From a strictly physical cabling point of view, while 10GBaseT is likely to work on ordinary cat5e or cat 6 cabling at very short distances such as from a server to a top of rack aggregation switch, more successful results will be seen with cat6a.
Your typical cat 6A cable is significantly fatter in diameter, less flexible and takes up much more space inside vertical cabling management up and down the inside of a dense cabinet, compared to an ordinary figure-8 shaped duplex singlemode fiber patch cable. And even more space savings are possible with single tube/uniboot, 1.6 mm diameter patch cables. On Wed, Aug 7, 2024, 3:48 PM Saku Ytti <saku@ytti.fi> wrote:
On Wed, 7 Aug 2024 at 17:41, Brandon Martin <lists.nanog@monmotha.net> wrote:
Among the other reasons folks have given, the 10GBASE-T PHY has added latency beyond the basic packetization/serialization delay inherent to Ethernet due to the use of a relatively long line code plus LDPC. It's not much (2-4us which is still less than 1000BASE-T serialization+packetization latency with larger packets), but it's more than 10GBASE-R PHYs. The HFT guys may care, but most other folks probably don't give a hoot.
I think this is the least bad explanation, some explanations are that copper may not be available, but that doesn't explain preference. Nor do I think wattage/heat explains preference, as it's hosted, so customers probably shouldn't care. Latency could very well explain preference, but it seems doubtful, when hardware is so underspecified, surely if you are talking in single microseconds or nanoseconds budget, the actual hardware becomes very important, so i think lack of specificity there implies it's not about latency.
-- ++ytti