10Gbps Internet: Super Broadband’s Secrets

Guys, I did it! I recently upgraded my home to a 10Gbps Fiber-optic broadband plan via Sonic. Yes, that’s 10Gbps Internet or ten times the speed of Gigabit.

And no, it’s not expensive, just $40/month (no contract required), which is very reasonable, if not cheap, in the USA. To put things in perspective, I’ve been paying almost double the amount for a Gigabit Comcast Cable connection.

So, where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic Fiber-optic is a great deal. I’d recommend it. And that’s the good news. The not-so-good is, well, there’s more, a lot more, to getting 10Gbps than just the broadband subscription.

This post will talk about that and set some expectations. But in a nutshell, 10Gbps is literally the Gigabit broadband ten times over.

Most importantly, this so-called “quest” for 10Gbps Internet is to satisfy my fabricated vain achievement — so I can say I’ve gotten that milestone. Above certain Gbps, the broadband speed makes zero difference in real-world usage.

Dong’s note: This post contains a referral link, available to all Sonic Fiber-optic subscribers, that would give the account holder some credit for new signups. This is not a review of the Internet service.

10Gbps Internet: Broadband is no longer the bottleneck

For years, the sub-Gigabit broadband connection has always been the bottleneck in our connection to the outside world — it’s still is for many, if not most citizens of the world.

No matter how fast your Wi-Fi is, if your Internet is 100Mbps, then you can’t download anything faster than 100Mbps, on a good day.

Then we have Gigabit-class Internet — something that’s between 500Mbps to 1Gbps. But at the same time, we also have Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E that currently can deliver up to 2.4Gbps of local speed – that’s the currently top-tier four-stream (4×4) at 160MHz — or Gig+ sustained real-world rates.

As the result, it’s always been incorrect to use an Internet speed test to gauge your Wi-Fi speed — chances are the former is the bottleneck. I ranted long and hard about that in this post on speed testing.

A 10Gbps — that’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet, a.k.a 10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE — broadband connection changes all the above. The Internet is now the fastest pipe in your home. But it also brings about other issues for those wanting to get the absolute most out of their connection.

The question is, how do we know we actually get 10Gbps? Let’s me break it right away: we can’t.

At best, we can only get close 10Gbps since the equipment has overhead, and 10Gbps is the highest ceiling speed grade any home router or switch can handle.

In other words, if you want to see a real 10Gbps sustained rate, you will need equipment that can handle 20Gbps or faster. Now that’s just too much.

And even when you just want a “sorta 10Gbps” connection. Things can be challenging, too. I speak from experience.

Let’s start with the hardware that I use.

10Gbps on the client end: Wired only, and it’s tricky

Above is a screenshot of my current Internet speed. It’s fast, alright, but you’ll note that it’s not 10Gbps, but just about 2.5Gbps. Did I get ripped off? Nope.

My desktop computer used for the test — a relatively compact gaming machine powered by the Asus ROG Strix Z590-I motherboard — has a built-in 2.5Gbps network adapter. And the Internet connection saturated that Multi-Gig connection.

Eventually, there will be a motherboard with a built-in 10Gbps network port. For now, the only way to get a 10Gbps network on a computer is via a PCIe add-on adapter.

That was not an option with my Z590-I since I already used its only qualified PCIe slot for a gaming graphic card.

How about Wi-Fi, you might ask?

As I mentioned above, even the best-to-date Wi-Fi connection can’t go over 2.4Gbps of ceiling speed. So it’s virtually impossible to experience 10Gbps via Wi-Fi — not even a quarter of that.

When (or if) 4×4 clients are available, we’ll get some 4.8Gbps of ceiling speed out of Wi-Fi, still less than half of 10Gbps.

So, if you want to experience 10Gbps on a computer, upgrading it to a 10Gbps wired adapter is the only way for now. And for my testing, I’ve had a couple of computers running these adapters for a few years.

But even then, that’s only half of the equation.

10Gbps Internet on the router end: Limited options

There are about two dozen of home Wi-Fi routers that come with Multi-Gig wired capability. And, not to brag, I’ve reviewed them all except for the latest eero Pro 6E, which I deliberately avoided.

Of those, there are just four that are 10Gbps-capable. (Hit the button below to view their ratings and review links). The rest can only handle the 5Gbps or 2.5Gbps speed grades and are clearly out of the question in this glorious quest.

Of the four above, only the Asus RT-AX89X and QNAP QHora-301W have two 10Gbps ports — we’d need one for the WAN connection and the other for the LAN side.

Considering the Asus is a much better router in terms of hardware specs and features, I decided to go with it.

(I used the QNAP briefly and it delivered a similar 10Gbps experience as described below.)

The RT-AX89X has two 10Gbps ports. One is a Multi-Gig (Base-T), and the other is an SFP+.

