alt.hn

4/25/2026 at 5:56:12 AM

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapters-cooler-smaller-cheaper/

by calcifer

4/25/2026 at 3:26:11 PM

Jeff: I see a possible problem with your tests that bit me before! ipferf3 is not multithreaded by default. The more capable computers probably have an interrupt rate sufficient to handle 10gig over USB (which likely multiplies the interrupt rate needed), but it's completely possible you're pushing the interrupt rate limits on the Macbook Neo and other lower powered hardware.

Any chance you could re-run with `-P 4` where 4 is the core count?

by exabrial

4/25/2026 at 4:47:42 PM

I ran all the tests at P 2 and P 4 to verify cpu cores weren't hindering the speed, but got the same result (within 2%).

Modern A/M cores and Zen 5 cores individually have enough grunt to handle at least 10 Gbps through USB without a hitch.

On my Pi's and N100 mini PCs, I do have to use threads to hit more than about 5-6 Gbps. And testing a 25 Gbps adapter I'm testing separately, I had to use multiple threads to get my Ampere CPU to measure speeds greater than 10 Gbps.

by geerlingguy

4/26/2026 at 6:19:06 PM

Awesome! We had a Intel Atom board with 10g, and we could never get iperf3 to saturate the interface until we used `-P`!

by exabrial

4/25/2026 at 9:36:06 PM

Most modern ethernet chips, including those used on USB ethernet devices, have adaptive interrupt coalescing (or moderation) for network I/O, which renders this likely not as big a deal as it once was. There will still be limits on packets/sec/core but it's not because of interrupts.

by dgacmu

4/25/2026 at 5:10:18 PM

Or Better use only iperf (or known as version 2), it has multi threading support

by dd_xplore

4/25/2026 at 5:20:18 PM

A single threaded benchmark better represents real performance, I'd argue. 10 Gbps is only 1.2 GB/s after all and few applications use parallel streams.

by fulafel

4/25/2026 at 8:56:48 PM

I think the intention is to measure the adapter itself independent from the CPU/overall system.

Besides, I can’t think of a typical single threaded application that would use those data rates, can you?

by stonegray

4/26/2026 at 6:01:16 AM

File transfer and storage (Dropbox, browser download, rsync, scp, NFS/SAN etc) is a classic use case that can utilize all the bandwidth you have and typically uses single streams between client and server.

by fulafel

4/25/2026 at 9:07:05 PM

Steam downloads

by iknowstuff

4/25/2026 at 9:26:07 PM

Steam download rates are throttled based on how fast it can actually install the game so it’s a bit of an outlier

by stonegray

4/25/2026 at 10:04:01 AM

All these USB version names. I used to know what they all meant, but then the USB IF went ahead and renamed them all and made a bunch of versions have the same name and renamed some versions to have the same name as the old name of other versions.

I have absolutely no idea what anyone means when they say USB 3.2 gen 2x2. I used to know what USB 3.2 meant but it's certainly not that.

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 1:05:22 PM

Unfortunately "USB 3.2" is just a version of the standard, which does not give any information about the performance of a USB port or device.

USB 5 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 1, available on Type A or Type C connectors (or on devices on a special extended micro B connector)

USB 10 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2, available on Type A or Type C connectors

USB 20 Gb/s = USB 3.2 gen 2x2, available only on Type C connectors

Moreover, "5 Gb/s" is a marketing lie. The so-called USB of 5 Gb/s has a speed of 4 Gb/s (the same as PCIe 2.0). On the other hand, 10 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s, have the claimed speeds, so USB of 10 Gb/s is 2.5 times faster than USB of 5 Gb/s, not 2 times faster.

10 Gb/s USB and Ethernet have truly the same speed, but the USB overhead is somewhat higher, leading to a somewhat lower speed. However, the speed shown in TFA, not much higher than 7 Gb/s seems too low, and it may be caused by the Windows drivers. It is possible that on other operating systems, e.g. Linux, one can get a higher transfer speed.

by adrian_b

4/25/2026 at 1:45:41 PM

The fact that you had to list all of the versions and speeds at the top of your post is illustrative of what the parent was trying to say. We can all look up what speed is associated with what version, but it’s not exactly a consumer friendly experience.

by mbreese

4/25/2026 at 2:10:41 PM

A few computer manufacturers do the right thing and they mark the speed on the USB ports, removing ambiguities, for example ASUS does this on my NUCs and motherboards.

Unfortunately, there are too many who do not do this, even among the biggest computer vendors.

by adrian_b

4/25/2026 at 2:32:20 PM

> mark the speed on the USB ports, removing ambiguities

Unfortunately it's not true.

Quiz: what happens when a device capable of 20Gbps is plugged into a port marked as 40Gbps?

by riobard

4/25/2026 at 2:44:26 PM

I can't tell if this is a trick question that has something to do with a quirk of USB running multiple lanes in parallel to get higher speeds.

Because if not then it's the same as any specification for connecting devices that allows for multiple speeds. It runs at the lowest of the max speeds supported of everything in the chain.

by ziml77

4/25/2026 at 3:07:43 PM

That's exactly the issue. I'm just pointing out that it's a fantasy to hope for simple numbering of max supported speeds will simplify the current USB mess.

It will not.

Consumers would expect plugging a 20Gbps device into a 40Gbps port should result in 20Gbps negotiated speed. In reality it will mostly likely end up at 10Gbps (or less) because of the mess.

by riobard

4/25/2026 at 4:00:44 PM

Older Thunderbolt devices were not compatible with USB, so plugging them into an USB Type C port would not work.

Newer Thunderbolt/USB 4 devices do not have any technical reason for preventing them to work as USB 3.2 2x2, i.e. to work at 20 Gb/s when plugged into a 20 Gb/s host port, and vice-versa for 20 Gb/s devices plugged into a USB 4/Thunderbolt host port, because both Thunderbolt and 20 Gb/s USB need the same wires in the cable and connector.

I do not know if all USB 4 controllers also work at 20 Gb/s (USB 3.2 2x2), but if they do not work that should be considered a bug.

by adrian_b

4/26/2026 at 8:08:16 AM

USB4/TB4 devices doing (only) PCIe tunneling will absolutely not work on a USB3.2 port, or even on an USB4 port without PCIe support (which you can find on some very recent smartphones I believe. It's spec compliant, PCIe is optional.)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 2:49:56 PM

Thats just port speed, charging and other features are all a crapshoot on USB making Thunderbolt the sane version of the "USB-C" family where it requires a set of things (speed, charging wattage)

by hypercube33

4/25/2026 at 7:13:26 PM

This is not what’s anti consumer, technical specifications can be confusing, it’s cable companies selling at Best Buy “gold plated” “HD ready” “braided fiber” “other bs” that is anti consumer. If you’re thinking about usb versions, you’re far from the normal consumer

by repeekad

4/25/2026 at 6:25:53 PM

USB 3.2 used to be what we now call USB 3.2 gen 2x2, doesn't it? So it used to be that the version dictated the max speed: 3.0 was 4Gb/s, 3.1 was 10, and 3.2 20, right?

But then they decided to memory hole that and now USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 are also USB 3.2 and USB 3.2 is called "generation 2x2", whatever that is supposed to mean

It makes no sense anymore. It used to be quite simple.

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 7:30:36 PM

No, they just renamed things when new standards were released (3.1 and 3.2). 20Gbps wasn't possible before 3.2, and it called Gen 2x2 at the time of release.

5 and 10 Gbps were renamed, though.

5 Gbps first was USB 3.0, then 3.1 Gen 1, then 3.2 Gen 1.

10 Gbps first was 3.1 Gen 2, then 3.2 Gen 2x1.

3.2 Gen 1x2 is also 10 Gbps, but physically different

by Aerofoli

4/25/2026 at 8:27:27 PM

Do any real devices use 1x2? I think we largely escaped that mess and it's mostly a strict progression of 5Gbps, 10Gbps, 10Gbps*2, 20Gbps*2, 40Gbps*2

by Dylan16807

4/25/2026 at 4:52:29 PM

"gen 2x2" is Microsoft level bad naming.

by rewgs

4/25/2026 at 6:45:03 PM

And USB gen 4x4 is for off-roading.

by guax

4/25/2026 at 2:47:19 PM

> Moreover, "5 Gb/s" is a marketing lie.

It's not a lie, the b just stands for baud not bit ;-)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 4:11:37 PM

That is technically correct, but "b" has never been an accepted abbreviation for baud (which was Bd) and the naming of the first versions of the PCIe, USB 3 and SATA speeds, which were done by Intel, were obviously in contradiction with the industry standards and intended to confuse the customers.

Previously to these standards promoted by Intel, the 1 Gb/s Ethernet used the same encoding and it was rightly called by everybody "1 Gb/s", not "1.25 Gb/s", because the gross bit rate has absolutely no importance for the users of a communication standard.

Only Intel invented this marketing trick, calling PCIe 1.0 and 2.0 as 2.5 and 5 Gb/s, instead of 2 and 4 Gb/s, and similarly for USB and SATA, where e.g. SATA 3 is called 6 Gb/s, but its speed is 4.8 Gb/s.

To be fair, what Intel did was not unusual, because in the computing industry there has been a long tradition of using fake numbers in marketing for various things, like scanner or video camera resolution ("digital" zoom, "interpolated" resolution), magnetic tape capacity ("compressed" capacity), and many others.

by adrian_b

4/25/2026 at 8:31:22 PM

The Ethernet version would have been much sillier than that. The megabaud rates for 10/100/1000 Ethernet are in fact 20, 125, and 125.

by Dylan16807

4/26/2026 at 8:03:36 AM

Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment. It's a shitshow, and I wish it'd backfire, but it won't. Maybe the EU will come up with some (better) "true labelling" laws, if not I see no chance for this to get better.

(Why the current laws don't cover this, I have no idea. It's technically false advertising.)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 10:21:58 AM

Oh, it's fine.

The lack of clarity is in keeping with the USB C connector itself, which may supply or accept power at various rates or not at all, may be fast or slow, may provide or accept video or not, and may even provide an interpretation of PCI Express but probably doesn't.

It probably looks the same no matter what, and the cable selected to use probably also won't be very forthcoming with its capabilities either.

(Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.)

by ssl-3

4/25/2026 at 12:46:05 PM

The USB A connector stayed the same between USB 1, 2 and 3. Yet most manufacturers voluntary distinguished them by giving USB 1 and 1.1 a white insert in plug and port, USB 2 a black insert and USB 3 a blue one

This was neither standarized nor enforced, yet it worked remarkably well in the real world

Then we decided to just have no markings at all on USB C cables. On the ports at least we occasionally get little thunderbolt or power symbols

by wongarsu

4/25/2026 at 1:49:29 PM

The exterior of the USB A connector stayed the same. The number of pins increased when we went from USB 2 to 3. So, even in this case, it’s slightly more complicated. The colors helped because the capabilities were very different between the ports. But when the USB IF increased the number of options (and reduced the size of the connector), different colors became impossible to do.

The problem is that there are too many uses for one connector. But this is wha we wanted - a reduced number of standardized connector/power options.

by mbreese

4/26/2026 at 3:01:40 AM

> But when the USB IF increased the number of options (and reduced the size of the connector), different colors became impossible to do.

Some USB C cables identify their capabilities visually or electronically. All USB C cables could do this.

> But this is wha we wanted - a reduced number of standardized connector/power options.

We meant who?

by pseudalopex

4/26/2026 at 2:37:39 PM

> Then we decided to just have no markings at all on USB C cables.

I'm shocked the LTT TrueSpec cables are the first I'm aware of to so such a small and basic thing. I have so many USB C cables and no idea which are power only, USB 2 only, or what. Such a mess

by kllrnohj

4/25/2026 at 2:08:31 PM

… and a M1 MacBook will source 5V/3A all day long to a non-PD negotiated sink. Somewhere between the M1 and M3 Apple decided to buy into USB-IF compliance and limit to 500mA.

Has lead to some very embarrassing “works on my computer” situations on prototype boards shared with my EE colleagues (I’m a software guy who dabbles in hardware when I need to)

by tomchuk

4/25/2026 at 3:10:33 PM

I think the Rd pulldown options are for 0.9/1.5/3A without PD negotiation.

by eigen

4/25/2026 at 7:47:34 PM

It doesn't take PD negotiation to get 5v, 3A from a compliant source. A 5.1k resistor or two (quantity depends on placement in the overall circuit) is sufficient.

This may be a matter of semantics, but I can't bring myself to call a resistor a negotiator. They only do one thing and they're very resistant to other options. :)

With nothing connected to the CC line(s) at all, then there should be no output voltage on Vcc. It shouldn't be 5v @ 3a, or 500mA, or anything else -- it should be ~exactly 0v, and therefore also 0a.

A resistor or two tells the power source what we want. Without it (or some, you know, actual PD negotiations), we get nothing.

---

A careful reader will note the repeated quantity distinction. Let me explain that.

Every USB C socket has both CC1 and CC2 pins. They're on opposite side of the connector and get used for sorting out PD, and for detecting the cable's connector orientation (if/when that matters).

But a cromulent USB C to USB C cable can have just 1 CC wire, and that's OK. It works; it isn't even wrong. To get such a cable to coax 5v from a 5v/3a source and get power for a prototype widget on Gilligan's Island, with the cable already cut in half to get at the wires inside: Wire up power and ground to your prototype. And put a 5.1k resistor between that single CC wire and ground. Voila: We've requested 5v at up to 3a.

Or: If we're being a bit more proper and snooty and want to do it The Right Way, and we actually have a USB C jack to prototype with, then that more-ideally takes two 5.1k resistors; one to pull CC1 to ground, and another to pull CC2 to ground. This does the same thing, but it does it on the connector side of things instead of the daunting no-mans-land of wires. Only one of these resistors will ever be used at one time.

Or: If we have a USB C jack and can only scrounge up one 5.1k resistor (maybe we only have a single #2 pencil to whittle down to 5.1k of resistance), or we're being particularly lazy, then that's OK too. Pick CC1 or CC2 and put 5.1k between there and ground. It will work with the cable plugged in one way, and it won't work with the cable flipped 180 degrees. That can be enough to get a thing done for the moment or whatever. (There's no solution that is as permanent as a temporary one.)

---

These are some of the things I learned when I was in the field and needed a 5v, >2.5a power supply to replace one that had died. I said to myself, "Self, just go over to Wal-Mart and get a 3a USB C power brick that comes with a cable, cut and splice that cable to fit the widget that needs power, and call it done. If it dies in the future, replacing it will be intuitive and fast."

