Its 2016 mid. Should we go for 10 Gb Ethernet now ?

10 GbE Ethernet is still some years away from becoming common in consumer market. The current status is that it is target towards enterprise market and therefore prices are generally high:

1. A 10 GbE switch will cost $1500 easily and may have to be imported wheras 1 GbE switches start from $30 only
2. A 10 GbE PCI card costs $200-$400 whereas a PCioe 2.0 GbE interface is available for $15-$20 only
3. Cat6A cabling is difficult to procure and it costs 3 times compared to Cat 6 UTP. Connectors would similarly be expensive
4. Their is no real time application (including 4K/3D video that would need more than 100 mbps speed. The content ecosystem is mature only for Full HD (1080p)
5. The WAN (Internet speed) typically seen at the top end in India is 100 mbps with 1 Gbps being offered only in select cities near the sea.

Their is very little reason for consumers to want or even care about 10G in home network.  However one case is starting to emerge slowly in a small minority of very advanced home networking setups:

In some deployments, users will centralization workstation storage in a RAID-1(N) NAS and use the  PC/Laptop/Workstation as a data less client which works on fast SSDs. Typically SATA 3 buses show this type of performance profile

• Host to Disk speed of 100-200 MB/s (0.8 to 1.6 Gbps)
• Host to HDD Cache speed of 6 Gbps (SATA 2 supports 3 Gbps, SATA 1.5 Gbps)
• OS/CPU caches further gives better transfer rates

So you can see that if a data transfer (read/write) is done on a NAS and it it hits any cache or disk, then the bottleneck would be the link itself and not the disk I/O operation and the GbE link would become fully saturated practically. 

To get around this, the use of 10 GbE seems logical. But not every device needs such type of transfer speeds. Only NAS and remote workstation. So the best way forward for these very slim minority homes is to either 

1. Put a small 10 GbE switch and put only NAS and workstation(s) in it and uplink to a slow GbE switch for the rest of the home network devices or even setup P2P 10 GbE links
2. install 10 GbE NICs (PCI cards)  on both the NAS and the PC (if you have only one) and puit direct P2P ethernet link
3. If you have multiple clients PCs and one NAS with 100-120 MB/s transfer speed  acceptable, the the switch can be upgraded to a smart 1 gbps switch, A n-port PCI card be put on NAS and link aggregation be used between NAS and switch, leaving the PCs connected to switch with standard 1 Gbps links

So 10 GbE is useful to quickly write small data but lots of it (typical workstation workload) or transfer large files quickly (again largely useful for transferring big video and image files during content creation activities). The "quickly" is the key point or pull for 10 GbE. 

In a nutshell, 10 GbE in home network is an overkill (and still impractical) for 2016 if implemented across the board. Infact most applications ( and most homes) are just fine with 100 mbps (Phone, Tablet, Streamer, Surveillance camera, etc)  with only applications that need to do big file transfer over LAN between two local nodes really needing 1 Gigabit Ethernet.

- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee