Unfortunately the blog didn't link to the SFP+ module they're using, but everyone should know there's effectively 2 different generations of 10gbit sfp+ to ethernet modules. The old gen, labeled as 30 meters, draws ~3 W, and gets extremely hot (to the point it'll usually cause link flaps), and the newer gen, usually labeled as 100m or 80m, draws ~1.5 W, and runs much, much cooler.
I had this issue with old gen Unifi SFP+ to RJ45 10Gbe, 3 failed. Needed gloves to remove them. Bought newer gen and they are warm but i dont need gloves.
I don't agree that it is insane. It is less efficient than ideal, but 10gbit over copper is not necessarily dangerously hot or difficult to power.
I have a MikroTik CRS304-4XG-IN on my office desk with three out of four ports at 10gbit and it is perhaps 20 degrees above ambient on the outside. Warm but not hot. Passively cooled design.
A normal Windows laptop runs hotter than that when idle.
I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.
It's wild to me Time Machine works on your network. Are you just doing "first backups" over and over again, or have you somehow achieved the very rare state where Time Machine can run for, say, a week at a time without falling over?
Sorry, this is snarky and off topic, but I'm nostalgic for the days when Time Machine "just worked".
For a very long time I thought Time Machine had become flaky, and I'm sure it's partially to blame, but with my current setup I've literally never observed it corrupt a backup and have to start over.
Before I was using one of the common Synology consumer NAS boxes that are often recommended. The NAS didn't report any errors with the drives or its own hardware, but at least once a month TM would glitch on at least one of my home laptops.
My new setup is an Asus FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X. For a year now it's been running without a single apparent TM glitch while backing up multiple personal laptops and my work laptop. Sometimes I'm plugged in and sometimes I'm backing up over WiFi, but it's always worked.
I tried various recommended settings for the Synology and nothing helped so I strongly suspect that the Synology network protocol(SMB, AFP, etc.) implementations were either buggy themselves or at least not compatible with quirks in Apple's implementations. Synology->Asus fixed all my TM problems instantly and seemingly permanantly!
Heh it's honestly wild to me anyone needs over a gig. My work has a one gig fiber line supporting hundreds of employees and usage generally remains below 10%.
The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.
I put 5Gbit internet into my home (fiber) to build my startup. I'm processing terabytes of data. I have over 100TB of storage in my basement. I can regularly saturate my internet connection. That said, I remember well when a 1Gbit connection provided enough bandwidth for a 500-person call center for daily workloads (back about 10 years ago).
That puts you in an extreme minority, even amongst enterprise businesses. Many medium sized enterprises have storage that looks like "a couple dozen TB total" for hundreds of staff.
Having 100 TB of storage in your home basement is an even more extreme minority than that. ;)
A gigabit connection is more than enough for a 500-person call center today.
Agreed. We had IP phones with 100 Mbps switches in between most of our computers and the rest of the network for a long time and very few people noticed. It'd only really be when I was installing a system upgrade or something, and I'd be like "man, it'd be nice if this didn't take an extra two minutes". For normal web access, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps aren't really discernable, until you're downloading large files. A lot of 4K streaming videos though, you'll start to feel it quite a bit faster.
And then hilariously, once you go above a gig, the reality is most sites won't serve them to you any faster than that anyways.
I found the nicest thing about fiber is I can hit over a gb/s uploading, which is often much more critical-path for whatever I’m doing than a download.
The only thing I'd caution anyone else looking to do the same is doing a software router/fw like the Portectli is it's usually not hard to get the raw bandwidth to look nice with big flows but the new connection latency, connections per second, jitter, and QoS handling tend to suffer vs something with hw offloads (which is what most are used to even with cheapo gigabit home AP+router+switch combos). It's also not usually the cheapest way to get the 10G class NAT/L4 FW bandwidth, but it is usually the cheapest way to get "full" FW functionality if you don't care as much about the performance.
If you want a full FW solution that can actually FW+NAT at 10G bidirectional without breaking a sweat then something like the FortiGate 90G is the cheapest thing I've found that performs really well across the board. Great QoS, great latency, amazing throughput performance (does well with even small packet sizes in a single stream), easy enough to use UI (once you get oriented), low power. If you want to enable all of the NGFW stuff (e.g. AV and IPS) then it'll dip below line rate though.
If you just want something that NATs/connection direction oriented filtering like a "normal" home router then something like the MikroTik CCR2004 can get you better than the performance they got on the VP2440 + give you 12 ports of 10G SFP+ to work with. If you were planning to do "fancy" FWing/functionality beyond a normal home NAT FW (with decent managed switching built in) then the feature set will be a bit limiting, of course.