So dumb ol' me went to Wal-Mart and bought exactly that, and I quite confidently set forth with the splicing.

This did not work. At all.

And that was a harsh rabbit hole to dive into, but it was ultimately fine. After I got back that evening I soldered a 5.1k resistor (of 1206 SMD form) mid-span between the CC wire and ground, and finished the adapter-cable quite neatly with some adhesive-lined shrink tubing.

Doing it this way got the customer's gear working faster than ordering the "right" parts and waiting for them show up would have, and it still works. That's all been a few years ago now; I consider it to be as permanent as anything ever really is.

by ssl-3

4/26/2026 at 1:20:16 AM

I’m printing this out for next time I’m stuck on an island.

by JSR_FDED

4/25/2026 at 1:57:17 PM

The lack of clarity is in keeping with the USB C connector itself, which may supply or accept power at various rates or not at all, may be fast or slow, may provide or accept video or not, and may even provide an interpretation of PCI Express but probably doesn't.

It gets even worse.

I now have two cheap Chinese gadgets (a checki printer and a tire inflater) that have USB-C ports for charging, but will only charge with the wire that came with the gadget. The other end of which is an old-style USB plug.

It seems that USB-C sockets are cheap enough parts to use them for everything, even if the manufacturer isn't going to put any actual USB circuitry behind them.

Edit: Three. I forgot about my wife's illuminated makeup mirror.

by reaperducer

4/25/2026 at 2:15:45 PM

I keep a few of these around to deal with this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6323

Very annoying though! The devices are just missing a couple resistors which is probably less than a cent on the BOM.

by anamexis

4/26/2026 at 3:45:55 AM

Wow, thanks for sharing this. Like the parent commenter, I have an increasing number of cheap devices like this. I wonder if anyone sells an "enclosed" version of this product. This won't survive 5 minutes in my house, haha.

A quick google I found one but they're $17 each (!) and it's from a site I've never heard of and can't vouch for, so not bothering to link it here.

I'm really surprised there aren't a number of these all over Amazon. Or if there are, they're using different keywords to describe them, so I can't find them.

by mh-

4/26/2026 at 10:41:19 PM

On AliExpress I found some that were already packaged into neat little professional-looking adapter-sized widgets for about $2.50 each.

I'd link them here, but I have a US perspective on things and it wasn't clear to me how this listing would be delivered. And delivery method is important to me, here.

If with AliExpress Choice shipping, then that'd be fine: They'd show up on a doorstep in Anytown, USA for a few dollars each.

But if they'd be delivered using Approximately Any Other Method, then: Surprise! Your widget valued at less than $2.50 now costs you $80 to receive!

I don't want to encourage anyone to be surprised like that.

(I have no doubt that an enterprising person could negotiate a very good price on 1,000 of these widgets and sell them on Amazon if they were motivated to do so.)

by ssl-3

4/26/2026 at 3:00:41 PM

Adafruit sells enclosures for them, too.

by anamexis

4/25/2026 at 3:16:51 PM

Note: If it just needs 5V power (Like many microcontroller-focused devices), USB C is convenient, because chargers and cables are ubiquitous. And they all (WIth exceptions like the one you mentioned) support 5V DC power.

Bonus: YOu can enable USB 2.0 data transfer as well for firmware updates, computer interfaces etc.

So: Cheap/ubiquitous part, everyone has cables + AC adapters to their local plug: I think it's a great default power connector.

by the__alchemist

4/25/2026 at 2:53:35 PM

Ah that's a fun misuse of USB ports. The companies will often even dodge issues with the USB-IF by labeling the ports as Type C and letting the customer's mind fill in the word USB.

I wish these devices would just use barrel jacks, labeled with the voltage and polarity. But these manufacturers know that the USB-C port weighs into buying decisions (and they know that most people have zero clue about the difference between a physical port and the electrical/protocol specs).

by ziml77

4/25/2026 at 3:05:39 PM

I hate barrel jacks, it seems that every single time I encounter one it's different from any adaptor I have. Size, voltage, and polarity can all differ. People got sick of having 10 differnet power adatpters to charge stuff. Hence the demand for "single connector" which seems to have converged on the USB-C form factor.

by SoftTalker

4/25/2026 at 3:15:16 PM

Right, but if it's not actually USB-C, at best you're looking at the device not working when plugged into a proper USB-C power supply. At worst you're facing fried electronics.

by ziml77

4/25/2026 at 3:53:40 PM

Agreed that would be like wiring a standard North American household wall outlet with 240VAC. Technically possible, but will probably fry anything not expecting it.

by SoftTalker

4/25/2026 at 10:06:18 PM

I came across a group of racks in the IT room in a (US) factory once that had 208v on their standard NEMA 5-15R sockets.

Their global-market IT stuff didn't care at all. But some of the US-market audio stuff I was integrating came with old-school linear power supplies, and those items cared a great deal.

by ssl-3

4/26/2026 at 3:20:20 PM

Have run into that exact thing also, not that the sockets were 5-15R but IEC C13 in a rack CDU. But someone had some adapter pigtails from C14 to a standard NEMA socket, of course that doesn't change the voltage at all. Hilarity ensued.

by SoftTalker

4/26/2026 at 5:45:03 PM

My aftermarket android auto display uses the type c connector for power input - wired directly to raw vehicle power. It will not run on 5v. It doesn't negotiate pd either. It just expects around 13 volts right on the power pins, and the supplied power cable does exactly that. It's portable too, which means that some poor person plugged their cable into their phone and blew it up.

by progman32

4/25/2026 at 5:04:26 PM

Or just include a $0.03 pd negotiator in the circuit

by flemhans

4/25/2026 at 10:00:43 PM

Yeah, they got cheap. They either got cheap with the BOM, or they got cheap with the QC and never tested it with USB C power sources, or they got cheap with the spec and it's working as-designed.

It just takes a couple of insignificant resistors and a USB C socket that brings out CC1 and CC2 to pads on the board to do it right. I wrote about how that works in a sister comment if you want to read more.

But those devices will charge/work just fine with any bog-standard USB A to USB C cable, alongside any decent power brick with USB A outputs. It doesn't have to be the exact cables they came with.

It's annoying in the "you cheap bastards" sort of way, but regular A to C cables will work.

(If it's really important to you, then it can be possible to hack in a couple of 5.1k resistors inside the cheap-bastard devices and make them work with regular USB C power bricks and regular USB C to C cables. The resistors will tell the source to provide 5v at up to 3A. All compliant USB C cables are required to safely pass 3A.

The mod can range from very easy, to somewhat problematic, to "fuck this, I quit". In reality, there might already be pads on the board to connect CC1 and CC2 to ground; just solder in the resistors. Or, the pins are probably brought out at the connector itself, so it can be bodged with some extra wire.

But reality is a cruel mistress and not all available PCB-mounted USB C connectors expose CC1 and CC2 at all, although in a sane and pure world absolutely all of them should.)

[tl;dr, just keep an A to C cable with the devices, always have USB A where they get used, and forget about it. The next round of cheap stuff will be better, worse, or the same, and that's a future problem.]

by ssl-3

4/25/2026 at 11:50:32 AM

This quagmire (along with the version names) is why I call it the Unintuitive Serial Bus.

by theandrewbailey

4/25/2026 at 12:07:09 PM

USB is just a complete mess. I don't mind so much ports having different capabilities if they are well documented in the specification sheets of the hardware because then at least I can find out what they are capable of, but alas it never seems to be the case. Its very hard to work out whether a port can do Displayport and to what extent/performance or its true power capability or just its real data transfer speed. More often than I like I have just hoped that something works. Anything above 5W charging and 5gbps transfer is optional.

by PaulKeeble

4/25/2026 at 11:47:42 PM

I have an Intel NUC where 10 Gbps devices can run faster when plugged into the 3.1 Gen 2 ports than the Thunderbolt 3 ports under NVMe load, due to the former having dedicated PCIe lanes and the latter sharing the PCH lanes with the M.2 slots, which could be highly relevant if I were doing heavy disk I/O over a 10 Gbit Ethernet adapter.

This is more than a mild annoyance in the case of faster Thunderbolt devices like eGPUs, especially since, in addition to the 2 PCIe lanes dedicated to the USB ports and a third dedicated to an SD card slot, an additional five lanes are unused.

IIRC there was a reason at one point that Intel insisted on connecting Thunderbolt controllers through the PCH, but I don't understand why they didn't at least use four lanes for one of the M.2 slots. Sure, they may have had to move the SD card slot due to configuration limitations, but in what world is SD card performance more important than NVMe performance?

by jasomill

4/26/2026 at 2:50:24 PM

Probably cheaper and freed up PCIe lanes for desktop boards (marketing?) now yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense.

by hypercube33

4/25/2026 at 2:11:31 PM

USB is just a complete mess.

You have to go out of your way to make Apple's Lightning connector look sensible, but somehow the USB consortium has managed to do it.

by reaperducer

4/26/2026 at 1:59:25 AM

To be fair, lightning only looks sensible because it never did anything other than USB2 and power delivery.

by ben-schaaf

4/26/2026 at 6:26:04 AM

A few devices do support USB 5Gbps over Lightning!

by gsnedders

4/25/2026 at 2:43:18 PM

I miss lightning. Cleanable with a toothpick and some compressed air. The USB-C port on my current iPhone is now compacted with pocket lint and I can't seem to clean it out.

by drcongo

4/25/2026 at 6:22:11 PM

It had a pretty bad flaw: the spring contacts being on the device side, causing wear and tear there.

USB-C moved those to the much cheaper to replace cable. The little strip in the middle makes cleaning a bit harder but does provide for more longevity. It's s necessary evil in order to have the spring contacts on the plug side as well as not having them exposed to touch.

I think the plug side of USB is pretty well designed. The problem is more with the electrical and signalling side and the marketing of the different versions.

by wolvoleo

4/25/2026 at 5:40:33 PM

Toothpick and compressed air works for my phone.

by dcrazy

4/25/2026 at 12:54:50 PM

Going by Fabien Sanglard's cheat sheet (who I trust uncritically) https://fabiensanglard.net/usbcheat/index.html it looks like 3.2 actually is a broader term than expected. Maybe there was some awful attempt at backwards compatibility? Or forwards?

by TomatoCo

4/25/2026 at 1:12:42 PM

Great site, thanks for the link. But holy heck, that "Also Known As" column is complete chaos. What the heck is wrong with the USB Consortium, do they have brain damage?

Also, according to that table, "USB4 Gen 2×2" is a downgrade on "USB 3.2 Gen 2x2", since the cable length is 0.8m instead of 1m for the same speeds. Which is uhh unexpected.

by Someone1234

4/25/2026 at 4:15:08 PM

Yeah I what I would give to have been a fly on the wall in the room where they decided to roll with such an obviously terrible and stupid naming scheme. Did anyone protest? Did anyone boldly dissent? Or did they all really just sit around and pat themselves on the back?

by wpm

4/26/2026 at 4:07:27 AM

It allows manufacturers to clear old stocks of cables by rebranding them as latest products.

USB 1+2/3/4 are basically unrelated standards under the same USB umbrella. USB4 especially is just Thunderbolt/PCIe x4 with features. If Betamax was branded as "VHS 2.0" instead of being a separate standard it would have been felt similar to the USB4 situation.

by numpad0

4/25/2026 at 1:52:16 PM

The cable length is only for the spec. You can get longer cables that achieve the higher bandwidth, they're just not certified for that.

by BearOso

4/25/2026 at 2:48:50 PM

Right, so per spec it is a downgrade.

by Someone1234

4/25/2026 at 2:08:08 PM

And? The question stands, why is the USB 4 spec a downgrade?

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 2:56:40 PM

Probably because with USB 3.2 2x2 they were reviewing too many longer cables that didn't meet the requirements, so they lowered the length so companies didn't submit them only to fail to get certified. It's worth noting that 1.2m is now in the USB4 spec.

by BearOso

4/25/2026 at 9:08:06 PM

I really, really wish somebody would explain to me what thr USB consortium was smoking, yeah. I cannot explain it.

by lpcvoid

4/25/2026 at 10:25:54 AM

To be fair they seem to have taken this often-stated criticism on board. USB 4's naming is more sensible, and they've pushed the simple data speed & power labelling that makes it easier to work out what you need.

by Latty

4/25/2026 at 11:37:08 AM

Yeah, now it's USB4 Version 2.0 / USB 80Gbps / USB4 Gen4.

by usagisushi

4/25/2026 at 2:05:52 PM

According to wikipedia the current marketing names for USB are just their speed: USB 5/10/20/40/80 Gbps. No version numbers or anything else.

by ac29

4/25/2026 at 2:08:23 PM

Then what's 3.2 gen 2x2?

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 10:30:32 AM

I don't think they've taken the criticism on board, USB 3 still has the completely nonsensical names

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 2:12:46 PM

The modern usb naming is to just list the speed or power output of the port.

Rather than some absurd version number it’s now just “USB 20 Gbits”

by Gigachad

4/26/2026 at 2:19:42 AM

Then why do I still see USB 3.2 generation 2x2

by mort96

4/26/2026 at 10:02:43 AM

I'm not sure I've ever seen that on a product description. But at any rate, USB IF doesn't have any ability to enforce branding guidelines unless the product uses the official USB logo.

by Gigachad

4/25/2026 at 7:54:03 PM

In my experience, its just best to stick with Thunderbolt when you want to make sure you are getting the best speed for external devices that require it (external SSD's, Graphics Cards, Network adapters)

Much easier and reliable than navigating the confusing sea of USB standards

by robotnikman

4/26/2026 at 12:45:22 AM

While I generally agree, there are still corner cases:

As I mentioned above, a Thunderbolt port can end up with less dedicated bandwidth than a 10 Gbps USB port due to PCIe lane configuration.

Thunderbolt 3 only provides 22 Gbps PCIe bandwidth even if only a single device is connected.

Apple's TB2-to-TB3 adapter will connect any TB2 device to any TB3 host, and any TB3 (not USB) device to any TB2 host unless it's bus powered, in which case you need to daisy-chain a second TB3 device with two ports to supply power.

While Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 PCIe are largely interchangeable, and while Thunderbolt 4 devices are backwards-compatible with Thunderbolt 3 hosts, USB 4 PCIe devices are not required to support Thunderbolt 3 hosts.

by jasomill

4/25/2026 at 5:05:40 PM

In all this, people now just go to the Apple Store and buy a cable for their Apple device. This confusion benefitted such vendors and now they sell 1$ cable for an absurd amount of profit.

by compounding_it

4/25/2026 at 6:23:54 PM

I will say, casual users don't really care. Pretty much any combination of a wall plug and a cable will charge a phone at acceptable speeds, and that's all 99% of people need.

by post-it

4/25/2026 at 12:57:20 PM

I predict in future when our civilization will advance to higher level, this phenomenon will happen with english words and jargons. e.g. here are versioned and namespaced words. topology.bio.23, topology.math.45 etc.

