> Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.
Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.
> Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.
For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.
For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less PCIe lanes available to waste.
For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as there is a multitude of different options to provide high bandwidth connectivity.
> Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.
Yes but a hogwash of several gigabits sometimes does give you real-world performance of more than a gigabit.
> Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.
It's been a bunch of years that a single lane could do 10Gbps, and a bunch more years that a single lane could do 5Gbps.
Also don't ethernet ports tend to be fed by the chipset? So they don't really take lanes.
Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.
> Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.
For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.
For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less PCIe lanes available to waste.
For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as there is a multitude of different options to provide high bandwidth connectivity.