I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.
It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.
Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...
Same. I ran CAT6 from one end of our house to the other, because my home office is in the opposite corner as the fiber coming in to the router. After running that, and manually crimping everything, it Just Worked from the first time I turned everything on. That felt pretty good.
Do you mean Cat 6 or Cat 5e? Cat 6e isn't a thing and 6a didn't exist in 2006. 6 was certainly more future-proof at the time, although arguably 5e is still fine even today. (Super-gigabit consumer equipment didn't really exist until the last five years and it's till notably more expensive and less common than gigabit, which runs on 5e just fine.)
Cat 6 for sure. I thought there was some extra tweak beyond that, but I probably misremembered after all this time. Perhaps it was just that it was plenum-rated..
One thing I'll add that I learnt in the process of doing my own house: It's not just the cable type but also the SFP module that can limit the distance. I used MicroTik hardware and their S+R10J modules are limited to ~30m for 10Gbps speeds.
I have 1.5/900 fibre to my house, and I bring a 2.5 line from the modem to my home office where a 2.5 switch delivers it to my workstation, laptop, and unraid NAS. But those devices are all themselves just gigE I think, and I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
More and more regular people are getting network storage appliances. More and more people have laptops with SSDs that can write at 4 or 5 GB/s. Why shouldn't they get to use all of it?
I should have said most home users. My point is that more bandwidth at this point probably won’t affect 99.999% of home users.
What’s described in the post is the tech equivalent of supe-ing up a sports car and then driving it in rush hour traffic. It’s fun to geek out doing it, but practically in everyday use the difference will be negligible. Even with large file uploads and downloads, there’s a good chance that services won’t reach those throughputs end to end.
What’s telling is that the post shows screenshots and charts from artificial speed tests. No videos of the Dropbox client chugging away with throttled uploads.
> I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
There are many things along the way that would get in the way of a home user downloading something from the internet that would hit that 5GB/s speed. It's not that people should be "banned" from it or something, more that the investment cost isn't worth it.
I regularly saturate my 1G home and 1G office connection syncing ~6GB files between the two. It's also nice to be able to download a 100G or so game quickly. Remote backups to cloud storage also benefit from fast upload speeds (and more importantly, restores).
We have a 5gbps pipe; routinely download games from Steam at >3gbps; when I had to reinitialize my cloud backup it was >4gbps. All of this without impacting anyone else on the pipe.
Yah, our P95 bandwidth is just a few megabits per second. But it's not that expensive and routinely saves me a few minutes here and there.
10gbps on the LAN is more broadly useful. Pegging it for a file share is a daily occurrence.
Also storage has gotten super expensive lately, and rather than upgrading my machines/consoles I've been offloading games and downloading them as needed and now am routinely downloading dozens of GB just to play a game.
My gaming time is limited so the faster the better.
I regularly hit 4.7 gbps on a 5 Gbps line pulling files (usenet is usually faster than torrent, but the latter can be equally as fast depending on the torrent & how good the client software is). It's great to just grab an entire movie series in 4k Blu Ray remux quality in 5 minutes and go. No real need to plan ahead for anything.
Yeah I foolishly paid for 500 Mb/s but the only things I ever get over even 200 Mb/s for in the UK are Steam downloads (and speed tests). Everything else seems to be roughly throttled at that rate.
I wonder what the idle vs at load difference is for power draw/heat. Would really love to see this feature in reviews some!
I wonder if you could negotiate down to 1gbit until you see some level of activity, if that would help at all?
I'm still eyeing 10Gb, but if my home needs +30w for three computers, I don't feel like it's really worth it. Would love to see more details on the power consumption from folks, especially tuning for idle.
10GBase-T can still be nice if you're going to do native PoE (which the author did not) or you expect a mix of devices with 1/2.5/5 which you don't want to or can't upgrade/replace immediately (which is where it sounds like the author was situated).
The new 10GBASE-T SFPs are actually not too bad - you can get the full 100 meters at half the wattage it takes for the old space heater generation ones to reach 30 meters. Based on the article, the author did not know there were newer cooler options for the ~the same price.
I've been running it like this in a closed comm box for the last 3 years without any issues. SFP+ modules actually do not use that much power, it's just that it's concentrated into a small package, resulting in high temps.
Cripes. When possible just do fiber and DACs. Faster and much cooler than 10Gbit. 10Gbit uses an absurd amount of power per port thus the need for all that cooling.
For me the threshold has always been "can I stream a 4K movie from the NAS downstairs or from my seed box". No real need for anything above. Still I ran 10Gb single mode fiber in all the ducts.