Welcome to the brave new world we will enter in far future.

by renticulous

4/25/2026 at 10:21:59 AM

[flagged]

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 10:34:00 AM

It means that if I pick up a random USB cable and plug it into a USB port I have no idea how well it will work or even if it will work at all. It's like the U in USB stands for Unpredictable.

by zoward

4/25/2026 at 11:55:47 AM

Now I only buy USB cables if they are marked with their speed and wattage. If it’s not marked, I have to assume it carries little power and is glacially slow, which is fine to charge some Bluetooth headphones but is not usable to connect an SSD.

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_log...

by massysett

4/25/2026 at 2:14:53 PM

Get a certified cable if it matters to you. If you pick a random cable out of the cable box it’s probably a 2.0 charging only cable that hasn’t been certified by USB IF.

Ultimately the majority of people only use usb cables for charging or 2.0 speeds for their keyboard or mic so this isn’t a problem. And for those who it is a problem, they know which one their high speed cable is.

by Gigachad

4/25/2026 at 11:04:24 AM

You'll notice a difference between USB 3.1 and 3.2 2x2?

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 1:09:12 PM

I use cables that look exactly the same to hook up sound boards, SSD’s, HDD’s, remote KVM switchers, phones, computers, tablets, peripherals of every shape, size, and demand. One livestream station (we have multiple) has literally 10-15 of these cables hooked up and the demands vary across devices. It is incredibly important that I know what I am using and what it is hooked up to. I can’t have random things flashing off and on or under-powered when I’m running live streams at work. I can’t be constantly swapping cables because data transfers are suddenly 1/10th what I expected.

This is not some minor inconvenience. It is a serious problem that creates completely avoidable hurdles. We have to label everything so meticulously and anytime somebody asks to borrow/use any usb-c cables from my department, we have to be incredibly particular about what we hand off.

HDMI? Whatever grab it from the drawer. USB-C? I need to assemble a committee and find out your use case, as well as when we’ll get it back. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

The only consistent solution is to massively over spec and spend 10x on cables you don’t need.

by Forgeties79

4/25/2026 at 11:55:46 AM

All I know is that I pick up some cables they work for some things and then I try to use them for other things and they don't work.

Isn't the whole point of the USB standard to make it so you don't have to be a super nerd to plug stuff together? People just want to transfer data from their phone or camera to a laptop without navigating spec sheets.

by ddtaylor

4/25/2026 at 5:35:22 PM

But that's not really true is it? Things will work just fine, albeit slower. There's just a few devices that won't.

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 11:16:23 AM

Would you recognize the difference between usb 3.2 and usb 2.0? Cables also play into the standard and the reality of our modern lives is that we all accumulate random cables as a matter of course of life. Sometimes things get mixed up and if you didn’t label the cable in some way when you acquired it, there is no way to easily test it without a lot of hassle and headache.

by yurishimo

4/25/2026 at 11:05:55 AM

This article we are discussing this about gives a great example of why understanding the difference matters a lot when purchasing hardware.

by hnlmorg

4/25/2026 at 10:26:31 AM

A sense of perfect knowledge of the things around you, and not feeling like someone is trying to take advantage of you any time you go shopping.

by xattt

4/25/2026 at 10:25:54 AM

Well it means I have no idea what TFA is talking about when it mentions USB versions, for one.

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 11:05:17 AM

[flagged]

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 11:34:05 AM

For me, it makes a difference much later on after buying some computer. I see a usb/c port and think I can plug anything into it that fits and it just works.

When it doesn't, it will take hours/days to figure out why and if it comes down to a cable incompatibility, I would have already made the mistake of not knowing what I was buying.

by wallst07

4/25/2026 at 11:12:34 AM

Why do you ask?

by mort96

4/25/2026 at 8:37:06 PM

Because this is an article about network adapters where someone again rants over USB markings which won't make a difference on the tested adapters if you exchange them.

It's just ranting for ranting sake, not even related to topic at hand.

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 5:41:20 PM

For those that read the article and are still confused (as I was) about what Apple hardware would give you the full 10GbE speeds:

- 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo).

- No Apple hardware supports the 3.2 v2x2 standard (20Gbps) and your connection will be downgraded to 10Gbps on these RTL8159 chips. Because of processing overhead, you will only get 5-7Gbps of total Ethernet throughput.

- Upgraded Mac Mini or Apple Studio base models have builtin 10GbE ports

For now, thunderbolt adapters are still the most reliable 10GbE for Apple laptops.

by aggregator-ios

4/25/2026 at 6:17:39 PM

> 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter is still the best. Full symmetrical 10GbE on laptops as far back as the 2018 MacBook Pro 13" (Intel) and every laptop since. Including the Airs starting with the M1 chip (Not sure about Neo).

The neo doesn't have thunderbolt at all so no, that won't fly.

by wolvoleo

4/25/2026 at 7:13:43 PM

Luckily I suspect the intersect on the Venn diagram isn’t huge for Neo buyers, and those wanting / needing 10gigE

by bdavbdav

4/25/2026 at 7:57:19 PM

Yup.

by aggregator-ios

4/25/2026 at 8:22:49 PM

Thinking about it, it would be pretty magical. Neo with 10GbE to fast storage and CPU and GPU: Thin client that's pretty damn thick for how thin it is.

by AnthonBerg

4/25/2026 at 6:26:27 PM

Thank you, I was suspecting the same but was not sure.

by aggregator-ios

4/25/2026 at 7:09:17 AM

A Framework expansion card was also announced this week. https://frame.work/nl/en/products/wisdpi-10g-ethernet-expans...

by GeertJohan

4/25/2026 at 7:18:16 AM

That link notes:

"Card supports 10Gbit/s and 10/100/1000/2500/5000/10000Mbit/s Ethernet"

Nice to see; some NICs are shedding 10/100 support. Apparently, it's not necessary to do this, even in a low cost device.

by topspin

4/25/2026 at 7:29:15 AM

Low-cost devices are exactly where 10/100 is still widely used. On PCs, it's a common power-saving mode.

by userbinator

4/25/2026 at 9:10:52 AM

For those of us who don’t know, how does it save power vs a 1gbe running at low throughput?

by hsbauauvhabzb

4/25/2026 at 11:16:26 AM

> how does [100BASE-TX] save power vs [1000BASE-T] running at low throughput?

100BASE-TX uses just two pairs (lanes), one for sending and one for receiving. 1000BASE-T uses all four pairs, for both sending and receiving. Therefore, a 100BASE-TX interface that's only receiving needs to power up one pair. A 1000BASE-T interface needs to power all four pairs all the time.

I recall reading about some extensions that allow switching off some of the pairs some of the time ("Green Ethernet"), but I think that they require support on both sides of the link, and I'm not sure if they are widely deployed.

by jech

4/26/2026 at 3:40:33 AM

100M also needs much less signal processing, and at lower speed, than 1G.

10M is even simpler, to the point that even a fast MCU can bit-bang it.

by userbinator

4/26/2026 at 12:37:11 PM

My only annoyance with "Green Ethernet" things is that often they seem to work poorly.

The dedicated machine I still keep around for Windows things has two onboard 2.5GbE ports. It will apparently sometimes, even with all power saving features turned off, randomly negotiate down to 100 mbit if I leave the machine alone for a bit, and then stay at that speed forever unless I manually reset the link after wondering why transferring large amounts of data is bottlenecking severely.

by rincebrain

4/25/2026 at 9:37:40 AM

I assume it is for wake-on-LAN. This of course requires the NIC being powered on while the system is sleeping. Lower bandwidth mode = less power draw.

by adastra22

4/25/2026 at 8:50:50 AM

TVs too.

by lostlogin

4/25/2026 at 1:16:20 PM

And PoE security cams.

by geerlingguy

4/25/2026 at 9:11:40 AM

100 mode saved me once when I really really really needed to have a connection in that moment, but the ethernet cable glued to the wall that I was using had only three out of eight wires even functioning.

by Tade0

4/25/2026 at 10:36:24 AM

Don’t we need at least four for 100 Mbps?

by winter_blue

4/25/2026 at 12:49:11 PM

According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end.

The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment.

The connection was overall unreliable, so I guess it must have been four, just not all of the time.

by Tade0

4/25/2026 at 2:13:14 PM

According to the technician I spoke with, he could only detect three on their end. The cable was chewed through by cats, so perhaps it was three just in that moment.

Ah, the old Cat-3 cable. Been there.

by reaperducer

4/25/2026 at 12:56:39 PM

There is two wire ethernet that supports 100. It isn't common, but automotive is starting to use it.

by bluGill

4/25/2026 at 1:52:21 PM

3 pairs probably. But then again you only need 2.

by gsich

4/25/2026 at 10:09:11 AM

Lots of industrial sensors and devices only do 4 wire 100BASE-TX so if there's no fallback to that it would be a paperweight in those situations.

by moffkalast

4/25/2026 at 2:14:36 PM

I also appreciate the 10/100 support. I recently needed it for some old voip equipment, and it was shockingly difficult to find an SFP+ module that worked in my 10G switch and supported 100mbps.

by jcalvinowens

4/25/2026 at 10:55:17 AM

100 is needed for embedded stuff, it'd render a lot of devices unusable (wiznet chips are popular and are 100 only). That'd suck.

by junon

4/25/2026 at 2:16:07 PM

IKEA smart home hub is also 100mbit.

by Gigachad

4/25/2026 at 1:49:17 PM

Low cost? The link mentions no price, only a "notify me" button as far as I can see. Does it show a(n estimated) price point for you somewhere?

by lucb1e

4/25/2026 at 1:58:22 PM

Low cost, as in not data center/server grade hardware.

by topspin

4/25/2026 at 11:20:05 AM

There are plenty of embedded chips which only provide RMII. No RGMII or alternatives.

by rleigh

4/25/2026 at 9:51:13 AM

-

by t312227

4/25/2026 at 10:08:00 AM

That hasn't been true on switched networks in probably 20 years or so.

by the_mitsuhiko

4/25/2026 at 10:32:41 AM

Isn’t that only relevant for network topologies that rely heavily on broadcasting to multiple nodes. Eg token ring, WiFi and powerline adapters?

For regular Ethernet, the switch will have a table of which IPs are on which NIC and thus can dynamically send packets at the right transmission protocols supported by those NICs without degrading the service of other NICs.

by hnlmorg

4/25/2026 at 10:41:33 AM

I’ve seen some vlans hit 1mbit BUM filters, I think we had about 800 users on that one. To saturate a 10m link would require a help of a lot of broadcast traffic.

100m is fine. 10m is fine but I can’t think of anything that negotiates 10m other than maybe WOL (I don’t use it enough to be sure from memory).

If I didn ahve something esoteric it would be on a specialised vlan anyway.

by hdgvhicv

4/26/2026 at 4:44:12 AM

10m is extended reach copper, you can do about triple the range of 100m with approximately the same transceiver analog prowess.

by namibj

4/25/2026 at 10:28:12 AM

We have switches now, hubs just don't exist anymore. Switches are not affected by some devices having a lower speed.

by vardump

4/25/2026 at 10:02:27 AM

Is that really true? If so, is there a saner way to handle this than upgrade all the things to 10GBE? Like a POE ethernet condom that interfaces with both network and devices at native max speeds without the core network having to degrade?

by oliwarner

4/25/2026 at 10:17:39 AM

> Is that really true?

It's not, cf. sibling posts. The GP probably learned networking in the 80ies~90ies when it was true, but those times are long gone.

(unless you're talking wifi.)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 10:04:57 AM

That is complete nonsense and not how switched networks work.

by HHad3

4/25/2026 at 8:20:49 PM

The author only got 7Gbps with a Framework 13 and a 10G adapter from the same brand (WisdPi).

If this is the same adapter in a different housing, will it also be limited to 7Gbps?

by retired

4/25/2026 at 10:25:25 PM

I'm guessing different mainboards could offer better USB port support for Gen 2 2x2, but right now the Ryzen AI 13" chips at least top out at USB4 / 3.2 Gen 2x1

by geerlingguy

4/25/2026 at 12:23:16 PM

A Framework SFP+ or SFP28 expansion would be sweet.

by sschueller

4/25/2026 at 11:01:14 AM

Are there any that actually have a SFP+ port? That's all I want. No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7, and you can just change it up to a $7 multimode when you need longer runs.

by realxrobau

4/25/2026 at 2:55:04 PM

> No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7,

You don't need Cat7 for 10G.

Cat6 is spec compliant up to 55mm. Cat6a to 100m, which is the same as Cat7.

If you're doing short runs like to a nearby switch, good Cat5e works fine in practice. I've run 10G over Cat5e through the walls for medium runs without errors because it's all I had. It works in many cases, but you're out of spec.

I use DAC where I can, but most people just want something they can plug into that RJ45 port in their wall that goes to the room down the hall where they put their switch.

There are several SFP+ to Thunderbolt/USB4 adapters on the market. Not cheap, though.

by Aurornis

4/25/2026 at 1:54:29 PM

Yep, 10gb over copper is not power efficient so any savings you get from getting a cheap 10gb switch will just go to your power bill. Most cost effective and flexible is a used 25gb switch. Most 25gb switches can do 1/10/25gb. 10gb networking has been dead for over 10 years.

by sixdonuts

4/25/2026 at 3:17:04 PM

Interesting observation about power use. How close do you think we are to it being practical to wire your whole home with fiber instead of CAT6 or whatever? If you're providing all your own equipment, are willing to purchase a high-end splicer for maintenance, etc.

For laptops I assume you need USB/Thunderbolt adapters. (Still no SFP+ or SFP28 module for Framework?)

For desktops you'd use an SFP28 card (taking up a PCIe slot).

For devices like Raspberry Pi's, etc. you'd use... local RJ45 switches with optical uplink ports?

by rkagerer

4/25/2026 at 7:36:25 PM

You can just do a mix.

Most of my devices only need 1G or even 100Mbps. No reason to switch to fiber. 1G/2.5G copper ports don’t use that much power.

For 10G+ things, it’s fiber or DAC first if possible then RJ45 if it’s the only option.

Then my backhaul between rooms is just single mode fiber, good up to 800G. Plug in a small switch at the end and you go back to RJ45 and PoE.

