Regarding my new BE88U and the 10Gb "WAN/LAN" port(s)

[visortgw]

Optical fibre cabling is what you should be investing in for speeds and futureproof-ness, because your router has a 10G SFP port.

As long as device also has SFP+ port AND you are willing to spend money on SFP+ transceivers, which can be quite pricey. I have found 10GBase-T to work well with existing Cat6 in-wall wiring in my house given relatively short runs. In fact, I use a couple of SFP+ 10GBase-T transceivers on primary switch going to my office.

 

[visortgw]

Mmm... I wouldn't advice doing this on a mixed network. Jumbo Frames is not a standard, it's not supported by many devices and has little benefits in modern networking. Before you reply it works on your Asus routers with great results - I run two 10GbE core business networks with links to data and application servers and none of them need Jumbo Frames for optimal performance.

So... When I first implemented multigig network at home, I remember testing MTU of 1500 vs 9000 (aka jumbo frame) for optimal performance — from what I recall, jumbo frame was the winner in a big way. I took some time today to reconfigure back to 1500 MTU throughout the network to discover that 10 Gbps connections slowed to a peak of 5 Gbps (i.e., roughly half!) — reverting to 9K MTU restored the full 10 Gbps (9.89 Gbps) peak transfer rate. 5, 2.5, and 1 Gbps connections also slowed down, but not as much percentage wise as the 10 Gbps. You may want to take another look at the performance of your two 10GbE core business networks...

 

[Tech9]

the capabilities of the gateway device set the tenor and tone of the Local network

No, you can have 100GbE LAN entirely run by a switch with VLANs, routing, DHCP, DNS, NTP, etc. connected to GbE firewall/gateway to WAN. You don't need WAN at all to run LAN, actually.

(i.e., roughly half!)

You have a device on your network capping standard Ethernet packets transfer. It can be NIC CPU, sending/receiving device CPU, a switch with lower packet forwarding rate, etc. This big difference in speed indicates issues when using standard Ethernet. Jumbo Frame is accidentally discovered band-aid solution in your specific case. It offloads something on your network not able to keep up with standard packet size, but non-standard packet size has to be end-to-end, all devices. It may speed up specific transfer you measure with and affect negatively something else with big probability. There are potential benefits of Jumbo Frame, but in specific conditions and the performance difference is not 2x. For mixed home network the recommended and default option is Disabled.

 

[degrub]

Last i recall, and this was some time ago, was that all devices on the lan had to support 9K frames and enabled. Otherwise, significant bandwidth reductions.

 

[Tech9]

all devices on the lan had to support 9K frames

This is correct. In short - source, path and destination have to support non-standard frames for a chance of better efficiency in exchange of potentially increased latency. Otherwise packet fragmentation will negatively impact the overall network performance.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Last i recall, and this was some time ago, was that all devices on the lan had to support 9K frames and enabled. Otherwise, significant bandwidth reductions.

This is incorrect. Just because, for example, one or two devices on your LAN are configured to use jumbo frames doesn't mean that all the other devices won't continue to work as normal. Also bear in mind that jumbo frames are an Ethernet only feature, they don't apply to wireless devices.

 

[degrub]

This is incorrect. Just because, for example, one or two devices on your LAN are configured to use jumbo frames doesn't mean that all the other devices won't continue to work as normal. Also bear in mind that jumbo frames are an Ethernet only feature, they don't apply to wireless devices.

i understand the path requirement. However, unless each port on a switch or router can be individually configured to 9k.... At least at the SMB or consumer level, i thought this was a global setting on the device ?

And for a packet going to/from a non-9k frame size destination, isn't the overhead of rebuilding required ?

 

[ColinTaylor]

i understand the path requirement. However, unless each port on a switch or router can be individually configured to 9k.... At least at the SMB or consumer level, i thought this was a global setting on the device ?

For Asus routers, yes you would globally enable 9k support for all of the ports (if the router supports 9k). But enabling 9k support doesn't change how ethernet devices using 1500 frames talk to each other.

 

[heysoundude]

As long as device also has SFP+ port AND you are willing to spend money on SFP+ transceivers, which can be quite pricey. I have found 10GBase-T to work well with existing Cat6 in-wall wiring in my house given relatively short runs. In fact, I use a couple of SFP+ 10GBase-T transceivers on primary switch going to my office.

Indeed, I'd be so bold as to suggest that most home runs are well under the 28m/100' limitation for full 10G speeds over UTP; the cabling/terminations just have to be up to it

 

[visortgw]

Indeed, I'd be so bold as to suggest that most home runs are well under the 28m/100' limitation for full 10G speeds over UTP; the cabling/terminations just have to be up to it

The plenum rated Cat6 that I had installed when building my house works just fine (all runs are under about 40') — I punched down cables into patch panel and crimped RJ45 connectors for wall jacks myself, and I have had zero issues initially as well as in my migrations from 1 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps to 5 and 10 Gbps.