I was surprised that the old Cat5e in my home supports 10Gbps without any issue, so went ahead and upgraded the rest of the network with 10Gbps switches (expensive Ubiquiti gear, but worth it to talk at 10Gbps between all my machines, even though the internet is only 5Gbps Fiber).
Unfortunately the blog didn't link to the SFP+ module they're using, but everyone should know there's effectively 2 different generations of 10gbit sfp+ to ethernet modules. The old gen, labeled as 30 meters, draws ~3 W, and gets extremely hot (to the point it'll usually cause link flaps), and the newer gen, usually labeled as 100m or 80m, draws ~1.5 W, and runs much, much cooler.
Example of the new gen: https://www.amazon.com/Wiitek-Transceiver-Compatible-UF-RJ45...
Old gen: https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-SFP-10G-T-S-Compatible-10GBase...
Typically the old gen uses a Marvell AQR113C, and the new gen uses a Broadcom chip that I forget the number of off hand.
I had this issue with old gen Unifi SFP+ to RJ45 10Gbe, 3 failed. Needed gloves to remove them. Bought newer gen and they are warm but i dont need gloves.
Wow, and at essentially the same price!
Thanks! 10Gb Eth is insane for exactly this reason (optical SFP+ modules are way cheaper and more reliable)
I don't agree that it is insane. It is less efficient than ideal, but 10gbit over copper is not necessarily dangerously hot or difficult to power.
I have a MikroTik CRS304-4XG-IN on my office desk with three out of four ports at 10gbit and it is perhaps 20 degrees above ambient on the outside. Warm but not hot. Passively cooled design.
A normal Windows laptop runs hotter than that when idle.
Minor nitpick but they are both considered Ethernet. The 4 pair copper one is 10GBASE-T.
I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.
It's wild to me Time Machine works on your network. Are you just doing "first backups" over and over again, or have you somehow achieved the very rare state where Time Machine can run for, say, a week at a time without falling over?
Sorry, this is snarky and off topic, but I'm nostalgic for the days when Time Machine "just worked".
For a very long time I thought Time Machine had become flaky, and I'm sure it's partially to blame, but with my current setup I've literally never observed it corrupt a backup and have to start over.
Before I was using one of the common Synology consumer NAS boxes that are often recommended. The NAS didn't report any errors with the drives or its own hardware, but at least once a month TM would glitch on at least one of my home laptops.
My new setup is an Asus FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X. For a year now it's been running without a single apparent TM glitch while backing up multiple personal laptops and my work laptop. Sometimes I'm plugged in and sometimes I'm backing up over WiFi, but it's always worked.
I tried various recommended settings for the Synology and nothing helped so I strongly suspect that the Synology network protocol(SMB, AFP, etc.) implementations were either buggy themselves or at least not compatible with quirks in Apple's implementations. Synology->Asus fixed all my TM problems instantly and seemingly permanantly!
Time Machine to a network share via Samba has been pretty reliable for me - only once has it corrupted itself in the five+ years I’ve been using it.
Amusingly enough Time Machine to a local drive failed completely.
Heh it's honestly wild to me anyone needs over a gig. My work has a one gig fiber line supporting hundreds of employees and usage generally remains below 10%.
The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.
I put 5Gbit internet into my home (fiber) to build my startup. I'm processing terabytes of data. I have over 100TB of storage in my basement. I can regularly saturate my internet connection. That said, I remember well when a 1Gbit connection provided enough bandwidth for a 500-person call center for daily workloads (back about 10 years ago).
That puts you in an extreme minority, even amongst enterprise businesses. Many medium sized enterprises have storage that looks like "a couple dozen TB total" for hundreds of staff.
Having 100 TB of storage in your home basement is an even more extreme minority than that. ;)
A gigabit connection is more than enough for a 500-person call center today.
Much works on 10/100 if you wanna know the truth about it - but it is really nice to hit full speeds when copying terabytes around.
Agreed. We had IP phones with 100 Mbps switches in between most of our computers and the rest of the network for a long time and very few people noticed. It'd only really be when I was installing a system upgrade or something, and I'd be like "man, it'd be nice if this didn't take an extra two minutes". For normal web access, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps aren't really discernable, until you're downloading large files. A lot of 4K streaming videos though, you'll start to feel it quite a bit faster.
And then hilariously, once you go above a gig, the reality is most sites won't serve them to you any faster than that anyways.
I found the nicest thing about fiber is I can hit over a gb/s uploading, which is often much more critical-path for whatever I’m doing than a download.
