Equipment Supporting 2.5gbps and 5gbps

Brandon Butterworth brandon at rd.bbc.co.uk
Thu Jan 28 16:10:44 UTC 2016


> The standard 24 or 48 port SFP+ switch is 10 times the price of the
> equivalent switch with 24 or 48 port SFP. The same is true for the optics.

I never saw many cheap 48port 1U sfp switches as people bought copper
at that speed so the ones that were around were relatively expensive.

With 10G it's been the opposite, nobody was using copper so SFP+ is
cheap. Only recently has copper 10G started to become common, a bit too
late to be worth bothering with now and as there are no copper SFP+
Having new servers switch to copper instead of sfp is a nuisance

Optic price depends on volume, 10G are cheap now so 1G being the old
line that's about to become rare are dirt cheap. 

> 2.5 and 4 Gbit/s SFP modules are available and cheap. It is just that
> ethernet ports will not take advantage of the extra speed.

Yes, they likely need new chips so may end up closer to 10G switch price

> It would be an improvement if we can get 2.5 or 4 Gbit/s ethernet on SFP
> instead of paying for an all SFP+ switch.

I disagree, stick to 10G get the volume up and hence price down.
Splitting the market enables the market to be tiered to keep some
prices higher than they might have been.

Same needs to happen with mm fibre, stop buying that junk and make
SM even cheaper.

brandon



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