The standard 24 or 48 port SFP+ switch is 10 times the price of the equivalent switch with 24 or 48 port SFP. The same is true for the optics.
I never saw many cheap 48port 1U sfp switches as people bought copper at that speed so the ones that were around were relatively expensive. With 10G it's been the opposite, nobody was using copper so SFP+ is cheap. Only recently has copper 10G started to become common, a bit too late to be worth bothering with now and as there are no copper SFP+ Having new servers switch to copper instead of sfp is a nuisance Optic price depends on volume, 10G are cheap now so 1G being the old line that's about to become rare are dirt cheap.
2.5 and 4 Gbit/s SFP modules are available and cheap. It is just that ethernet ports will not take advantage of the extra speed.
Yes, they likely need new chips so may end up closer to 10G switch price
It would be an improvement if we can get 2.5 or 4 Gbit/s ethernet on SFP instead of paying for an all SFP+ switch.
I disagree, stick to 10G get the volume up and hence price down. Splitting the market enables the market to be tiered to keep some prices higher than they might have been. Same needs to happen with mm fibre, stop buying that junk and make SM even cheaper. brandon