> 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.
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.