The only thing I'd caution anyone else looking to do the same is doing a software router/fw like the Portectli is it's usually not hard to get the raw bandwidth to look nice with big flows but the new connection latency, connections per second, jitter, and QoS handling tend to suffer vs something with hw offloads (which is what most are used to even with cheapo gigabit home AP+router+switch combos). It's also not usually the cheapest way to get the 10G class NAT/L4 FW bandwidth, but it is usually the cheapest way to get "full" FW functionality if you don't care as much about the performance.
If you want a full FW solution that can actually FW+NAT at 10G bidirectional without breaking a sweat then something like the FortiGate 90G is the cheapest thing I've found that performs really well across the board. Great QoS, great latency, amazing throughput performance (does well with even small packet sizes in a single stream), easy enough to use UI (once you get oriented), low power. If you want to enable all of the NGFW stuff (e.g. AV and IPS) then it'll dip below line rate though.
If you just want something that NATs/connection direction oriented filtering like a "normal" home router then something like the MikroTik CCR2004 can get you better than the performance they got on the VP2440 + give you 12 ports of 10G SFP+ to work with. If you were planning to do "fancy" FWing/functionality beyond a normal home NAT FW (with decent managed switching built in) then the feature set will be a bit limiting, of course.
I might have been lucky, but in the one home and one office were I've connected 10gbit switches and PCIe cards, it has just worked. Especially the office was a nice surprise, because it is at least 20 meters (probably more) of unknown cabling and at least one unknown patch panel between the utility closet where the NAS lives and the desk area. The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5, but clearly not.
It is nice moving/streaming large files across the network at 10 gbit. It really is ten times less waiting than with plain old gigabit.
Of course, most of the time I'm working with lots of small files and then the spinning disk array in the NAS has no chance to saturated the this giant pipe, or even a normal gigabit connection...
Same. I ran CAT6 from one end of our house to the other, because my home office is in the opposite corner as the fiber coming in to the router. After running that, and manually crimping everything, it Just Worked from the first time I turned everything on. That felt pretty good.
> The cables were run 15 years ago, so I expected it to be cat 5
FWIW, Cat 5e supplanted Cat 5 25 years ago.
I know when I was doing some custom wiring in a house around 2005-6, it was clear that cat-6e was the thing to use if you wanted any future-proofing.
So I bought a reel of that even though I was only going to be using 1000-BaseT. I don't remember there being too much premium on the wire itself.
Do you mean Cat 6 or Cat 5e? Cat 6e isn't a thing and 6a didn't exist in 2006. 6 was certainly more future-proof at the time, although arguably 5e is still fine even today. (Super-gigabit consumer equipment didn't really exist until the last five years and it's till notably more expensive and less common than gigabit, which runs on 5e just fine.)
Cat 6 for sure. I thought there was some extra tweak beyond that, but I probably misremembered after all this time. Perhaps it was just that it was plenum-rated..
One thing I'll add that I learnt in the process of doing my own house: It's not just the cable type but also the SFP module that can limit the distance. I used MicroTik hardware and their S+R10J modules are limited to ~30m for 10Gbps speeds.
That's pretty wild.
I have 1.5/900 fibre to my house, and I bring a 2.5 line from the modem to my home office where a 2.5 switch delivers it to my workstation, laptop, and unraid NAS. But those devices are all themselves just gigE I think, and I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
10Gbps is enough bandwidth for 500 concurrent Netflix streams in 4K/UHD (15Mbps) AND 500 concurrent video calls (4Mbps).
Home users don’t need more bandwidth to improve their internet experiences, they need lower latency, less congestion and less loss.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-net...
Home users only do video calls and watch Netflix?
More and more regular people are getting network storage appliances. More and more people have laptops with SSDs that can write at 4 or 5 GB/s. Why shouldn't they get to use all of it?
I should have said most home users. My point is that more bandwidth at this point probably won’t affect 99.999% of home users.
What’s described in the post is the tech equivalent of supe-ing up a sports car and then driving it in rush hour traffic. It’s fun to geek out doing it, but practically in everyday use the difference will be negligible. Even with large file uploads and downloads, there’s a good chance that services won’t reach those throughputs end to end.
What’s telling is that the post shows screenshots and charts from artificial speed tests. No videos of the Dropbox client chugging away with throttled uploads.
> I should have said most home users. My point is that more bandwidth at this point probably won’t affect 99.999% of home users.
640k should be enough for everybody... DSL should be enough for everybody...
If you build it, they will come.
To quote the previous post:
> I've yet to come up against a download (even a torrent) that seems like it would have really benefitted from having the entire theoretical 1.5 pipe available.