I only have 10G though (to transfer large files/RAWs between my computer and my storage). Something faster would be nice because NVMe SSDs can go 50G+ but that equipment is pricey and power hungry.

by harrall

4/26/2026 at 5:44:17 AM

If you need 1G or 10GB over copper you can just use a SFP or SFP+ media converter in a 25GB SFP28 switch port. If you have a POE requirement, say for video cameras you either use a dedicated 1GB POE switch or power injector. A 10GBASE-T (RJ-45 copper) switch consumes 3-12 watts per port and a 24 port switch will idle at 50 to 60 watts and run hot. SFP+ and SFP28 ports use under 1 watt per port. I would never recommend a 10GBASE-T copper switch for any use case in this day and age, home or enterprise.

by sixdonuts

4/25/2026 at 3:41:27 PM

Wiring ports for humans to use in a flexible and future proof manner (as in a single family home, for instance) gains a lot of utility with PoE.

The convenience and flexibility of PoE would always push me towards copper wiring.

by rsync

4/25/2026 at 4:29:50 PM

>10gb networking has been dead for over 10 years.

Not even close to being true, unless you specifically mean 10Gbps over twisted pair (Cat6/7) cable. SFP+ is the default on a ton of network gear still.

by throwawaypath

4/25/2026 at 8:39:08 PM

I think the point he is making is that the industry first went with a 10g single link, and then 40g over 4 links. Then they figured out how to do 25g over a single link, and 100g over 4 links. Those 25g/100g are common for enterprise switches. It might be fairer to say 40g is dead, 10g still has use cases.

Edit to add: If you want an example, these are the NVidia ConnectX nics available from FS.com, the lowest end one is 25g, then 100g, 200g etc.

https://www.fs.com/uk/c/nvidia-ethernet-nics-4014

by jburgess777

4/26/2026 at 4:58:16 AM

What they mean is that the cost per bit both capex and opex/power is worse for 10G than 25G for a while now as long as you talk about new hardware.

We're at the point where 25GBaud PAM4 is being replaced by 50GBaud PAM4. That's 50 to 100 Gbit/s.

But iirc the use of PAM4 for the faster ones than "only" 25Gbit/s lanes is a hindrance to managing bottom-barrel price-per-bit. PCIe 3 was 8, PCIe4 was 16, and PCIe 5 is 32 GBaud with a line code basically like the 10+ Gbit/s Ethernet links (well, it's 66b/64b for Eth and 130b/128b for PCIe).

by namibj

4/25/2026 at 11:18:26 AM

10G DACs are no cheaper than cat6, which is perfectly fine for 10G at most practical distances. Considering the target audience of these cards it seems pretty obvious to me that letting users "just buy a cat 6 cable" is miles more reasonable than having them buy a transceiver or DAC.

As for allowing to switch to fiber, that just seems orthogonal again to what these USB NICs are for, not to mention the SFP+ itself is probably more expensive than the NIC shown here...

by Galanwe

4/25/2026 at 11:57:43 AM

DACs are very cheap (second hand and AliExpress) and they never use much W. If both machines are near each other though (which a DAC cable implies) and both run Linux and both support Thunderbolt, you might be better off with a direct ethernet over TB connection. Whether macOS supports such, I don't know.

The other side will then also need a low power NIC (of which fiber and DAC over SFP+ are less power hungry). What this article doesn't mention, is that there are also a lot of PCIe NICs on the market which aren't power hungry (RTL8127), as well as RTL8261C for switches/routers.

I've seen low power RTL NICs with SFP+ on it, too (example: [1]). With SFP+, you'll have a lot more versatility. DAC and SFP+ fiber are very cheap, btw. Especially second hand they go for virtually nothing. I have 10 SFP+ fiber lying around here doing nothing which I got for a few EUR each.

For me as European with high energy prices and solar energy gotten the beat next year (in NL), this is all very interesting.

There's a couple of good reasons why to opt for fiber in the home. You keep the energy between the different groups separated which can help. I also find fiber very easy to get through walls, allowing me to have multiple fiber connections through walls (currently I use 1x fiber + 1x ethernet for PoE possibilities from fusebox).

With all above being said, AQC100S is low power and does not get very hot. You can get these with SFP+ and PCIe/TB. They've been available for a while.

[1] https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005011733192115.html (no vouching for, just first hit on search)

by Fnoord

4/25/2026 at 5:31:46 PM

I just wish someone would come out with a PCIE 4x1 capable card with SFP - my main desktop’s non-GPU expansion slots are all 4x1 electrically and even the one you linked is a 3x2. As far as I can tell the only 4x1 cards available are RTL8127 or AQC113 RJ45 ones :(

I suppose an NVME riser is also an option, albeit janky.

by ZekeSulastin

4/25/2026 at 9:06:23 PM

There are RTL8127 cards with SFP+, e.g. https://www.lekuo.com/product_view.php?id=659

edit: on looking closer, that still seems to be an x4 card.

by jburgess777

4/26/2026 at 5:00:59 AM

Says electrically 3x2.

by namibj

4/26/2026 at 6:15:24 PM

Right, but I don’t think a x2 slot exists so hence being physically a x4 card. If you had an open ended x1 slot you might be able to run as PCIe v4 x1.

by jburgess777

4/25/2026 at 4:22:28 PM

I can also buy a roll of CAT6 and a few dozen dollars in tools and RJ-45 connectors and make my own custom length cables.

by wpm

4/25/2026 at 6:55:33 PM

Also SFPs are always a gamble. Might work, might not, you have multiple options, meanwhile with copper RJ-45 you are guaranteed that a link will be established.

by gsich

4/25/2026 at 3:10:08 PM

> No one wants to use 10g ethernet when DACs are cheaper than cat7,

Ethernet is media independent. Yes, yes, it was first classified for thick net, but ethernet over twisted pair (rj45 typically) is still ethernet despite the lack of vampire taps. You can run ethernet on thick or thin coax, twisted pair, dac, fiber, or even over the ether so to speak.

That said, 10g over rj45 is pretty handy when you have existing wire in walls. In my experience, it runs fine on the cat5 (not even cat5e) that's already there. Maybe it won't work on all my runs, especially if I tried all at once, but so far, I'm two for two.

The spec is for ~ 100m in dense conduit; real world runs in homes are typically shorter and with less dense cabling... and cabling often exceeds the spec it's marked for, so there's wiggle room.

by toast0

4/25/2026 at 4:17:47 PM

I have a fairly large house (2 story 3k sqft) with all cat5e. I iperf’d every run and they could all do 10gb negotiation and TCP, most of the runs could sustain very high UDP rates with low packet loss. There’s just one run (which is the one to the internet) which had a slightly higher UDP packet loss rate. So basically every run can do 10gb fine. Been running the whole network like this for a year. It’s been great! I just need a 10 gig capable NAS. My current one can only do 3.5 or so because it’s a usb 5gb/s which isn’t really 5 gb.

by lukevp

4/25/2026 at 1:11:06 PM

Modern transceivers can do 10G on absolutely garbage twisted pair. My house was wired with absolutely dire cat5 cabling. Zero shielding and barely any copper in the pairs. I thought I'd barely be able to do 1G on them, but modern transceivers (amazon) easily do 10G over like 30M of that sort of cables.

In fact I had more trouble getting quality fiber working for that sort of distance than El Cheapo cat5. They do heat up a bit, but they work wonder.

by buserror

4/25/2026 at 1:49:08 PM

Zero shielding may actually help. Shielding acts as an antenna when not properly grounded and continuous, which is more common than not.

by OneOffAsk

4/26/2026 at 4:34:14 PM

Having recently terminated a nice name brand Cat6A jack (ICC brand), I’m quite unimpressed by the state of category cable shielding:

The termination comes with basically no instructions.

The connector shell contacts the shield by squishing it between the shell and the cable jacket. With a zip tie, helpfully supplied with the connector. Good luck applying much (any) compression force. Never mind that CAT6A cable jackets come in various sizes, are not manufactured to tight tolerances (why would they be?), and are quite squishy.

Compare to a high quality F connector, which is highly engineered, less expensive than a decent Cat6A jack, and makes excellent contact to the cable shield without much fiddling.

The switch that connects to it has no grounding terminal of any sort. It uses an external isolated power supply. Admittedly, the ground connection on a switch is probably doing very little at frequencies of hundreds of MHzz

by amluto

4/25/2026 at 3:17:02 PM

The big bulky black box this little adapter replaces in Jeff's uses is actually just a PCIe/OCP card in an enclosure and you can replace that with a 10g card with SFP.

by undersuit

4/25/2026 at 3:43:31 PM

I’ve been using the qnap sfp+ thunderbolt one (I think it’s a marvel/aqantia chip) for a few years now everyday with my MacBook and it’s been solid

by radicality

4/25/2026 at 4:30:50 PM

I would rather use Ethernet where possible. I used SFP28 for a while, but this meant an extra networking card was needed in each PC. Ethernet is universal, and now that bandwidths are catching up, I no longer see SFP as necessary in a typical home or small office network.

by drnick1

4/25/2026 at 6:39:50 PM

I think you are mixing it quite a bit. SFP+ is still Ethernet, also SFP28 gives you speed (25Gbps) RJ45 will never do, so the extra card for the extra speed is mandatory.

by AdrianB1

4/25/2026 at 12:08:26 PM

10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite expensive. It's not sufficient bandwidth for getting good performance out of most SSDs, yet it's really excessive for any hard drives (except for RAID10 setups I guess). For SSDs you want thunderbolt (or 40+ GbE) connection for best latency and performance, and for hard drives 2.5Gbit/sec is more than enough. As I said, I might be misunderstanding something, but 10 GbE sits between the two sensible options for me.

by nasretdinov

4/25/2026 at 12:20:24 PM

10gbe is a sweet spot at least for my homelab stuff. It's easy to find old enterprise gear for, cheap, and fast enough for everything I want to do.

by razighter777

4/25/2026 at 12:24:38 PM

Exactly. Enough supports 10gbe that you might as well grab it; a few Mikrotik switches, some old enterprise gear, and an adapter gets you some good speeds.

Sure some of it might have been fine at 2.5 or 5 but those are relatively new and less commonly available.

by bombcar

4/25/2026 at 12:41:16 PM

I'm actually surprised at the amount of 2.5/5 gear I've been coming across lately, especially in the 2.5 space as more ISPs are pushing for gigabit+ to the house.

Verizon's been issuing a wireless router with 10G WAN and several 2.5G ports and MoCA support that includes a 2.5G adapter and they use that across all their current connection types. I was delighted to see that when I got the router a couple years ago.

by kotaKat

4/25/2026 at 3:49:56 PM

2.5 crossed some threshold and replaced 1gb I feel - which is nice. It’s a great “normal speed” vs 10g/40g for backbone and NAS.

by bombcar

4/25/2026 at 4:03:44 PM

10GbE can be extremely cheap now if you're doing things like buying Intel NICs off eBay to put into your own test/dev headless servers.

There is also a glut of 40 Gbps stuff on the market because it's a dead end technology and most ISPs went straight to 100 for things like aggregation switch to router links. Not that I would encourage anyone to go whole hog on 40 Gbps just because, but if you can get a transceiver for $15, NICs for $30, and maybe you get a switch for free from electronics recycling or for 80 bucks, and can tolerate its noise and heat output...

I have seen plenty of people throw decommissioned 40 Gbps stuff straight into electronics recycling bins.

Mellanox ConnectX-3 40 Gbps QSFP NICs are literally 20 bucks on ebay.

by walrus01

4/25/2026 at 12:40:53 PM

10 Gb is cheap! Mikrotik has a 4x10Gb + 1x1Gb port switch for $150 USD and an 8x10Gb version for about $275. I have the 8 port version.

SFP+'s and fiber are cheap, like maybe 50 bucks for the SFP+ set and fiber. 10Gb PCIe cards are maybe ~$50 new on Amazon with Intel chips and cheaper on eBay - I bought used 10 Gb Mellanox cards for $25 each - "they just work" under FreeBSD and Linux.

Copper 10 Gb used to consume waaaaay more power (like 5+W per port!) and cost more both in terms of the SFP and cable. In reality fiber is more environmentally friendly as there is no copper, less energy used, and less plastic per meter. So my setup mostly consists of SR and BR optics and DAC's. The "DAC" direct attach cables are handy for switch-switch or short switch<->NIC runs. And I will continue to run fiber for the foreseeable future and actively avoid copper.

by MisterTea

4/25/2026 at 2:01:49 PM

10 Gb is cheap! … $150 … $275.

San Francisco checking in.

by reaperducer

4/25/2026 at 6:20:54 PM

It's not that much considering people pay $100+ for cable/internet and/or >=$(15 * n) streaming services PER month. Some people might want faster transfer speeds or low latency. For the price of two or three months of internet and streaming/cable you get a very fast LAN if you so desire. If you don't need it then don't spend the money.

by MisterTea

4/25/2026 at 2:16:04 PM

A single eero or Ubiquiti AP will be $150-300 depending on the exact capabilities, so if you're pricing out how to network your house I'd say the switch looks pretty good b

by Analemma_

4/26/2026 at 4:37:42 PM

The UniFi U7 Lite is $99 and appears to be every bit as good as the more expensive gear unless you want 6GHz or need extra radios or have clients with more than two spatial streams.

by amluto

4/25/2026 at 2:12:26 PM

10 years ago, you spent $40 for a few port unmanaged gigabit switch and $80-100 for the bottom tier web-managed crap.

That corresponds to $50 and $105-130 in today's money.

Now you can get it 10 times faster with an OK management layer for $150. This is after a -long- time of 10gbps prices stagnating.

10gbps is unexpectedly cheap.

by mlyle

4/25/2026 at 8:53:08 PM

minor nitpick: I wouldn't call it stagnating. They were artificially inflated.

as an aside: for pricing, 20 years ago unmanaged 1G-BaseT ethernet switches were $20/port. That's the region 10G-BaseT switches occupy right now if they use realtek chips. And multiple sources confirm the realtek switch can do full line rate on all ports simultaneiously with a normal 1500 MTU

by butvacuum

4/25/2026 at 2:07:30 PM

Considering what you get and the historic prices of 10GbE those are absolute steals.

How much would they need to cost before you'd consider it cheap? If you want CHEAP then 10GbE is not for you in 2026.

by kiddico

4/25/2026 at 2:10:19 PM

Keep in mind that $275 today is the same as $140 in January 2000. Tech gadgets used to be far more expensive, both in real terms and as a percentage of average income.

by sbierwagen

4/25/2026 at 1:41:08 PM

I redid the backbone of my home in 10Gb fiber, and "cheap" is not the term I would use. Especially when you can get perfectly cromulent 1GbE switches for like $10 these days.

