A friend at work has started experimenting with 10G LAN at home and at that speed one interesting observation is that the copper interfaces use significantly more power, like 8W vs 1W for an optical one or something like that. But it's only really worth it if you have a significant portion of end devices that have SPF+ slots directly, with the converters you get the worst of both worlds really. Except for range.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You also lose the option of PoE with fiber, although TBH in all my years I've never used it.

I'm just bitter because I bought a big roll of Cat6 a couple years ago and it cost an arm and a leg. The same length of multimode fiber would have been a fraction, and I'd probably get better speeds.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

If you're forward thinking for future speed generations you definitely should go with singlemode fiber, by the way. Multimode is mostly done at 10Gbit/s as far as I know. There are some things like 40G and 100G SR4, over multimode but they use 4 fibers in each direction. Whereas I have personally installed 100G bidirectional lines already on singlemode over 10 km already, that's easily commercially available (though it would be ridiculous for home use).

I think the price difference between 10G single mode and 10G multi mode gear has also decayed enough that taking the step up to singlemode is no big issue anymore.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 0 points 1 week ago

The prices for devices on Amazon aren't significantly different for switches, although if your devices are all ethernet (and they probably are) then you have to add the cost of the trancievers. Still, cheap switches are comparable, and the enterprise stuff jumps up an other of magnitude on both sides.

If more devices came with fiber sockets, it'd be cheaper to run fiber just for the cable price difference.

It does seem there's more diversity in fiber that might make consumer standardization harder. There's single vs multi-mode cabling, SC and LC connectors, simplex and duplex, and even the polishing types aren't all incompatible. So, there aren't any clear choices to offer to clients, and it'd be more confusing for many consumers. Ethernet is, basically, ethernet, unless you're a network engineer chasing specs.