Drachasor wrote:Yes, but if they are going to cost ~$80 per 10GBASE-T port, then they are more expensive than fiber solutions where you could get a managed switch with layer 3 capability for the same price and it will have more ports to boot.
They shouldn't need to, the cost of the internals wouldn't be that much per port. The guts of a L3 switch are enough to make a good router already, there's hardly a difference anymore beyond the label. A lot of server farms have already replaced all their older internal routers with L3 switches because there's no longer a difference except for price.
Consumer routers are actually L3 switches anyway. Case in point, a server router connected directly to a client requires a crossover cable. But we consumers don't buy crossover cables to connect our desktops to our home "routers".
Granted modern server networking gear can sense and swap pins 1+2 with 3+6 so either cable can be used (no idea how common it is for home "routers"), but I remember this precisely because I got this question wrong on a practice exam and had to bug the professor about it.
Drachasor wrote:Edit: I don't mean to harp on this overmuch, but unless you have extensive CAT6 cabling already ran and it would be hard to run fiber, then it is something everyone should be aware of.
The idea is the 2.5 and 5GBase-T standard allows existing Cat5e to automatically upgrade to 2.5Gbps over 100m. In fact, if you use less than 50m you can expect to attain 5GBASE-T over
Cat5e cabling. That is absolutely perfect for existing home networks (I'm not talking home installations, just behind the desk).
All I want is 5G from my system to my NAS for my weekly SSD-image backups. I run daily incremental backups, but SSD images take awhile to transfer even though most M.2 SSDs could still max out a 5GBASE-T connection.