The Mikrotik switches [1] work technically speaking but they are quite difficult to configure. You have to pull them from your network, connect physically to a specific port, force your machine onto a specific IP, connect to a specific IP. I could not get this to work in macOS nor Ubuntu despite hours of futzing with it. They both kept infuriatingly overriding my changes to the IP. I was only able to get this to work on an old Windows 10 laptop.

Once you do get their web UI up, you pray the password on the sticker on the bottom works. Neither of mine did and I had to firmware reset both and find the default password online. The web UI itself holds no hands. It's straight out of 1995, largely unstyled HTML. While using both of my devices the backend the UI talked to would crash and log me out about every five minutes. Not every five minutes after log in. Every 5 minutes wall time!

The Mikrotik switches are also fanless, and 10GbE SFP+ adapters throw off a lot of heat. If you use more than one they overheat. You can just about get away with two if you put them on opposite sides but I would not recommend it.

I've also had very mixed luck with SFP+ module compatibility with this thing. I had a number of modules that refused to run at higher than one GB, hence my fighting to get into the UI. Despite a ton of futzing between logouts I was not able to get them to work at 10Gb and returned them.

I'll be honest, my Mikrotik switches have been infuriating. I replaced one of them with a Ubiquiti Pro XG 8 8-Port 10G and holy crap the difference is night and day. It just works. Everything worked straight from the box day one, I can configure it from my phone or the web, I highly recommend this thing.

The Ubiquiti switches are multiple times more expensive but if you value your time they're well worth the price. I still have two of the Mikrotik switches on my network but am completely intent on replacing them. The Ubiquiti is worth it for online configuration alone. No need to pull the thing from your network, test your changes immediately!

1. https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in

2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe

by donatj

4/25/2026 at 10:04:04 PM

Hah. I used a dremel tool, some radiators, and a bit of thermal glue to make my Mikrotik switch work reliably: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...

It's been like this for the last 3 years. And amazingly, I still can't find a 10G switch that is just as compact.

by cyberax

4/26/2026 at 12:40:09 AM

This is the kind of quality I want and expect from a website called Hacker News.

It's way more fun to see a real solution for a problem than it is to see someone complain that the cheapest available product is lacking in finesse.

Good stuff. Are you using RouterOS or SwOS on that little guy?

---

Related, here's a moneyshot of my Mikrotik Hex S that I've got in a portable rack: https://i.postimg.cc/cCJhfkv1/image.png

That very cheap gigabit copper SFP was running hotter than I'd like -- it probably would have been fine, but this rig is meant to run outside while camping off-grid in the sun in central Florida. So I put some heatsinks from my 3D printing stash on there and so far they've stayed put.

In this system, the Hex S is running OpenWRT and is configured as a PoE-powered managed switch. In that role, it switches packets and does VLAN stuff fine, and is probably a bit of overkill.

But it's also one of several layers of manual redundancy, which is important in that environment: One does not simply go to the store and buy special electronics in central Florida. So it isn't included in the travel kit, then it doesn't exist.

With one shell script, it stops being just-a-switch and becomes a router with all the usual services, plus SQM tricks and multiple WAN ports. The rig works well.

by ssl-3

4/26/2026 at 3:29:15 AM

RouterOS, although I'm only using the switch-related functionality.

I found that the temperature of the 10G modules has almost no relation to their cost. So far, the least hot modules are 10G Tek ones that are also the cheapest. Mirkotik's 10G modules are more expensive, and they are also hotter.

by cyberax

4/25/2026 at 4:52:49 PM

I use mikrotik equipment extensively (as in hundreds/ thousands of them over the years), while I disagree with a lot of of this, the post is absolutely correct about the ridiculous password on a sticker requirements they introduced a few years ago. The pw text is incredibly small and the way it’s printed (dpi and font) makes it very difficult to differentiate certain characters. Also the way you initially connect to them when they’re new out of the box to then enter this obnoxious password has several issues/challenges. It used to be so easy and convenient to configure brand new mikrotik devices in the past, and now it’s become a task I dread and has even caused us to buy non- mikrotik gear in several cases.

by bobbob1921

4/25/2026 at 9:39:24 PM

I don't configure anything on the mikrotik. Out of the box it's a dumb switch and that is all I want.

> The Mikrotik switches are also fanless, and 10GbE SFP+ adapters throw off a lot of heat.

If you are talking about copper SFP's, then that's the problem: copper. It takes a lot of energy to drive a wire at GHz speeds, not so much with an optical link (though it's getting much better.) I have only ever felt luke warm optical and DAC SFP's. Copper 10 Gb SFP's are burning hot. I avoid using copper and run fiber.

by MisterTea

4/25/2026 at 6:01:58 PM

I got an 8 port SFP+ managed switch from AliExpress for $100!

by chaz6

4/25/2026 at 2:00:27 PM

Does microtik have any competition?

by amelius

4/25/2026 at 4:56:23 PM

in the lower end space kind of, however in many respects no they don’t. Ubiquity would be their main competition, but ubiquity equipment is cloud first whereas a strong point of mikrotik has been that you do not need a centralized cloud controller (ie local first). Also in terms of the vast capabilities of mikrotik equipment at its price point, no there is absolutely no real competitor. (Maybe PFsense is the closest competitor with strong feature set)

by bobbob1921

4/25/2026 at 6:42:06 PM

Ubiquiti, Juniper, Firewalla or Alta Labs?

by emb-dev

4/25/2026 at 1:15:35 PM

I have a zfs x 3 disk hard drive mirror and 10GbE.

For writes yes 10GbE overkill but for for reads it's faster than 2.5GbE would be.

Sure there is 5GbE but most switches that support 5GbE support 10GbE.

by CTDOCodebases

4/25/2026 at 6:49:30 PM

10 GbE has a good performance/$ ratio, better than 25 GbE, and it is 10 times faster than the basic (for today) 1 Gbps. If you need more go for 25, but the availability of cheap cards, switches and cabling (DACs, AOCs, transceivers) is lower than for 10 GbE. For me, 10 GbE is the baseline for the year 2025 at home.

by AdrianB1

4/25/2026 at 1:04:04 PM

I chose 10GbE to fit 20 HDDs in RAID 10.

~ 1 GB/sec seems about right for a long time. I can't imagine the basic files I work with everyday getting much more storage-dense than they are in 2026.

by randusername

4/25/2026 at 5:09:44 PM

I remember my friend Peter, in 1999, on campus networking with 100 Mbit internet saying: I think this will be enough for many years to come. And he was kinda right — 100 Mbit is still "almost good enough" 27 years later for internet access.

by flemhans

4/25/2026 at 10:54:52 PM

AI model files can be rather large...

by cyberax

4/25/2026 at 12:11:26 PM

Are you gonna run thunderbolt more than a few meters? If you think 10 is expensive, check prices above 10. You may even need fiber for that.

by whatevaa

4/25/2026 at 1:23:15 PM

Making a long distance complex network may be expensive, but to connect directly a few computers one can use 25 Gb/s Ethernet at a reasonable price.

Last time when I checked, dual-port 25 Gb/s NICs were not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs.

If you have a few computers with no more than a few meters distance between them, you can put a dual-port 25 Gb/s card in each and connect them directly with direct attach copper cables, in a daisy chain or in a ring, without an expensive switch.

by adrian_b

4/25/2026 at 12:14:30 PM

No, of course I'm not going to if I choose thunderbolt :). But in many cases it's fine because SSDs aren't nearly as noisy as HDDs, so the NAS can just sit under your desk.

For 40+ GbE or fibre I agree they are expensive, but at least you get full performance out of your system. SSDs aren't cheap these days either...

by nasretdinov

4/25/2026 at 8:57:44 PM

fiber vs DAC isn't really a cost concern st a home level. a 2m LC patch cable is $5 and used bidi cisco optics $5-10 each. not much more for new optics either.

by butvacuum

4/25/2026 at 7:30:42 AM

Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.

by deepsun

4/25/2026 at 7:42:34 AM

Theoretically yes, practically that hasn't been built yet. I've only seen it for 2.5Gbase-T, and only for 802.3bt Type 3 (51W).

If anyone's aware of something better, I'd be interested too :)

(Then again I wouldn't voluntarily use 5Gb-T or 10Gb-T anyway, and ≈50W is enough for most use cases.)

[ed.: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807960919319.html ("2.5GPD2CBT-20V" variant) - actually 2.5G not 1G as I wrote initially]

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 8:04:15 AM

Eh.

A lot of laptops won't accept less than 60w

My work laptop won't accept less than 90w (A modern HP, i7 155h with a random low end GPU)

At first everyone at the office just assumed that the USB C wasn't able to charge the pc

by Iulioh

4/25/2026 at 8:52:42 AM

I gotta say, I love my macbooks. Every Apple laptop I've owned that has USB-C ports will happily charge itself from a 5V/1.5A wall charger (albeit extremely slowly).

by javawizard

4/25/2026 at 8:59:00 AM

That hasn’t been my experience. I once tried to charge an M3 MBP via a lower powered wall plug. It was left off over night and the following morning the battery was still at 1%.

by hnlmorg

4/25/2026 at 9:24:48 AM

Note:

Some devices expect USB-A on the charger side instead of C

USB-A pump out 1A5V(5W) regardless of what's connected to it, then it negotiate higher power if available.

USB C-C does not give any power if the receiving device is not able to negotiate it

by Iulioh

4/25/2026 at 11:44:50 AM

My work has a little power strip with a usb-c and usb-a jack on it at every desk. I can charge my phone and iPad just fine with a USB-C cable into the USB-C port, but when I plugged my MacBook Air into it, it says “not charging.” Going into the system information tool I can see it’s only running at 10W. So apparently 10W is not enough to charge, but it’s still at least keeping the battery from draining.

A 20w charger will definitely charge the MacBook, just slowly.

by sgerenser

4/25/2026 at 10:37:33 AM

This was a decent USB plug from Anker. I regularly use it to charge things like iPhones and tablets. I knew it wouldn’t supply enough power to run the MBP but thought it should trickle charge the device over night. But it didn’t.

I can’t recall which cable I used though. The cable might have been garbage but I’m pretty sure I threw out all the older USB cables so they wouldn’t get mixed with more modern supporting cables.

by hnlmorg

4/25/2026 at 9:19:22 AM

What did it start at?

by saagarjha

4/25/2026 at 10:37:55 AM

1%

by hnlmorg

4/25/2026 at 9:25:53 AM

They probably require higher voltages but I havent seen one myself. I usually just charge y laptop with my phone charger, what is it, 18 watts? Don't care, charges my laptop and the phone that is plugged into it overnight. Why charge at faster speeds when there is no need to

Laptop charges fine regular 5V as well.

by tjoff

4/25/2026 at 10:58:31 AM

My Thinkpad T490 will happily take any power provided voltage is high enough (15V+).

by folmar

4/25/2026 at 9:23:21 AM

The issue might not be the wattage bit rather the minimum voltage. (Some?) Macs seems to charge at 15v already, most laptops need 20v

by _blk

4/25/2026 at 10:24:57 AM

Coincidentally, the USB-C spec is written such that wattage implies a minimum set of supported voltages:

* ≤15W charger: must have 5V

* ≤27W charger: must have 5V & 9V

* ≤45W charger: must have 5V & 9V & 15V

* (OT but worth noting: >60W: requires "chipped" cable.)

* ≤100W charger: must have 5V & 9V & 15V & 20V

(levels above this starting to become relevant for the new 240W stuff)

(36W/12V doesn't exist anymore in PD 3.0. There seems to be a pattern with 140W @ 28V now, and then 240W at 48V, I haven't checked what's actually in the specs now for those, vs. what's just "herd agreement".)

Some devices are built to only charge from 20V, which means you need to buy a 45.000001W (scnr) charger to be sure it'll charge. If I remember correctly, requiring a minimum wattage to charge is permitted by the standard, so if the device requires a 46W charger it can assume it'll get 15V. Not sure about what exactly the spec says there, though.

(Of course the chargers may support higher voltages at lower power, but that'd cost money to build so they pretty much don't.)

NB: the lower voltages are all mandatory to support for higher powered chargers to be spec compliant. Some that don't do that exist — they're not spec compliant.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 9:42:56 PM

It's a 3A supply up to the 100W one, that gets upped to 5A at higher voltages.

Varying voltage power supplies are usually capped by current, not power. That's because many of the components, set maximum current and voltage that you must obey independently.

At higher voltages people start accepting higher loses in stuff like cables, because fire-safety becomes a more important concern than efficiency. So the standard relaxes things a little bit.

by marcosdumay

4/26/2026 at 7:58:55 AM

You're correct but it's irrelevant. My point was that these requirements are in the standard and if you want to put the USB logo on a power brick you need to meet them. And the consumer is intended to be able to rely on them - which was & still is a pretty good idea considering the USB-C cable carnage.

I wish they did something like this for USB-C cables, but it's probably too late.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 10:34:44 AM

My laptop has

    $ upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT)
    [...]
        voltage-min-design:  11.58 V
And I can charge it via USB-C using a 22.5W powerbank @ 12V (HP EliteBook 845 G10.)

I guess that would be out of spec then?

edit: nvm I didn't see the qualifier 'minimum'

by sva_

4/25/2026 at 11:03:00 AM 

  voltage-min-design:  11.58 V
This has nothing to do with USB-C, this is the minimum design voltage of your lithium ion battery pack. In this case, you have a 4-cell pack, and if the cells drop below 2.895V that means they're physically f*cked and HP would like to sell you a new battery. (Sometimes that can be fixed by trickle charging, depending on how badly f*cked the battery is.)

If your laptop's USB-C circuitry were built for it, you could charge it from 5V. (Slowly, of course.) It's not even that much of a stretch given laptops are built with "NVDC"¹ power systems, and any charger input goes into a buck-boost voltage regulator anyway.

¹ google "NVDC power", e.g. https://www.monolithicpower.com/en/learning/resources/batter... (scroll down to it)

by eqvinox

4/26/2026 at 12:02:07 AM

Thanks for the write up, I didn't know that.

by _blk

4/25/2026 at 8:58:25 AM

A Mac mini at home used 4.64w averaged over the last 30 days. Even under load it just sips power.

by lostlogin

4/25/2026 at 10:38:53 AM

It can draw a lot more under load? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/103253

by sva_

4/25/2026 at 4:51:57 PM

I’m sure it can, but even that could be supplied by POE++ I think?

