10 times faster than 5G, are you ready for 10G communications?

The 2022 Winter Olympics will allow everyone to experience the joy of 5G high-speed surfing. The development of communication technology and faster and faster transmission rates are constantly redefining the way the world connects.

IEEE predicts that device connections will grow from 18 billion (in 2017) to 28.5 billion devices (by 2022). The number of Internet users will "soar from 3.4 billion in 2017 to 4.8 billion in 2022". The explosive growth of network traffic has not only accelerated the entry of mobile communications into the 5G era, but also spawned the collective upgrade of broadband, wireless and other networks.

In recent years, all major operators have launched triple-gigabit and full-gigabit solutions, bringing gigabit 5G, gigabit broadband, and gigabit Wi-Fi into thousands of households and becoming basic household configurations like water, electricity, and coal.

If there is a hierarchy of Internet speed, then is "full Gigabit" the enviable top of the pyramid? For ordinary people, it is indeed the case. However, some people have already taken the lead in "10 Gigabit".

Currently, the network infrastructure of cloud data centers has reached the 400Gbps standard, which is 400 times the bandwidth of 5G, and is moving towards 800G and 1600G. However, for individual home users, there is not such a large data throughput, and 10G network is enough to stand out from the crowd.

Every fundamental change in the field of communications has brought about earth-shaking changes in our lives. Ten years ago, we could not imagine that the mobile Internet supported by 4G would be so large, creating countless Internet giants and unicorns; 5G is also accelerating the transformation of thousands of industries and constantly giving birth to a variety of innovative application scenarios. So, how will the entry of 10G communications into the consumer market change our lifestyle?

Why Ethernet becomes the soil for 10G network?

If the cost is not taken into consideration, the faster the surfing speed, the better. As a trend-setter standing at the forefront of technology, you may be eager to call the operator and ask them to hurry up and get the 10G package for you, the valued users.

At this time, the other party is probably in a difficult position. 10G network is generally an enterprise-level service. It is not impossible to customize it, but you have to pay extra. How much should you pay? Just give it according to the scale of the university education network.

At this time, if they didn't have a real mine at home, most people would have given up. But there is another group of people who, relying on the belief that knowledge is power, used some 10G switches from corporate server rooms, commonly known as "picking up garbage", to build a 10G network at home.

Why is it so humble for ordinary people to use 10G network?

Here we need to explain a question first: Why can 10G network only be realized through Ethernet?

As mentioned earlier, 5G cellular networks, wireless networks WiFi-6, and home broadband have all achieved commercial use of gigabit services. If you want higher speeds, you can only rely on local area networks, or intranets.

In simple terms, it allows your desktop, laptop, mobile phone, game console, tablet, smart TV, smart socket, storage device NAS and other devices to communicate through an internal small network. The internal LAN is often built using Ethernet.

Explaining the concept and history of Ethernet is really a boring thing. Cisco, known as the Golden Gate Bridge of the Internet, believes that this knowledge is not very meaningful in its courses. Interested readers can search for it by themselves. Let's just talk about why you must rely on Ethernet if you want the "10 Gigabit" experience now.

First of all, compared with WiFi that uses radio waves, Ethernet transmits data directly through cables and optical cables. It is stable, reliable and resistant to interference. It is less likely to fail and let down teammates when the game is online.

Secondly, what about cellular mobile networks? The latest generation of mobile communication network 5G has a peak theoretical transmission speed of about 100Mbps. The transmission capacity of 6G is 10 times higher than that of 5G. It can reach the 10G standard, but it is still under development and its widespread commercial use is nowhere in sight.

(Original Ethernet system diagram)

Since neither of these two is possible, there must be hope for fixed-line broadband with fiber to the home. However, home broadband networks often have complex architectures and are connected to the external network through a local area network. Network construction, upgrades, and expansions are relatively troublesome. They have begun to fail to keep up with the speed of computer terminal iterations, becoming the main bottleneck that blocks user experience. For example, in 2020, Apple has added a 10Gb 10G Ethernet interface to the M1Macmini, but it is still useless if the user does not have a 10G network.

In contrast, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) proposed the implementation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) on copper cables in November 2002. In 2005, IEEE defined 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) as the fastest Ethernet standard in local area networks (LANs) in standard 802.3x. At the end of 2017, IEEE approved the 200GbE and 400GbE standards to meet the needs of cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operators for higher bandwidth.

Since being adopted as a standard by IEEE in 1982, Ethernet has gone through 40 years of ups and downs. With its comprehensive advantages of continuous evolution, high speed, stability and reliability, it has become the most widely used network technology in the world and has taken the lead in standing at the forefront of home 10 Gigabit networks.

Is the demand for 10G data centers in the home real?

