Anybody see a 48 port managed 2.5 Gig ethernet switch for reasonable pricing yet? it seems like these are still either thousands of dollars or sold for chinese market without appropriate certificatiosn to be plugged into the north american electric grid. Any help would be appreciated (even better if it has 2-4 SFP+ 10 gig ports on it)
Yea, I think 2.5G is really searching for a market, that may not exist. For home use, 1Gbit is in general plenty fast enough, and maxes out most US customers Internet too. For enterprise use 10G is common and cheap. The cards to get an SFP+ port into any tower or server is just really small. Enterprise is considering how to do 100G core cheaply enough, and looking for at least 25G on performance servers, if not also 100G in some cases. If you’ve got the budget you can roll 400G core right now in “not insane pricing”.
2.5G to the generic office (that might well be remote) is likely re-wiring and unnecessary. And that’s if you don’t find ac WiFi sufficient, i.e. sub 1G.
The biggest up side to 2.5 gig and 5 gig is that they can do their speeds on existing cat 5e and cat 6 cables at their full 100 meters. And I think 2.5 gig poe is dirt cheap. Outside of reusing existing cables WiFi 6 and 6e APs are their only real use since they can peak just over 1 gbit speeds.
I will have to see that. I would be concerned about pushing cat5e that fast. I am not sure about cat6, but again that speed is not fast enough to buy new cards for the computers and if we were buying cards I guess the 10G fiber cards are likely cost competitive now that servers are dumping them as obsolete.
In terms of value old 10 gig is much better than new 5 gig and even 2.5. It’s just most 10 gig stuff has crazy loud fans and use a ton of power.
Noise doesn’t matter in a data center which is where the switches live. The power use might be more than a 1gbit, but they’re in line with any dual power enterprise switch really.