Mine under very rarely exceeds 10w.

by lostlogin

4/25/2026 at 8:28:50 AM

Great. So we got EU laws to mandate USB-C chargers and then get manufacturers that flaunt the spirit of the law by rejecting lower wattages.

by spockz

4/25/2026 at 9:07:35 AM

My laptop refuses to charge for 45W chargers as well, but I can almost understand it.

When plugged into 100W chargers while powered on, it takes ten minutes to gain a single percentage point. Idle in power save may let me charge the thing in a few hours. If I start playing video, the battery slowly drains.

If your laptop is part space heater, like most laptops with Nvidia GPUs in them seem to be, using a low power adapter like that is pretty useless.

Also, 100W chargers are what, 25 euros these days? An OEM charger costs about 120 so the USB-C plan still works out.

Other manufacturers do similar things. Apple accepts lower wattage chargers (because that's what they sell themselves) but they ignore two power negotiation standards and only supports the very latest, which isn't in many affordable chargers, limiting the fast charge capacity for third parties.

by jeroenhd

4/25/2026 at 10:24:35 AM

Which laptop is that? My Razer with 5070 will take 45W chargers just fine, so do the ThinkPads, my work 16" MacBook and previous Asus Zephyrus with 4070.

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 11:49:48 AM

I was on a trip a few years ago and had only brought my “compact” 45w usb-c charger since the brick that came with my work ThinkPad (one of the high end 16” screen models, maybe p16?) was enormous. When I plugged it in Windows complained that the charger was insufficient to charge the laptop. I think it at least kept it from draining the battery though. I had to run to Walmart and get a 65w charger which did the job fine.

by sgerenser

4/25/2026 at 4:36:53 PM

The idea is that you can use chargers that you have lying around. In an emergency I charged my MacBook Pro with an old 5 or 10W adapter overnight while shut down. I don’t see the reason for flat out refusing a charge. Especially when turned off.

by spockz

4/25/2026 at 10:22:50 AM

Most laptops will take 45W. There might be some workstations that don't, but even gaming stuff with 5080s will charge on 45W.

by izacus

4/25/2026 at 8:56:00 AM

The idea of a POE Mac mini makes me happy. It would be a nice way of power cycling it from the switch, tidier than the smart plug I have.

https://hackaday.com/2023/08/14/adding-power-over-ethernet-s...

by lostlogin

4/25/2026 at 11:31:40 AM

It's undoubtably a cool solution, but in why do you need to remotely do a hard power cycle? Won't just SSHing in and rebooting be enough?

by yonatan8070

4/25/2026 at 11:37:30 AM

And when ssh is down because you OOMd or something else?

by wallst07

4/25/2026 at 11:47:29 AM

I don't really run heavy loads on my home server, so I haven't thought of that

Makes sense, thanks!

by yonatan8070

4/25/2026 at 8:13:42 AM

With 802.3bt type 4 (71W delivered, 90W consumed), absolutely achievable with the proper electronics, but would you trust a no-name, fly-by-night NIC to not fry your expensive devices? That's the biggest hurdle. Possibly a company like Apple, Anker, or similar megacorp or high-trust startup could pull if off.

by burnt-resistor

4/25/2026 at 2:14:42 PM

Doing home automation of lamps, sensors, speakers via PoE would be great too. It should faster and more stable than Zigbee/Wifi and with no need to change the batteries often.

by oever

4/25/2026 at 10:27:04 AM

We used PoE hats for a bunch of Raspberry Pis once. It’s definitely a great idea.

by knolan

4/25/2026 at 9:14:33 AM

I found a 5gbe one that claimed 60W, will power a phone but not the low power laptop I've got here. It probably isn't far off.

by JonChesterfield

4/25/2026 at 9:56:51 AM

I can’t find what you want, but you can buy PoE splitters. PoE in, ethernet and power out.

Surely a matter of time until someone does this…

by mjlee

4/25/2026 at 8:32:40 AM

I think class 4 tops out at about 71W delivered to the powered device, albeit 90W at the switch port.

Might be a struggle I suspect!

by gertrunde

4/25/2026 at 8:32:45 AM

Yes, but look up the prices for PoE switches and you might reconsider.

by userbinator

4/25/2026 at 11:41:33 AM

PoE can be cheap, but usually never cheaper than non-poe. But if you have a PoE switch and spare ports, its very nice.

The problem comes when you try to design a large network and need random PoE ports on end devices where you can't home-run a cable back.

I have a Unifi Pro XG 48 PoE and I love it, but I still don't use PoE for everything. The cost of a (non unifi) poe device + the cost of using one of those ports always exceeds a simple power adapter on the other side (if possible).

I think about this a lot.

by wallst07

4/25/2026 at 1:30:35 PM

Just got an rtl8127 pci e card to replace my aqc113. Runs cool, doesn't have as much contention on the chipset. Price was right. Good purchase and that $10 chip will allow cheaper more power efficient home 10gb equipment within the coming years.

by ranon

4/25/2026 at 7:58:07 PM

Was the card $10 or are you saying that the chip is a $10 part?

by aggregator-ios

4/25/2026 at 2:32:47 PM

I'm disappointed that both the article and comments don't go into the actual differences between how these adapters work and the overhead incurred by USB.

At a high level, I'm pretty sure Thunderbolt will be significantly better in all situations:

Thunderbolt is PCIe; depending on the way the network card driver works, the PCIe controller will usually end up doing DMA straight into the buffers the SKB points to, and with io_uring or AF_XDP, these buffers can even be sent down into user space without ever being copied. Also, usually these drivers can take advantage of multiple txqueues and rxqueues (for example, per core or per stream) since they can allocate whatever memory they want for the NIC to write into.

USB is USB; the controller can DMA USB packet data into URBs but they need to be set up for each transaction, and once the data arrives, it's encapsulated in NCM or some other USB format and the kernel usually has to copy or move the frames to get SKBs. The whole thing is sort of fundamentally pull based rather than push based.

But, this is just scratching the surface; I'm sure there are neat tricks that some USB 3.2 NIC drivers can do to reduce overhead and I'd love to read an article where I learned more about that, or even saw some benchmarks that analyzed especially memory controller utilization, kernel CPU time, and performance counters (like cache utilization). Especially at 10G and beyond, a lot of processing becomes memory bandwidth limited and the difference can be extremely significant.

by bri3d

4/25/2026 at 2:40:04 PM

ACK. From some cursory experimentation, my laptop can roughly saturate 1G via USB, but on 2.5G things get wonky above roughly 1.9G unidirectional or 2.9G bidirectional.

> Thunderbolt is PCIe

Nit: Thunderbolt isn't PCIe, it tunnels PCIe. Depending on chips used, there's bandwidth limits; I vaguely remember 22.5G on older 40G TB Intel chips.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 2:47:01 PM

> Thunderbolt is PCIe

Thunderbolt allows PCIe tunneling, but it has some overhead over raw PCIe. That's why Thunderbolt eGPU setups don't perform as well as plugging the GPU directly into a PCIe slot.

> USB is USB

Until you get to USB4, when USB 4 supports Thunderbolt 4.

by Aurornis

4/25/2026 at 2:53:24 PM

Fair; I should have said "from the standpoint of the driver."

> USB 4 supports Thunderbolt 4

It's the opposite! I hate to get into it as I saw the USB naming argument pretty thoroughly enumerated in the comments here already, but the pedantic interpretation is "Thunderbolt 4 is a superset of USB4 which requires implementation of the USB4 PCIe tunneling protocol which is an evolution of the Thunderbolt 3 PCIe tunneling protocol."

From the standpoint of USB-IF a "USB4" host doesn't need to support PCIe tunneling, but Microsoft also (wisely, IMO) put a wrench into this classic USB confusion nightmare by requiring "USB4" ports to support PCIe tunneling for Windows Logo.

by bri3d

4/25/2026 at 11:43:52 PM

> That's why Thunderbolt eGPU setups don't perform as well as plugging the GPU directly into a PCIe slot.

The bigger factor is probably that PCI-e tunnelling at most a ×4 link, while when you plug a GPU in you are generally doing so into a ×16 or at least ×8 slot, and very few GPUs target ×4.

by Latty

4/25/2026 at 9:59:46 PM

> At a high level, I'm pretty sure Thunderbolt will be significantly better in all situations:

None of my devices support thunderbolt; so not all situations.

by toast0

4/25/2026 at 8:19:04 AM

FWIW I got a Xikestor 10G adapter with the Realtek chipset from AliExpress and it underperforms my much cheaper 5G one.

by fmajid

4/25/2026 at 9:25:06 AM

Yeah. Just because it negotiates, doesn’t mean it can utilise.

by dijit

4/26/2026 at 12:33:03 PM

My question would be, I suppose, how well do they work for extended intervals (e.g. 30+ minutes of saturated traffic)?

I've tried buying several USB3 2.5/5/10GbE copper adapters, apparently mostly Aquantia under the hood, and all but one of them would, even with fans actively pointed at them cooling them, rapidly reach a temperature at which they would stop operating entirely, which has turned me off of trying to explore more.

by rincebrain

4/25/2026 at 8:27:08 AM

My favorite USB ethernet adapter is a lowly 100 MBit one that works everywhere without requiring driver downloads.

by superjan

4/25/2026 at 7:23:33 AM

I have a RTL8157 5 Gbps adapter from CableMatters.

Interestingly it seems to get burning hot on the MacBook M1 Pro while it remains cool on the M5 Pro model.

Maybe the workload is different, but I would not rule out some sort of hardware or driver difference. I only use a 1G port on my router at the moment.

by user34283

4/25/2026 at 10:14:41 AM

Huh! That's very interesting.

I am definitely not the person to shed any light on what is going on, but you've added to my feeling that these adapters are all incomprehensible, so I'll try and do the same for you.

I have a USB C ethernet adapter (a Belkin USB-C to Ethernet + Charge Adapter which I recommend if you need it). I ran out of USB C ports one day, and plugged it through a USB C to USB A adapter instead. I must have done an fast.com speed-test to make sure it wasn't going to slow things down drastically, and found that the latency was lower! Not a huge amount, and I think the max speed was quicker without the adapter. But still, lower latency through a $1.50 Essager USB C to USB A adapter, bought from Shein or Shopee or somewhere silly!

I tried tons of times, back and forward, with the adapter a few times, then without the adapter a few times. Even on multiple laptops. As much as I don't want to, I keep seeing lower latency through this cheap adapter.

Next step, I'll try USB C to USB A, then back through a USB A to USB C adapter. Who knows how fast my internet could be!

by red369

4/25/2026 at 9:28:42 AM

[dead]

by baybal2

4/25/2026 at 1:28:45 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not really a straightforward next place to go, no? 10Gbe is 4x2.5Gbit, right? Then 25Gbit is 1x25Gbit? Four of em for 100Gbit? That's right isn't it?

It's unfortunate thinking that this is the end, this is as good as it's gonna be, for a while. Especially with usb4 going faster and faster still.

Edit: ah! 25Gbase-t exists, is four pairs. Defined at the same time as 40Gbase-t, 802.3bq-2016. A PAM-16 encoding. Yes, 100Gbe was originally defined as 4x25Gbe for optical but there are base-t.

Also! The 10Gb adapter here is $80. Worth noting for folks that 2.5Gbe adapters are ~$13 and 5Gbe adapters a hair over $20! Very affordable very nice boost. Make use of those USB ports!

by jauntywundrkind

4/25/2026 at 1:06:09 PM

I don't understand how a 10GbE adapter is possible without Thunderbolt, or why not being Thunderbolt makes it smaller. In my experience USB speeds faster than 3 don't happen in practice unless you have a Thunderbolt port and device. Maybe I just don't have devices that use the faster USB speeds, but Thunderbolt has always been the one and only way to exceed the speed of USB for me.

I think USB 4 exists based on the Thunderbolt spec (or the other way around?), but doesn't require any Thunderbolt capabilities and therefore isn't very telling.

I think Apple's approach of supporting Thunderbolt 4/5 on every USB port of the MacBook Pro is the only sustainable way forward.

by LoganDark

4/25/2026 at 1:43:18 PM

Because USB can do 2 lanes of 10 gbps. So that's 20gbps. 10 < 20. Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable).

The reason it's smaller to go with USB is that AFAIK thunderbolt only bridges to other interfaces like USB or PCIe. So any thunderbolt NIC is actually thunderbolt -> PCIe, then PCIe -> Ethernet. USB is more often interfaced with directly. 2 big power hungry chips vs 1. 1 < 2 so it is smaller.

Thunderbolt also carries overhead vs oculink. Thunderbolt tunnels PCIe. The PCIe tunnels the ethernet traffic. Oculink is just PCIe, which is why it's not as hot pluggable but gets significant performance increases for PCIe devices. USB in this case tunnels Ethernet traffic. So thunderbolt NICs have 2 layers, USB has 1. 1 < 2. Less overhead means lower power and less heat so smaller heatsinks, fewer chips means smaller board so smaller device. If more devices had oculink connectors, it's highly conceivable that an oculink adapter would also be smaller than a thunderbolt NIC, because again there's no such thing as a thunderbolt NIC just a thunderbolt -> PCIe -> Ethernet.

by Neywiny

4/26/2026 at 3:50:58 AM

> Thunderbolt isn't part of the equation here because it's not a thunderbolt device or thunderbolt host (even if the port is thunderbolt capable).

The article directly states this device is smaller than a Thunderbolt adapter. I was not calling Thunderbolt part of the equation, just asking how it's possible to reach high speeds without it.

The rest of your explanation makes sense, thanks.

by LoganDark

4/25/2026 at 2:33:26 PM

Thunderbolt 4 and 5 are just USB (40, 80 Gbps) with mandatory support for otherwise optional USB-C features like video and high power.

by ac29

4/26/2026 at 3:51:42 AM

Now that USB 4 is just Thunderbolt with less features, yes. Mostly by definition, though.

by LoganDark

4/26/2026 at 12:24:55 AM

I bought one of these as soon as I heard about it ($74 from eBay) and tested it against my USB-4 AQC113 mainstays ($87, IO CREST brand on Amazon), from my MBP.

The new RTL-based adapter is physically smaller, runs way cooler, but only gets ~6 Gbps from my Mac to my Linux box, with a lot of jitter (iperf3).

The AQC adapter is all metal, gets uncomfortably hot, and sustains 9.3 Gbps, no problem. It's about the same size as the middle adapter in the photo.

The USB-4 AQC adapters are only ~$13 more, and yet are significantly faster with lower jitter. I'm staying with those.

