Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop Cisco reckons it has invented "a whole new category of switches" called "micro-switches". Switchzilla suggested fibre-to-the-desk makes these devices sensible because it means you can run a connection all the way from one really big aggregation switch to a desktop or other device, instead of needing to put intermediary …
I have powerline as a trunk between floors. It was meant to be temporary until I get around running fibre (or possibly copper) between SFP ports. Much to my surprise it has been extremely reliable. So much so that I haven't bothered tearing walls and floors open for the cable run. House was partially rewired before which may help with regards to quality of the mains wiring. I did have to replace the kit once as one converter did die (old age or issues with power we had in the area for a while where it fluctuated and at times was on/off like a yoyo.
They can be quite sensitive to what else is connected to the circuit.
>I haven't got round to putting cat5 round my house even though I've lived here for 5 years and I'm very lucky I have 5ghz wireless
There is 5Ghz (802.11a) and there is 5Ghz (802.11ax aka WiFi6)...
If your broadband connection is sub 30Mbps and you are not using the WiFi for TV casting, you'll probably not notice the difference.
WiFi usually works well for devices that have to move around, such as phones, tablets and to some extent laptops. However, for anything that tends to stay in one place (be it a desktop PC, laptop docking station, NAS, STB, games console, etc) I recommend cabled connectivity. Mesh networks have improved things somewhat in dense residential buildings (since the transmit power of the individual mesh nodes can be lowered), but with cabled networks you don't have to worry about competing for limited resources with your neighbours.
Then again, I design and build cabled networks for a living, so I might be biased here. :-)
In office environments (remember those?) I've more or less given up, especially when in the modern, open-plan, free-seating, collaboration-cum-daycare setups. If people need to sit at different desks each day (or even move between "zones" during the day), bring their laptops to meetings et cetera, then a blanketing wireless hotspot network is a must. People who need access to specific environments or networks (e.g. testers, developers, people who need to simulate being customers...) would have dedicated pods with cabled networks dropped at those pods only. (This is never popular with office planners, but hey; what can you do?)
My initial comment including the laptops was mainly thought for home situations. While I myself do most of my work-at-home in the same place at a dedicated desk for a little over 12 years, there's always that beautiful-but-let's-be-honest-really-too-chilly day in late March when you can bring a cup of coffee onto the balcony...
Still, office environments are not the only environments where computers are used.
And even in office environments there are situations where laptops are not issued to people because they aren't allowed to move the computer away, or the form factor is inadequate. While even fixed PCs can have WiFi, when they are usually positioned under desks, inside specific furniture, etc. WiFi is not exactly the best technology to ensure smooth and fast connections, unless external antennas are not placed properly.
>While even fixed PCs can have WiFi, ... unless external antennas are not placed properly.
Got a problem with one client - they invested in a bunch of nano USB WiFi adaptors - yes the adaptor says 802.11n but connection stability is only a given if the adaptor is within 3 metres of a WiFI AP, place it 6+ metres away...
A couple of years ago I spoke to a group of people from a university who had been sold on the idea of fibre to the desktop. There were about a dozen of us in the meeting room. I asked how many were connected to a wired port - the answer was zero!
I accept that for specialist applications and devices, a wired connection is preferable. That may be high end fixed workstations with high bandwidth, low latency or high availability requirements. In terms of proportion of connected devices, my guess would be that this applies to <10% for most organisations. In some, it may be zero.
The same plays out in the home. I have been working on the WiFi on my work laptop with countless videoconferencing meetings over the last 10 months as many others have, too. I don't need a wired connection for my use case, and most devices quite happily connect and perform adequately that way, including UHD streaming for the TV. The exception would be the X-Box (or gaming PC) where a wired connection is preferable - primarily to reduce latency so you avoid being dead, but you just don't know it yet!
The problem with WiFi is that every workstation that is connected to the WiFi router is sharing the bandwidth. So if you have several users in an office, that does not leave much bandwidth *per user* at any time that everone needs to access the company LAN at the same time, even if data usage is usually very modest.
