is plenty fast enough.

Just like 640k of RAM out to be enough for anybody.

The new home network

Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem router

Next year will be 10 years since I bought any new home networking gear. Compared to typical IT gear lifetimes, where you’re normally replacing gear every couple of years, hitting double digits on anything is an impressive feat that usually represents one of two things. Either you over-invested to begin with in the name of “future-proofing”, even if you couldn’t fully use the gear at first, or there have been so many other expenses/upgrades ahead of it that you haven’t even thought about upgrading something that works perfectly well. As the old adage goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But look, I’m not here to judge your personal technology choices. Merely provide some insight into some of my own, a cautionary tale or two, and some helpful anecdotes along the way. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get all three in a single post, but if not, two out of three ain’t bad.

For the past nine years, a venerable Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem/router has been dutifully providing access to the interwebs to all my devices. It’s done its job so well, faultlessly, that I feel like I need to put it out to pasture before it starts getting ideas and starting the robot uprising that every sci-fi has warned us about. Besides, it’s 2024 now, and putting aside the glaring limitations of Australian internet speeds or your device’s ability to utilise that kind of speed, the Wi-Fi 5 that it came with is positively pedestrian compared to what we have now. Plus, WPA3 is also a thing now too, and any security upgrade is always worthwhile.

When I was waiting for the internet to be connected in my first apartment, I was able to plug a USB 4G modem into it and have the AC68U share it to all my devices. And when that same apartment joined the 21st century and upgraded to NBN, albeit on the slightly-inferior FTTB version, the AC68U just kept on working. And now that I’m on Opticomm (i.e. non-NBN) FTTP, it just keeps on working. I have no doubt that it would keep doing so until one of two things happened: it releases the magic smoke and spontaneously combusts into a small pile of ash, or the heat death of the universe. Whichever comes first.

That means it’s time for an upgrade! But to what?

Home networking gear is boring in the best possible way. The ideal scenario is that you set it up once, and don’t ever touch it again unless you’re changing something. But if you’re like me, you’ll spend a few weeks every ten years fiddling with it, then never touch it again. That’s basically how I’ve run my AC68U over the years, besides upgrading the firmware every now and again, or forwarding a port here and there. Like I said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I have basically three options for upgrading my home network.

I consider myself pretty lucky (for the purposes of picking home networking gear), in that I live by myself in a small apartment. That means I don’t need a fancy mesh system, or multiple APs to cover the whole thing. Because I’m the only one that uses the network, I can wire up all my computers for the latency and consistency advantages wired connections provide, put everything else on wireless, and have a pretty simple setup overall.

It would have been easy to pick up something like the 2024 version of the AC68U, an all-in-one wireless router. This time around, I won’t even have to buy something with an ADSL modem, because I’m not planning to live in a place with ADSL ever again. But as ugly as the aesthetic of most of today’s wireless routers are, surely there are better options? Some of the Wi-Fi 7 wireless router options from TP Link don’t look too bad, although they are a little on the pricey side. But what if I wanted a slightly less consumer option? After almost a decade with the Asus and never touching all the marketing buzzwords in its web interface and going straight to the advanced settings, what if I wanted to step it up a notch?

Ubiquity seem to be the current flavour of the month for their prosumer networking gear. Their new-ish UniFi Express is a nice little all-in-one that I could probably recommend pretty comfortably to anyone who wanted something configurable, but backed with a great user interface that makes setting it all up easy enough. I can even see myself trying out a UniFi Express to see if I like the Ubiquity ecosystem as a whole, as it’s also a pretty cheap entry point into the UniFi ecosystem. It would probably also be suitable for someone to deploy at a “secondary” site like their parent’s house to replace their ageing network gear, too, and even comes with cool features like remote management.

But as nice as the UniFi Express is, it “only” comes with Wi-Fi 6, so wouldn’t be that much of an upgrade. It’s also lacking some features. There’s no USB port, for example, if you wanted to share a 4G/5G USB modem between all your devices, just like I had to do while I was waiting for the internet to be connected at my place after moving in. That isn’t a huge deal these days given the relatively fast provisioning times of NBN, but it’s a nice to have. There’s also only one LAN port, like Ubiquity expect you to have a switch if you plan to network a few computers together like it’s 1999 or something. It’s a reasonable assumption, but would it have killed Ubiquity to put a few more Ethernet ports on the thing? Fortunately, this also isn’t a big deal for me as I already have a switch connecting my computers together on a LAN like it’s 1999.

Which brings us to the third option, separate out my router, switch, and wireless access point into three separate devices. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with having an all-in-one wireless router, sometimes you just can’t find the right device at the right price. There’s also something about the modularity of having three separate devices, meaning that if you want to upgrade something in the future, you can do so without having to replace everything. But now instead of having one decision to make, I have three! Make that two, on account of the fact I already have a switch. It’s an 8-port, 2.5G RJ45 switch with one 10G SFP+ port from Keeplink, which you can also have for the low price of around $70 if you’re willing to buy it from AliExpress.

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IMG_3532After moving to Brisbane in April last year, I spent a few days in Hobart this February. It’s the first time since I moved away that I’ve been back, and while you could definitely see the differences in little old Hobart compared to when I left. But while I enjoyed my time in Hobart, I’m now more confused than ever about where I consider home to be.

Last August, I was in the Seattle watching The International 2015. The games scheduled for the day hadn’t started yet, so I was doing the widely accepted thing of tracking down Dota 2 personalities in order to obtain their signature.

As you might imagine, players were insanely popular to the point where they had scheduled photo and signature times — I ended up starting in the line for Evil Geniuses player Universe, but by the time I got near to the front it was Aui_2000 doing signatures, which was fine. I collected Aui’s signature on my Dota 2 Steelseries mousepad, and that was it.

Anyway, the games for the day hadn’t started yet — or maybe we were between games — but the English casters were seated and warming up. TobiWan was a caster I was interesting in getting the signature, seeing as he’s one of the most famous Dota 2 casters (and Australian, too). When it was my time to get his signature, I asked how he was and inquired if I could get his signature on my Dota 2 event badge. He said yeah, of course, and then asked if my accent was Australian.

I was a little confused, as even though I’ve lived in Australia for my entire life, I don’t think I have much of an accent. Perhaps it’s one of those cant-smell-your-own-body-odour things, but I replied yeah. While Tobi was signing my badge, he asked me where I was from, and seeing as I had only moved to Brisbane a few months prior, I answered Brisbane. He told me he hailed from a similar part of South East Queensland, the Gold Coast, and in that moment, we shared a special bond. Or I’d like to think so, anyway.

Fast forward about nine months, and it’s once again Tobi in his AMA on Reddit, answering a question about living/working in Germany: “I really just work here, I don’t really live here.”

It’s kind of how I feel about living in Brisbane. I moved here to take up full time-employment, and while that’s great and all, it hasn’t really given me the chance to explore a different state in a different part of the country. I used to do this thing where I’d go and find the biggest shopping centre I could and walk around for a bit, but eventually you run out of Westfields. Plus, not driving kind of makes it hard to venture any further than the train lines can take you, although I’m do going down to Robina every now and then.

To make matters even worse, when I returned to work on the Monday after a weekend wedding in Tassie, one of my colleagues welcomed me home. “Home”. I’m not sure I know where that is anymore, not out of some misplaced sense of belonging, but because I mostly just work in Brisbane, and don’t really live here.

That could change.