There are many things along the way that would get in the way of a home user downloading something from the internet that would hit that 5GB/s speed. It's not that people should be "banned" from it or something, more that the investment cost isn't worth it.
I regularly saturate my 1G home and 1G office connection syncing ~6GB files between the two. It's also nice to be able to download a 100G or so game quickly. Remote backups to cloud storage also benefit from fast upload speeds (and more importantly, restores).
We have a 5gbps pipe; routinely download games from Steam at >3gbps; when I had to reinitialize my cloud backup it was >4gbps. All of this without impacting anyone else on the pipe.
Yah, our P95 bandwidth is just a few megabits per second. But it's not that expensive and routinely saves me a few minutes here and there.
10gbps on the LAN is more broadly useful. Pegging it for a file share is a daily occurrence.
Also storage has gotten super expensive lately, and rather than upgrading my machines/consoles I've been offloading games and downloading them as needed and now am routinely downloading dozens of GB just to play a game.
My gaming time is limited so the faster the better.
How much $ extra are you willing to pay for the extremely occasional transfer at rates higher than gigabit? 2x? 3x?
Those ssds are very likely cached and so cannot keep that pace for more than a quick burst of a few gigs.
I regularly hit 4.7 gbps on a 5 Gbps line pulling files (usenet is usually faster than torrent, but the latter can be equally as fast depending on the torrent & how good the client software is). It's great to just grab an entire movie series in 4k Blu Ray remux quality in 5 minutes and go. No real need to plan ahead for anything.
Yeah I foolishly paid for 500 Mb/s but the only things I ever get over even 200 Mb/s for in the UK are Steam downloads (and speed tests). Everything else seems to be roughly throttled at that rate.
Telus gave me a good price and I'd already invested in a Unifi gateway that could accept the ONT directly, so that was fun to play with.
Both impressive and surprising that thermals were the biggest barrier!
Meanwhile I'm sat here wishing I could justify running any ethernet in my apartment, but improving wi-fi tech means I never can...
I wonder what the idle vs at load difference is for power draw/heat. Would really love to see this feature in reviews some!
I wonder if you could negotiate down to 1gbit until you see some level of activity, if that would help at all?
I'm still eyeing 10Gb, but if my home needs +30w for three computers, I don't feel like it's really worth it. Would love to see more details on the power consumption from folks, especially tuning for idle.
10g-base-T is a sick joke
high latency, high error rates, and terrifying heat output from SFPs (which the author noted for himself)
the only cat6 left in my home network is the link to verizon's ont, because in their infinite wisdom the ONLY connectivity offered was 10g-base-t
10GBase-T can still be nice if you're going to do native PoE (which the author did not) or you expect a mix of devices with 1/2.5/5 which you don't want to or can't upgrade/replace immediately (which is where it sounds like the author was situated).
The new 10GBASE-T SFPs are actually not too bad - you can get the full 100 meters at half the wattage it takes for the old space heater generation ones to reach 30 meters. Based on the article, the author did not know there were newer cooler options for the ~the same price.
The Mikrotik switch is awesome, and it's still the most compact 10G switch available.
You can fix the thermal issue either by adding a small fan (Noctua is great) or by adding more radiators: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...
I've been running it like this in a closed comm box for the last 3 years without any issues. SFP+ modules actually do not use that much power, it's just that it's concentrated into a small package, resulting in high temps.
Cripes. When possible just do fiber and DACs. Faster and much cooler than 10Gbit. 10Gbit uses an absurd amount of power per port thus the need for all that cooling.
yeah, the article though says...
"The apartment has structured cabling -- each room has one or more RJ45 sockets in the wall," ...
Which is the main problem most folks face.
wish the standard was "conduit" instead of "bake-this-years-tech-into-the-wall" which doesn't always last...
DACs are terrible, they are unwieldy and are always either too short or too long.
Fiber is much better, but in my case the house already had Cat5 Ethernet wiring (originally used just for phones!) everywhere.
Another use case for 10G Ethernet is PoE for the WiFi access points. Although you can't use SFP+ modules for that, of course.
For me the threshold has always been "can I stream a 4K movie from the NAS downstairs or from my seed box". No real need for anything above. Still I ran 10Gb single mode fiber in all the ducts.
The device nomenclature alone is worth the read! (otherwise an impressive feat to see)
I was surprised that the old Cat5e in my home supports 10Gbps without any issue, so went ahead and upgraded the rest of the network with 10Gbps switches (expensive Ubiquiti gear, but worth it to talk at 10Gbps between all my machines, even though the internet is only 5Gbps Fiber).
What's the point?