10G Ethernet has gotten a lot cheaper, certainly viable for enthusiasts. I'm not sure what I would use it for except for faster access to my NAS, and that's coincidentally also the one device category where 10G ports are somewhat common. For everything else 1G per device seems plenty, and with Ethernet you actually get the advertised speeds in typical scenarios.
A network card for 10Gpbs costs at least €100 per device here, whereas 1Gbps goes for less than €10. A switch with at least 4x 10Gbps ports costs over €300 (whereas 4x 1Gpbs costs about €20).
Using 2.5Gbps ports is more cost effective, with switches available at a third of the price of a 10Gbps version and network cards going for about half the price of a 10Gbps port.
A literal 10x price increase is not exactly what I'd call "viable for enthusiasts". With 802.11ax, WiFi has surpassed ethernet for all practical purposes for end users. You can't _rely_ on ax working at full speed, but if you try it and it works, it's a whole lot cheaper and easier than setting up wired internet.
It's sad, but this is only the case because network device vendors want to keep cashing in on "enterprise" hardware with ludicrous pricing. Prices have barely dropped over the last 4-5 years on many 10Gbps switches, probably because they're mostly used in data centres anyway.
I've run into annoyances with 1Gbps ethernet a few times, usually when transferring large files between PC and laptop or from my NAS. After 10 years of universal gigabit ethernet, I somehow felt like it shouldn't be faster to copy everything from my laptop to an external SSD and then copy it back to my desktop than sending the data over a short wire connected to both computers, but here we are.
> A literal 10x price increase is not exactly what I'd call "viable for enthusiasts".
As an "enthusiast" here that's because you should be looking at used gear. You can pick up things like the Mellanox Connectx-2 SFP+ used cards for cheap, like $20-30 USD (local availability is of course a crapshoot though).
If you want/need 10Gbps over cat6, though, then yeah it gets more expensive. But if you're just looking for 10gbps between a couple of systems and can run a cable, SFP+ with some DAC cables are very much within reach.
> With 802.11ax, WiFi has surpassed ethernet for all practical purposes for end users. You can't _rely_ on ax working at full speed, but if you try it and it works, it's a whole lot cheaper and easier than setting up wired internet.
For all practical purposes it hasn't. Remember the airspace itself is shared. That old 802.11ac laptop or phone or whatever
streaming youtube or netflix will murder your theoretical 802.11ax bandwidth. It's not unlike claiming that an 8-port gigabit switch is "8Gbps" (assuming a full-throughput switch, which is common-enough) - that's basically how wifi marketing speeds works. It's the shared available bandwidth, not the per-client bandwidth. If you actually care about bandwidth then 802.11ax is still going to be practically inferior to 1gbps ethernet runs. But for most people as long as the wifi is mostly faster than their internet connection, which is typically far less than 1gbps anyway, then who cares? More significantly latency with wifi still remains unreliable, so anyone trying to game will still also be better served with wired connections. Even if "theoretical peak bandwidth" is lower.
> I'm not sure what I would use it for except for faster access to my NAS
Uncompressed 4:4:4 4k video at 60hz is only a small bit beyond the reach of 10G ethernet. Imagine being able to remote display from anywhere to anywhere else in the building with absolutely zero loss. Use a huge server as your desktop machine without having to listen to those fans all day...