Hope that helps someone!

by ridiculous_fish

4/26/2026 at 1:25:15 AM

10GbE adoption feels different from the successful string of standard speeds that came prior, since the market congealed around one standards family per Ethernet speed circa say 100Base-TX. We've heard stories as horrific as RJ45 assemblies heating up to a degree such that thermoplastic would flow.

Was some threshold crossed where 10Gbit over CAT6-whatever cabling is crossing physics thresholds? Or perhaps 10Gbit was brought to market when tech supporting copper connections wasn't yet mature enough?

by papaver-somnamb

4/26/2026 at 1:56:12 AM

I have never heard of ethernet cables getting hot to that degree except when PoE is involved.

by nbf_1995

4/25/2026 at 8:17:52 AM

For Thunderbolt 4/5 docks, I've held off from buying a high-end Thunderbolt 5 dock as many still have 2.5GbE Ethernet and other limitations with displays. The CalDigit TS5 Plus is one of the only options with 10GbE and its $500 (and usually OoS). I managed to buy an ex-corporate refurb HP Thunderbolt 4 G4 dock for only ~$64 and would recommend others do the same (this has an Intel 2.5GbE and good display outputs)

by jordand

4/25/2026 at 5:29:43 PM

Thermals are often the whole story with adapters like this. Once the heat problem gets solved, the product category starts looking much more sane.

by deferredgrant

4/25/2026 at 12:06:20 PM

I have a 5G USB and getting it to work at 5G speeds in Linux was a challenge. The driver worked properly only with kernel 6.12 not 6.10 nor 6.14

by yread

4/25/2026 at 1:37:40 PM

The inaccessibility of 10GbE, and the even higher inaccessibility of anything faster, made me move away from NAS devices to DAS. Not everyone can do this, or needs move TBs of data on a frequent basis, but if you do then a USB4/Thunderbolt 5 DAS is the way to go (and it’s basically the only way to go in film and TV data management.)

by movedx

4/25/2026 at 1:53:05 PM

TIL that DAS stands for "Direct Attached Storage." In the olden times we called them external hard drives.

by barnabask

4/25/2026 at 3:43:34 PM

A DAS device will typically hold more than one hard drive. But yes, it's a more fancy version of having four seperate external hard drives hooked up.

by Telaneo

4/25/2026 at 5:29:23 PM

Well with the move to SSD's, it added two syllables.

Maybe external solid state drive is just too long and it finally had to be sortened somehow.

by BenjiWiebe

4/25/2026 at 11:10:45 AM

TFA doesn't compare the performance of the new adapters with the older ones.

Does anyone know if the old bulky ones will hit 10G speeds on the same hardware?

I assume I can get a few old TB2 models and adapters on the cheap and they'll run cool enough and stable enough for constant 1G internet and occasional 10G intranet

by randusername

4/25/2026 at 1:28:10 PM

I'm still curious why it can't reach full 10GbE in both directions. Afaik USB gen 3.2 2x2 the transmit and receive directions are independent. So it doesn't really make sense to reach full speed one way and not the other way, purely from a USB perspective.

by rowanG077

4/25/2026 at 7:15:37 AM

It seems like a lot of laptop manufacturers skipped the USB 3.2 Gen2x2 in favor of USB4/TB4.

by sva_

4/25/2026 at 7:28:54 AM

Conversely, the last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find any USB4 external SSDs on Amazon; only USB 3.2.

by TMWNN

4/25/2026 at 7:54:03 AM

Wouldn't it be better to just buy an M.2 NVMe adapter, eg. ICY DOCK ICYNano MB861U31-1M2B[0]?

[0]: https://global.icydock.com/product_247.html

by whilenot-dev

4/25/2026 at 8:18:19 AM

That doesn't seem to be USB 4?

by justinclift

4/25/2026 at 10:12:23 AM

Is there an SSD that saturates USB3.2 Gen2 speeds and requires USB4?

by whilenot-dev

4/25/2026 at 11:31:27 AM

Oh yes. Samsung 9100 Pro does 14800/13400 MiB/s over PCIe 5x4.

by bestham

4/25/2026 at 12:38:10 PM

What you're seeing are the speeds of various multi-tier caches (RAM, intermediate SLC etc.) It cannot write to its main flash memory that fast. While it to the user looks like they just wrote 10 GiB in a single second, the SSD is internally still busy for another 10 seconds persisting that data. The actual real write speed of top-shelf consumer grade SSDs these days is somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 GiB/s. Most models top out at half of that or less.

by daneel_w

4/25/2026 at 12:17:57 PM

I bought this one when upgrading my desktop, it indeed delivers what it promises. 14.5GB/s on my tiny random desktop, it's impressive. Everything feels so instantaneous, my Linux desktop finally feels like a Mac :)

by alfanick

4/25/2026 at 3:21:05 PM

That's certainly impossible as even USB4 is only 40Gb/s~5GB/s, and of that you could only expect to get 32Gb/s~4GB/s. Or realistically even less due to overhead.

It is probably the speed of it being read into RAM.

Try entering sync right after copying to see how long it really takes

by sva_

4/25/2026 at 3:55:43 PM

Oh I meant without USB4 enclosure ofc, PCIe5 directly. It's truly the best consumer-level SSD available around.

It beats my previous desktop's RAM speed, what a time to live in.

by alfanick

4/25/2026 at 11:54:22 AM

Maybe not, but the USB consortium hasn't got around to polluting the USB4 namespace yet so it's safer to buy stuff with the USB4 label.

Of course, just give them some time and they'll come up with USB4 "gen classic" at 11 Mbps.

by nottorp

4/25/2026 at 10:28:11 AM

Many PCIe4 or 5 drives

by muro

4/25/2026 at 8:17:24 AM

If Amazon is a strict requirement, then this won't help. But if you're ok with AliExpress then it's probably a win:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008555989592.html

I have one of these, though I'm using with a USB 3.x port as that's what my desktop has. For me it's working fine, and for others with actual USB 4 ports it seems to be working properly for them.

by justinclift

4/25/2026 at 7:53:51 AM

Really? I see plenty when I search for 'usb4 nvme enclosure'

by sva_

4/25/2026 at 8:18:17 PM

How about 10 GbE switches/routers? I have 10 GbE fiber-to-the-home via Sonic, but so far just have it plugged into a Google Wifi router with gigabit ethernet. Would love to have 10 GbE wired to my desk.

by tobinfricke

4/25/2026 at 8:44:39 PM

If you are riding the Geerling train you would probably be interested in the upcoming mono router: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/testing-mono-gateway-...

Personally I use an x86 PC (supermicro E300 with X11SDV motherboard with integrated Intel X540 10Gbe NICs) running opnsense.

by osamagirl69

4/26/2026 at 3:54:33 AM

Full, multiport 10GbE switches are still rather pricy. You could look at 2.5Gb or 5Gb port routers that have a 10Gb input. You won't be able saturate it with a single device, but you would using multiple devices. Ubiquiti has some nice stuff.

by jshier

4/26/2026 at 3:05:29 AM

I also discovered the other day that you can get high-speed networking between two computers with just a thunderbolt cable. It showed up as a 20G connection anyway.

by l8rlump

4/25/2026 at 8:19:45 PM

RTL8159 is way cheaper from Aliexpress in other products, and most is this small or smaller for 10G.

The article should maybe have been focusing on that piece?

by punnerud

4/26/2026 at 12:41:17 AM

Interesting approach. I’ve been experimenting with browser-based tools lately and the performance is surprisingly good.

by emirdw

4/26/2026 at 12:45:06 AM

I'm surprised your experiments with browser based tools, caused you interest in smaller 10GbE USB adapters.

by gnabgib

4/25/2026 at 4:46:59 PM

What would be actual use cases ? I mean, I get the nerdery of having the fastest possible network, but in practice ?

by flal_

4/25/2026 at 6:34:17 PM

Recently, I had a researcher who had been delivered a blob of research data. It was multiple TB, and the data was delivered in a little RAID-1 drove enclosure, which had a USB-C connection. (I don’t remember the exact make or model.)

The user originally wanted to do the transfer over WiFi. I helped them set up the transfer, and they eventually realized it would take multiple months to complete.

I set them up with a Thunderbolt 10GBASE-T Ethernet adapter. The wiring was Cat-6, but the distance was low enough such that 10G would’ve been achievable.

The switches in the network closet were only 1GbE, though the uplinks were 10GbE. Even so, switching the transfer from wireless to 1GbE wired brought our ETA down to just under one month.

I wish we could’ve gotten a 10GBASE-T port for the researcher; that would’ve brought the ETA down from ~1 month to ~1 week.

by CaliforniaKarl

4/25/2026 at 11:01:53 PM

Why not connect it directly to the server/workstation?

by mixmastamyk

4/26/2026 at 1:52:22 AM

I’m curious, I have 10gb switch and 5gb fiber internet. Will such adapter work on Xbox searies x?

by galkk

4/25/2026 at 12:27:36 PM

What cat cable works with it?

by p0w3n3d

4/25/2026 at 11:01:17 AM

By the way, how are switches and cables for > 1Gbps these days?

by nottorp

4/25/2026 at 11:21:56 AM

You can find 2.5G switches with a reasonable amount of ports on the cheap. For 10G though the cost is still prohibitive IMHO unless you are fine with 2 ports.

For cables, I think everything converged to cat6a a while ago, which is both reasonably cheap and perfecrly fine for 10G (up to 100m from what I remember)

by Galanwe

4/25/2026 at 1:23:46 PM

Mikrotik has a couple 4-5 port 10 GbE switches (one has SFP+ ports, one has RJ45), and Ubiquiti has a couple small switches now that don't quite break the bank at least.

by geerlingguy

4/25/2026 at 4:36:59 PM

Nicgiga and Trendnet have 8 and 5 port 10G switches for less than $250 respectively.

by wpm

4/25/2026 at 6:17:11 PM

I remember getting my first laptop with gigabit ethernet in 2005, more than 20 years ago! I'm surprised 10gbit is still so uncommon and eyewateringly expensive. And I don't just mean the adapters which are coming down in price finally but also the switches. For more than 10 years we've had semi managed gigabit switches for 25€ like the TP-SG108E. 10gbit is still crazy expensive. Even though it is quite needed these days for fast transfers from computer to computer, the old "your harddrive won't keep up anyway" excuse is no longer valid.

I still have max 10 gbit here and I'd have to replace 3 switches at least so it won't be coming soon. The 2.5 and 5 options are too meh for me to be interesting.

I hope the arrival of these new chips will increase the number of systems with 10g it and then hopefully the prices of switches will come down too.

by wolvoleo

4/26/2026 at 3:03:39 PM

10GB ethernet switches will never be cheap because of the power requirements. Just get a 25GB switch and skip 10GB all together.

by sixdonuts

4/27/2026 at 4:25:53 AM

Of course they will go down in power just like these USB controllers have done.

by wolvoleo

4/27/2026 at 2:51:46 PM

25GB switches do 1/10/25GB, can be used with copper and fiber, use a magnitude less in power per port than a 10GB copper switch and cost the same or less per port than existing 10GB copper switchs.

by sixdonuts

4/25/2026 at 7:38:10 PM

How often do you have to do fast transfers from computer to computer?

Would argue for those purposes 40gig thunderbolt makes a lot more sense.

by kd913

4/26/2026 at 3:53:09 AM

It would but none of my systems have thunderbolt and besides that my NASes are on the other side of the flat where the noise doesn't bother me. Thunderbolt only reaches a metre or two. I assume thunderbolt PCI cards are a thing but the distance is a bigger problem.

I need fast transfers pretty often. I do a weekly image of all my workstations as backup. Right now I do them overnight as it's limited to 110MB/s but this could be done within 15 minutes with 10gbit.

Also, huge media files.

by wolvoleo

4/25/2026 at 10:57:14 AM

From the source of the RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver in FreeBSD: (old, not directly relevant, just amusing) https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_r...

/* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on * the RealTek chipset. Datasheets can be obtained from * www.realtek.com.tw. * * Written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu> * Electrical Engineering Department * Columbia University, New York City / / * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers. * * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four * packets queued for transmission at any one time. * * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol * levels. * * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it. * * On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although * rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the * PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register * space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast * filter. * * The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY * chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where * the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need * to select which interface to use depending on the chip type. */

by simonjgreen

4/25/2026 at 11:42:50 AM

Those comments are about the 25 years old RTL8139, among the world's first highly affordable and fully-integrated Fast Ethernet controllers that ended up on pretty much every motherboard. Contrary to all of the aged complaints about the RTL8139, I ran several such on OpenBSD (and Windows) for close to ten years with no problems at all.

by daneel_w

4/25/2026 at 12:58:24 PM

> unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it

Oh no!

by kalleboo

4/29/2026 at 7:48:43 AM

[flagged]

by ayesha-ashu

4/25/2026 at 11:00:37 AM

8159 != 8139

> /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on […]

Also, please, for the love of whatever entity, at least remove the *s on that paste. This is just atrocious and disrespectful of any reader.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 11:29:06 AM

I've had such terrible success with usb-ethernet adapters on linux, to the point where wifi is usually much more performant. The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. It's so frequent though that even scp-ing a medium-sized file is likely to fail or stall. Hardware is a Framework 13 3rd gen laptop.

Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...

by freedomben

4/25/2026 at 1:16:58 PM

> The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up.

I never ever saw that and I'm literally using usb-to-ethernet adapters on Linux since forever. It's about the chipset you're using and how the kernel supports it no? For example for 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet if you go with anything with a Realtek RTL8156B (and not the older non 'B') or anything more recent it should work flawlessly.

Before buying I look on the Internet for users' returns / kernel support what the latest chipset the cool kids on the block are using.

As I've been perfectly happy with Realtek 8156B for 2.5 Gbit/s if I wanted to buy a 10 Gbit/s one, I'd look at cool kids, like that Jeff Geerling dude from TFA/Youtube, and see he's using a Realtek 8159 and I'd think: "Oh that's close to mine, I trust that to work very well".

I literally still even have an old USB2.0-to-100Mbit/s that I use daily and that has never failed me neither (it's for an old laptop that I use as some kind of terminal over SSH). I don't recommend 100 Mbit/s: my point is that it's been many moons all this has flawless support under Linux.

> Is this just my hardware?

To me it's due to a poor chipset / poor chipset support in the USB-to-ethernet adapter you're using.

These things, when they're a well supported chipset, are flawless.

by TacticalCoder

4/25/2026 at 9:59:36 PM

One another thing to try: set the MTU to 9000. But don't do this on your main interface, or you'll get haunted by traffic being blackholed.