Many people may think that the current Gigabit network is more than enough for downloading files, playing games, and watching videos. It is a waste of money to have such a high speed.

Indeed, 10 Gigabit Ethernet can provide a transmission rate of 10Gbps and transmit data at a rate of 10 billion bits per second. For many years, it has mainly served scenarios such as data centers and enterprise LANs.

For example, schools need high-definition video applications to support digital teaching, and the application of LiDAR and sensors in digital military requires a large amount of data throughput; or the Internet of Things in enterprise parks is constantly developing and is increasingly sensitive to network delays... At this time, the network bandwidth of the metropolitan area network is insufficient, and packet loss and equipment crashes will cause relatively large losses. Therefore, it is often solved through a 10G local area network. As one of the "new infrastructures", the hyper-converged digital infrastructure has also seen a technical trend of converged Ethernet.

But for home users, isn't 10G network a bit of an overkill?

In fact, we can infer from the results that if Gigabit networks were really sufficient, there wouldn't be so many DIY 10G network experts. This is mainly because some people may really have a lot of money at home:

If you are a fan of 3A games and high-definition videos, facing 4K and 8K picture quality, it will take dozens of minutes to download and copy a 4K blockbuster under a gigabit network. For those who are used to transmitting and watching in seconds, it is really unbearable.

If you are a content creator or a creator who works with love, due to the epidemic, more and more audio-visual, 3D, and game studios have begun to work remotely, so uploading and downloading video materials and program files to centralized storage every day has greatly affected work efficiency. At this time, the ultra-wide bandwidth provided by 10GbE can open a huge design file in seconds, which can indeed achieve easier collaboration.

If you are a hardware enthusiast who is very particular about pennies, and you buy a laptop with a 10G interface, but you can't bear to see the potential wasted, you can only do it yourself and build a 10G intranet to make it shine.

If you need to store a lot of learning materials, you spend a lot of money to buy a hard disk with a read and write speed of hundreds of megabytes, but the file transfer speed cannot keep up with the pace of the storage hardware. In a 10G network, you can easily transfer at a rate of 1.25GB/s, and copy a 20GB file to another computer in 20 seconds. How cool is that?

At this point, you may feel that the more bandwidth the better.

In addition to being fast, 10 Gigabit Ethernet also comes with many other benefits, such as flexible expansion, directly using mid-range Ethernet switches as access devices, simplifying the complexity of network configuration; strong adaptability, able to automatically identify a variety of network applications such as data services, voice services, video services, and provide bandwidth guarantees.

It is better to take action than to think about it. Let’s start “picking up trash” now, or rather, build a 10G network.

How many steps are there to build a 10G network?

Do-it-yourselfers may have already started gearing up to deploy their own 10G home network. But don't worry, although DIY is not uncommon in 2022, the reason why 10G network has not become popular on a large scale is that it has a high threshold, which not only tests the thickness of the wallet, but also requires technical reserves.

First of all, optical fiber. To ensure the stability of the 10G network, it is still necessary to use a wired connection. There are many common twisted pair cables. The 10G network generally uses Category 7 cables, a type of twisted pair cable recognized in the 2002 ISO/IEC118017 Category/F standard, with a transmission rate of up to 10Gbps. If it is not a newly renovated home, rewiring also requires considering the previously laid network cables, which is extremely troublesome. This also reminds us that it is best to deploy the network in one step, choose the best within the acceptable range, and reduce the cost of secondary transformation.

Second, a 10G router. The router can maximize the performance of broadband and is the center of the home network. Now many operators will give away WiFi-6 routers in Gigabit packages. If you want your wireless devices to enjoy 10G network speeds, then a 10G router is essential. On e-commerce platforms, a high-end 10G router often costs thousands of yuan.

Next, the 10G network card. The network card is the interface that connects the computer and the transmission medium in the local area network. The computer must have a 10G network card to run at a speed of 10Gbps. At present, some brand computers such as Apple have built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and support optional 10G network cards. Of course, speed is time, and time is money, so you have to pay extra.

By the way, some short video producers, game studios, game enthusiasts, etc. may also need a NAS that supports 10G transmission speeds to enable resource management, backup, and sharing to achieve better read and write speeds.

It is not difficult to find out from here that money not only limits imagination, but also limits Internet speed.

However, this does not mean that ordinary people will have no chance of getting 10 Gigabit.

In a rapidly changing society, the digitalization of thousands of industries and the popularization of remote working methods will give rise to a large number of new network applications, greatly increasing the demand for network bandwidth. 10G networks will eventually step down from the unattainable pyramid and enter the mass consumer market. The increase in basic network speed is like fertile soil, allowing a new generation of Internet applications and services to flourish, such as digital humans or the metaverse.

As Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, said: "Designing Ethernet as an open, industrial standard local network is more significant than inventing Ethernet itself."