Plus I have found that on an industrial estate or business area, WiFi can sometimes become very slow or fail completely at random times - probably due to strong interference from outside the building. Even if the interference only lasts 5 minutes, it's not good when a customer phones in and is told, "Sorry I cannot access your account right now because our computers are down."
And you didn't get latency issues with videoconferencing or VoIP calls over WiFi? It takes a few people to create latency issues but with some top of the line models or pro models that allow QoS with WLAN connections too.
I had several examples of people working from home were a sudden traffic spike from their children crippled the WebEx calls.
And there are those at university who are desperate to get FTTD because they're moving 50TB data sets around, but the university IT department have only just ratified the spec for 10GbE over cat 6a and still consider fibre is only for vertical infrastructure, same as it was 25 years ago when they ran 4 pair OM1 to every floor of the building labelling it as "future proof" and "suitable for beyond the expected life of the building".
We were lucky enough to move into a house that was pre-wired for networking and connecting things like set-top boxes and game consoles really is a must for reliable data.
We do have wireless for our phones, but TBH I wire everything that I can primarily not for the speed, but for reliability.
You don't need many people in the vicinity with their own WiFi networks to swamp the neighbourhood to the point that it is not very practical to use.
AFAICT, those devices that have a USB-C port do not have NIC behind it — if ther were, the datasheet should mention, or more likely, crow about it. Seems to me that this would be an obvious thing to do, because it would allow a connected laptop to use a single cable for power and network.
Dell laptops seem to go that way - just one USBC for everything.
Indeed - I'm working on one right now. "Dock station" box tucked under the monitor riser, with monitor cable, various USBs (keyboard, mouse, headset, phone charge/connector cable), ethernet and power into it.
One single USB-C cable coming out of it, into the Dell laptop. It's getting all the inputs plus power that way, and driving the monitor as a second screen going the other way. Works like a charm.
HP as well. My work laptop is sitting next to me - a single USB-C cable from the dock. Drives a pair of 24" monitors, USB ports for headset, keyboard and mouse and an RJ45 to hook up to the office switch.
I think that's a fairly standard arrangement for modern high(er) spec setups. Certainly seems to be reliable once you have the correct drivers in place.
I thought that, but... two of the three are not intended to go on desks. They're intended to replace a Cat5 outlet, mounted half inside the wall, using a standard American back box. So the unpainted-metal- ugliness gets hidden inside the box, only the white part pokes out. And the fiber cable is hidden and protected inside the wall.
The all-white one with USB-C is the only real "desktop" model.
Actually, those small modular ones are pretty nice... I presume the "hidden" RJ45s are "through" ports enabling the hub to run FROM PoE delivered by tapping into existing cat 5/6 cabling that the fibre will be replacing. That's a pretty neat idea! And adding that to the Catalyst management... actually that's really tempting and quite inventive. Neat.
They're likely to also have usual Catalyst pricing so neat as it might be to use those (only in US since they're clearly designed for US socket backboxes to replace existing outlet), its not likely to be cheap. Having said that if you already run Catalyst environment and those integrate fairly seamlessly, that helps as managing infrastructure does have a cost.
I thought for a moment it meant a USB-C powered network switch. Which would actually be useful. I can't fathom why I'd want a network switch providing USB-C power only.
Turns out Ubiquity do the former already, which is something I'd actually want in my laptop bag.
https://www.ashbycomputers.co.uk/product/ubiquiti-usw-flex-mini-unifi-usw-flex-mini-5-port-smart-managed-usb-c-powered-gigabit-network-switch/
The Ubiquity hub is powered by either PoE (leaving 4 ports for user devices) or USB-C. It doesn't provide any PoE or USB-C power outlets for user devices. So given it's modest power demands, it and a power adaptor could fit in a laptop bag.
The Cisco hub is obviously trying to limit the proliferation of desktop power outlets. However, as noted by others it is an ugly box to have on any desk outside of an electrical engineering lab.
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