At home, I have separate VLANs for the 9k packets. It has a separate subnet (both V6 and V4), so it works perfectly. The devices on this VLAN use it directly if they can, and everything else goes through the router that sends proper ICMP "too big" messages.

by cyberax

4/25/2026 at 12:32:26 PM

Can any of them do TSN?

by oytis

4/25/2026 at 12:54:28 PM

wow. Maybe i should try it

by flyingsquirrel_

4/25/2026 at 10:35:17 PM

mbklog4@gmail.com

by ballack007

4/25/2026 at 2:53:38 PM

Thats just a depressing situation for 10G networking.

If its p2p, its easier to just use usb-c inbetween.

Apparently someone doesn't understand my post so let me edit it for the downvote?!... 10G is old tech, its 2026 and the best thing we still have today is a 80$ Adapater while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb

I'm waiting for 10g network for home for ages now but infra is more expensive, consumes more energy and gets hotter.

by AntiUSAbah

4/26/2026 at 3:37:32 AM

while USB-C already can do 5, 10, 20 and 40gb

...over a few meters at most. 10GBASE-T Ethernet goes dozens of meters, and the other variants using optic fiber reach into kilometers.

by userbinator

4/25/2026 at 12:53:16 PM

> USB 3.2 Gen 2x1

What the fuck

by Razengan

4/25/2026 at 2:06:07 PM

It's still not named well but the way to understand it is: gen 1 is 5gbps/lane, gen 2 is 10. x1 is 1 lane, x2 is 2. So really there are only 4 combinations, 5, 10, 10, 20.

It just took them a really long and windy time to get there.

by Neywiny

4/25/2026 at 10:03:52 AM

[dead]

by woohin

4/25/2026 at 2:59:31 PM

[dead]

by bitvvip

4/26/2026 at 2:29:07 AM

[dead]

by BLACKCRAB

4/25/2026 at 2:20:13 PM

Price is the key factor. If it's too expensive, even if the performance is excellent, it won't be necessary.

by cycloner

4/25/2026 at 7:44:58 AM

Too bad this is 10Gbase-T, that energy-wasting hot-running garbage needs to die sooner rather than later. Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use.

(Fibre is nowhere near as "sensitive" as some people believe.)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 8:09:05 AM

The problem with fibre isn't the sensitivity. It's that most endpoints have a 1Gbps copper port on them and then Cat6A ports can be used with the common devices but also allow you to add or relocate 10Gbps devices without rewiring the building again.

by zrm

4/25/2026 at 8:14:25 AM

However — unlike copper twisted pair — the bandwidth current fiber media can carry is nearly limited by nothing but the optics at each end.

by HappMacDonald

4/25/2026 at 8:20:44 AM

That doesn't solve the chicken and egg problem.

What probably would is something like having PCIe and USB to 1Gbps fiber adapters that cost $5.

by zrm

4/25/2026 at 9:53:59 AM

You've been able to get Intel X520 NICs [0], with transceivers included for ~40USD on Newegg for a long time. This is a little more than double the price of Newegg's cheapest single-port 10/100/1000 copper card, but even the cheapest available such card is three times your "chicken and egg"-solving price point.

I suspect the combination of the absence of cheap-o all-in-one AP/router combo boxes with any SFP+ cages and fiber cabling's reputation of being extremely fragile have much more to do with its scarcity at the extremely low end of networking gear than anything else.

[0] This is a two-port SFP+ PCI Express card

by simoncion

4/25/2026 at 5:16:58 PM

You can get copper ones for $5.99 (quality may vary):

https://www.amazon.com/1000Mbps-Network-Performance-Gigabit-...

https://www.amazon.com/SALAN-Ethernet-Portable-Internet-Conv...

But it's not competing with those, it's competing with the copper port which is already built into most devices.

Another thing that would work is something like this (also $5.99), but with one of the ports as fibre:

https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Splitter-1000Mbps-In...

The point being you need some cheap way to plug in existing copper devices if you run fibre to the endpoints.

This plus $5 for a transceiver is pretty close at $15:

https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Converter-Auto-Negot...

But +$15 and an extra wall outlet per endpoint is still an inconvenience, and if a two-port device with its own power supply can be made for $15 then where is the PCIe/USB to fibre adapter for <$10?

by zrm

4/26/2026 at 12:03:26 AM

> (quality may vary):

Yep. Good NICs last for approximately forever, life's way too short to deal with maybe-flaky NICs, and the price difference between the Amazon Special and something that's going to be reliable is -what- two big boxes of Cheerios? Two dozen eggs? Not. Worth it.

> But it's not competing with those, it's competing with the copper port which is already built into most devices.

Correct! That's part of why I was so very surprised to see you suggesting that extremely cheap PCI Express and USB adapters would "solve the chicken and egg problem".

> The point being you need some cheap way to plug in existing copper devices if you run fibre to the endpoints.

That's called a multi-port switch. Netgear sells five-port gigabit ones for like 20 USD. Switches that have two SFP+ cages and eight copper gigabit ports [0] are six times the price of a cheap-o Netgear switch, but are something that's going to last at least a decade. It's also pretty uncommon to find SOHO switches that have SFP+ cages and don't have at least one fixed copper port.

> This plus $5 for a transceiver is pretty close at $15:

If you're connecting a single device, why the hell would you use that when you could slap a copper SFP or SFP+ module in the switch's cage and run a cable? If you're connecting multiple devices, then either install multiple copper modules and run multiple cables, run multiple copper cables from fixed copper ports on the switch, or put a switch where the existing copper devices are.

[0] <https://mikrotik.com/product/css610_8g_2s_in>

by simoncion

4/26/2026 at 1:15:47 AM

> If you're connecting a single device, why the hell would you use that when you could slap a copper SFP or SFP+ module in the switch's cage and run a cable?

The problem to be solved is that you want to be able to put fibre inside the walls of the building instead of copper. Running a new cable to the switch closet is the thing to be prevented.

But if the wall jacks are fibre then you need some economical way of hooking them up to every printer and single-purpose device with a network port. If you have to buy another $100+ switch just to get from fibre to copper even when there is only one device near that jack, people aren't going to go for that.

by zrm

4/27/2026 at 1:00:44 PM

> The problem to be solved is that you want to be able to put fibre inside the walls of the building instead of copper. Running a new cable to the switch closet is the thing to be prevented.

...why would you ever not run copper alongside fiber for new construction? If nothing else, PoE is extremely useful, and nothing says that you actually have to connect all of that copper cable to your switch... you can connect it as-needed. I also can't imagine that most refits only have room for exactly one cable in their conduit. [0]

I'd expect to hear the sort of plan you propose from a PHB or Highly Paid Consultant, not someone who actually has had to use that sort of configuration.

Regardless, the scenario you're now proposing is one where noone other than a PHB would use that Amazon Special that you linked for media conversion.

[0] If there's no conduit and cables are all flopping around in the wall, then there's even more room for cabling.

by simoncion

4/28/2026 at 4:26:40 AM

The original problem was that everyone runs copper instead of fibre because there are too many existing devices that only have copper. Running both everywhere would require you to buy and terminate twice as much cable as you expect to use, which leads people to running only copper again.

If you chose PCs to begin with that come with fibre ethernet or put quality cards in the ones that matter then you could make fibre the default instead of copper. Until you have a number of devices like printers or VoIP phones or Raspberry Pis that have no need for 10Gbps or even 1Gbps connectivity, they just need a way to be plugged in at all. If you need to add $100+ in conversion expense to each of those devices, you're back to using copper by default.

by zrm

4/28/2026 at 6:58:11 AM

> Running both everywhere would require you to buy and terminate twice as much cable as you expect to use...

Ah. Let's play with that logic a bit:

"Running Ethernet cabling everywhere would require you to buy and terminate far more than twice as much cable as you expect to use. Just run power cables and wire up one extra outlet for a HomePlug in each room.".

Yeah, that checks out. "Powerline Ethernet" devices are actually pretty good these days, and are right around your magic price range... Amazon has them at ~13 USD per unit. [0] Why would anyone bother running a second cable to each room? Thirteen bucks per room has to be way less than the materials and labor cost for the cable run. Doing anything else is, like, really stupid. Don't you agree?

Anyway. You expect to use the cabling that you plan to install... plus some extra for screwups, man.

[0] <https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-PLEK500-Homeplug-AV2-Powerlin...>

by simoncion

4/27/2026 at 2:56:31 PM

Running a new cable is easy. You just use the old cable to pull the new cable. You can run composite cable if you desire copper, fiber and power.

by sixdonuts

4/28/2026 at 7:09:29 AM

> You can run composite cable if you desire copper, fiber and power.

Oooh. Cool.

By "power" do you mean 120/240VAC, or do you mean much lower voltage DC? I've found some Belden cabling that I think provides mains power and Ethernet, and I've found fiber cabling that I guess carries lower voltage DC, but am having a tough time finding a cable that combines fiber and copper data with mains power. Do you have an example of such a cable handy?

(Full disclosure: I'm refusing to spend more than like five minutes on the search... so I might have been able to dig up examples of such a cable.)

by simoncion

4/28/2026 at 4:29:25 AM

Which is why people run only copper because that costs less than running multiple types of cable everywhere when most drops only have one device, and then pull fibre through using the existing copper cable in the rare instances where they find a need for 40Gbps or more.

But then the copper gets used for 10Gbps connections instead of fibre because it's what's already in the building.

by zrm

4/25/2026 at 8:37:04 AM

In practice though 10G via copper requires pretty perfect terminations. The slightest error leads to crosstalk issues.

by mschuster91

4/25/2026 at 9:12:35 AM

Ymmv. I've got a mix of cheap premade patch cables and some I crimped from solid core, all cat5e, all holding 10gbe totally happily. I suspect that only works because they're a meter or two long but that reaches across the rack.

by JonChesterfield

4/26/2026 at 10:20:02 PM

NICs have DSPs to cancel out crosstalk.

by userbinator

4/25/2026 at 8:34:14 AM

Good thing the ranges for 25Gbase-T are short enough to make it impractical for home use.

Anyone who talks about 25GBASE-T like it actually exists, doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.

by userbinator

4/25/2026 at 10:09:19 AM

Or is speaking in future terms.

40Gbase-T will never exist, sure. 25Gbase-T very likely will.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 8:33:14 AM

Is the energy consumption inherent to 10Gbase-T? Or is it that 1Gbit nics have been around forever and optimised ad infinitum?

To be fair, the power consumption is also my biggest gripe with my WiFi 6 AP, they run extremely hot.

by spockz

4/25/2026 at 10:10:29 AM

It's inherently worse than anything fibre, or even DAC cables (which are kinda cheating.) It needs a shitton of analog "magic" to work with the bandwidth limitations of copper cabling.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 2:34:53 PM

Just wondering why you considered DAC cables cheating, is the analog magic mainly the impedance matching or I'm missing something?

by teleforce

4/26/2026 at 7:48:51 AM

DAC cables are cheating because due to the extremely short range limits (5m, 7m if you're very lucky) they can just put the 10Gbase-R/SFI signal straight on a pair of Copper at 10.3125 Gbaud.

10Gbase-T, to try to get to 100m, throws FEC on it and converts the signal to 4x PAM-16/THP at 800 Mbd, and then uses 4 copper pairs *bidirectionally*. That's the analog magic.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 4:34:07 PM

Okay. Sure. But why do we notice that on 10GbaseT and on 1? Is there some signal processing which is exponentially expensive at faster speeds? I’ve seen cards using 25W per port.

by spockz

4/26/2026 at 7:51:35 AM

cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908287

Yes, that signal processing is massively more expensive. A 10Gbase-T PHY is a sophisticated DSP. Not sure if the power needs are exponential, given we only have a few data points, but it's in the ballpark.

(1000base-T PHYs are already DSPs, but nowhere near as sophisticated)

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 11:52:01 AM

How easy can an ordinary home user install fiber in his home compared to a good old wire?

by ciupicri

4/25/2026 at 12:20:25 PM

There’s nothing hard about it if you can run pre-terminated patches. Which you typically can since the connectors are so small.

by markonen

4/25/2026 at 12:56:04 PM

So you're saying users could buy stuff like this? "25m (82ft) Fiber Patch Cable, 1 Fiber, SC APC Simplex to SC APC Simplex, Single Mode (OS2), Riser (OFNR), 2.0mm, Tight-Buffered, Yellow", https://www.fs.com/eu-en/products/282133.html?attribute=1031...

Heck, I don't even know what I should buy for 10G SFP+ ports and a distance of say 30 meters. Guess, I'm back to CAT6 :-)

by ciupicri

4/25/2026 at 2:24:18 PM

> Guess, I'm back to CAT6 :-)

If you learned what you need for 10GbT you can learn what you need for 10GbLR. Which is:

LC connector, PC or UPC, duplex, OS1 or OS2, and SFP+ modules saying "LR".

Any of the following is wrong: SC, FC, LSH, E2000, ST, APC, simplex, OM[1-5], "SR" or "ER" SFPs.

And that's short enough.

by eqvinox

4/25/2026 at 1:48:26 PM

LC connectors are smaller and what the actual SFP+ modules typically have. If you want to run a link with just one fiber, you need BiDi optics.

FS does custom multi-fiber cable assemblies too (beyond the duplex patches which is basically the standard), and they can also include pull eyes on them if that’d be helpful.

Single mode is a good choice, common wisdom used to be multimode for short runs but the single mode stuff is not much more expensive and the standard 10km optics will likely brute force the signal over any mistakes like cable kinks or dirt on the connectors.

by markonen

4/26/2026 at 3:21:49 PM

Fiber is way easier to run than copper. If you already have copper just use that to run the fiber.

by sixdonuts

4/25/2026 at 4:50:32 PM

Nothing in my home has SFP ports other than my routers and my primary network switch (two, hooked up to the routers). All of my computers and USB adapters for laptops expect RJ45 at 10/100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mbps. None of my runs are over 50 ft.

So IDGAF about how much "better" fiber is. It's unfathomably worse when you factor in the cost and work I'd need to do to convert everything and every new adapter I'd have to buy or build (can I get an $80 USB SFP adapter? Do I have a cable?). The extra marginal cost in electricity will take longer than the lifetime of my equipment to exceed the cost of redoing everything.

by wpm

4/25/2026 at 10:08:20 AM

Can these support local LLM’s?

by souravroy78

4/25/2026 at 7:48:34 AM

Will they be cheaper? I look at the RAM prices. Granted, RAM is in a different category than USB adapters, but I no longer trust anyone writing "will be cheaper" - the reality may be different to the projection made.

by shevy-java