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Almost a decade? I think I got my first gigabit switch in like 2003-2004. I think I paid like $200 for a 5-port switch. Still using it. I remember stuffing a gigabit NIC into an MSI K7D Master-L, which had an integrated 100Mbit NIC. I managed to fry that board (melted the main power connector) which resulted in an Opteron upgrade. CPUs, etc. got repurposed.
Poorly worded. I meant cheap dishes have been around for a decade.
I remember the transition from 10Mb to 100Mb. I still have 2x 8x 10Mb with 2x 100Mb uplink ports that we paid $900/ea for. And there is no auto crossover on these since that didn't exist when they were made, haha.
I recently paid $300 for a 12-port 10gige netgear switch. The XS712T
Depends what you mean by "cheap", but Mikrotik make some that are within reach of us mortals, with catchy names like CRS305-1G-4S+IN. You have to spend extra money to get SFP+ modules to actually connect fibre to, but those can be had fairly cheap these days. Switches with SFP+ cages can be used for 2.5GbE too.
Wow 12-57V DC input, I presume that's to meet wide ranging PoE specs but that's hella nice to see it on a barrel jack input, for those of us who live off-grid and power everything direct DC as much as possible. Nice suggestion, thanks!
It's not so much this as there isn't a 'demand' for it yet. It's just like when the original 1Gb came out and people were on 100Mb switched--there was no real reason for 1Gb except on servers. Then file serving without a file server took off and suddenly you could use the storage at native speeds on 1Gb, but 100Mb was a bottleneck. It also helped that 1Gb hardware came down in cost to the point where it was $5 more for 1Gb vs a 100Mb nic. So the cabling and nics where already there and all you needed were the switches, and once those came down in price, poof! 100Mb was history.
That's good that the nics are getting popular. That's what helped bring gigabit down in price at the transition from 100Mb. It got to the point that a gig nic was the same cost as 100Mb, so everyone had gig nics, and once there were gig nics and all the wiring could handle gig, it was only the switches that were left and manufacturers focused on bringing those prices down. The day a gig switch was 4-5x 100Mb it made sense because of the increase in bandwidth. For 2.5, it's going to have to come down to 2-3x gig imo. 5Gb might still work at a higher premium, but both of these have to also compete with the large amount of used 10Gb that's out there, where in many scenarios 2x 10Gb nics and a DAC can do the job for a lot less than 2.5/5Gb.
