Desktop gigabit kit goes for a song
There is good news for buyers as technologies develop ever faster, and prices drop more quickly
Having been around networks for more years than I care to admit, I’ve got used to regular tenfold leaps in bandwidth. I’ve also come to expect prices for new products to start falling fairly soon after those products are released. But it took a recent purchase to put this into perspective and demonstrate how little time is now needed for this to happen and how cheap recently leading-edge technology can become.
It wasn’t a major purchase. All I wanted was a basic Ethernet switch to connect a handful of systems together for a project. The budget was a mere £50, but for that I had expected to receive a reasonable five-to-eight port 10/100Mbit/s switch from D-Link, Netgear or one of the other branded SME vendors. Possibly with a gigabit uplink.
However, I didn’t end up with a 10/100Mbit/s product. Rather, at a shade over £37, I found that I could afford a five-port Gigabit Ethernet switch which, by my reckoning, comes out at roughly £7.50 per port – a ridiculously small amount for technology that just a year or so ago was only found in corporate datacentres.
Moreover, gigabit switches aren’t only being used to provide fast server uplinks. Indeed, with desktop PCs and even notebooks now regularly shipping with gigabit interfaces as standard, high-speed gigabit connectivity all the way to the desktop is now very much a reality.
No wonder, then, that according to a recent Dell’Oro Group report, widespread adoption of Gigabit Ethernet by small to medium-sized businesses is fuelling new growth in the switch market.
So much so that its five-year forecast predicts switch revenues rising from $13.6bn last year to $17.8bn by 2009. And all that against a background of continually falling prices.
But it doesn’t stop there, the same report also highlights growing use of products offering the next big bandwidth hike, as 10 Gigabit Ethernet starts the march out of the datacentre. In particular, it points to the development of new copper implementations as a catalyst for growth, enabling switch vendors to come up with much more affordable offerings than the current crop of fibre-based products.
There are two such interfaces – one available already and the other expected next year. The first goes by the name of 10GBase-CX4, ratified by the IEEE in February last year as part of the 802.3ak standard. This eliminates the crosstalk and other problems that arise with standard UTP cabling, by using four transmitters and four receivers connected instead by a bundle of thin twin-axial wires.
The cables involved are limited to just 15 metres and have to be factory terminated, so are mostly used to connect switches together to form the high-speed backbones that are required to deliver gigabit to the desktop.
However, the other copper implementation, 10GBase-T, will use four-pair UTP, possibly, over distances of up to 100 metres, and that is a different proposition altogether.
Of course a lot of work is still required, both on the new interface and the wiring standard required to support it. But when 10Gbase-T does appear it could really start to encourage commoditisation. Indeed, who knows? The 10 gigabit switch at £37 could be just around the corner.