The Fiber-optic ONT Sonic put in my house, like most ONTs, used an RJ45 port, so I used the router’s 10Gbps Multi-Gig port for the Internet connection. The WAN side was straightforward.

On the LAN side, things were a bit more complicated. I had no computer with an SFP+ port and didn’t want to get an adapter. That, plus the fact I’d like to use more wired Multi-Gig devices, meant I’d need a switch.

10Gbps-capable switches: Still very expensive

While Gigabit switches are a dime in a dozen and relatively affordable, Multi-Gig switches, especially those capable of 10Gbps, are still scarce. And they are all expensive.

And I needed one that has an SFP+ port. Of all switches I’ve reviewed, the Zyxel XS1930-12HP is the only one that fits the bill, so I used it. If you wonder, this switch’s current price is around $1000 and it’s actually less expensive than many of its peers.

There are more affordable Multi-Gig switches, but they have mostly lower-grade ports (2.5Gbps or 5Gbps).

It’s worth noting that all switches have overhead, and the Zyxel didn’t deliver the full 10Gbps in my testing. The chart above shows the performances of all Multi-Gig switches I’ve reviewed.

That said, so far on the equipment front, I’ve used the following:

I’ve gotten these devices for review and testing purposes over time, but if you buy them today, that’d cost you some $2000.

(What I didn’t tell you is I also use a pair of ZenWiFi Pro ET12 as my Multi-Gig Wired mesh satellites. But you can skip this since, clearly, I’m nuts when it comes to networking.)

And that brings us to my actual Internet speed out of my 10Gbps Fiber-optic broadband, using this souped-up set of equipment.

My real Multi-Gig Internet speed

Upon completing the installation, the friendly Sonic tech did a test at the ONT with his special equipment.

“8 gigs down and 5 gigs up,” he said, “It’ll probably get faster once the ONT has been updated. Give it a day or two. It’ll be different.”

And he didn’t lie. During the next couple of days, using the equipment listed above, I generally got speeds between 6Gbps to 8Gbps in both directions.

Those weren’t exactly 10Gbps but, to be fair, they might have been the speed of any of the parts involved, be it the router, the switch, or the network adapters.

I could eliminate the go-betweens and other devices that might be using the broadband connection by connecting one of my 10Gbps-capable desktops to the ONT directly to do a real test, and I did think about that.

But it proved to be too much work due to the layout of my home. (Among other things, I couldn’t run long cables willy nilly and risk having my children, or worse, my wife, tripping over them.)

Most importantly, I didn’t care. Even on my office “work” desktop mentioned above, 2.5Gbps is already crazy fast — that’s more than 2.5 times the speeds of Comcast on the download pipe and hundreds of times faster on the upload. Anything above that is ridiculous.

One thing is clear, Fiber-optic broadband is so much better than cable. The speed aside, I consistently get ping and jitter values — those that determine the quality of a connection — below a few milliseconds. In many tests, they were at zero.

My Comcast Cable connection generally has pings at 15 milliseconds, and Comcast does impose a monthly data cap of 1.25 terabytes. Sonic has no monthly data cap, and with that comes the feeling of freedom.

Multi-Gig Internet and its hidden benefits

In any case, my broadband connection is now easily in the Multi-Gig realm. The crazy speeds, apart from being, well, fast, also brings in some benefits that you can’t have with sub-Gigabit.

QoS is (mostly) no longer applicable

The first is probably the fact you don’t need to use Quality of Service anymore. I wrote about QoS in this post, but it’s a function that prioritizes the broadband connection to prevent a device from hogging all the bandwidth.

Considering most devices has Gigabit or Wi-Fi at best, the network adapter itself is now the bandwidth guardrail. For example, if you host a BitTorrent client on a computer with a Gigabit connection, the client can’t use more than 1000Mbps of Internet bandwidth anyway.

If you use multiples clients like that, then it might still be a good idea to use QoS, but you get the idea.

And by the way, in my case, the Fiber-optic also improves real-time communication a great deal, likely thanks to the better connection quality mentioned above.

A new level of personal server

Thanks to the much aster upload speed, you’d note that all personal remote server applications work much better.

My business partners and I use several Synology NAS servers in multiple locations and sync data between them as off-site backups. The super-fast broadband makes this much better. At least on my end.

And if you use a media server, such as Plex, streaming to a remote part is now just like using Netflix or Hulu in terms of speed and video quality. Actually, it was better.

The Internet speed test is now applicable for local Wi-Fi

This part applies directly to what I do on this website. From now on, I can confidently use the Internet as the base to test local Wi-Fi, and I’ve tried that with the Netgear WAX630E.

I’ll keep my current test methodology but knowing that the Internet is no longer the bottleneck will make my work much easier.

Among other things, I’ll be able to determine if a router is consistent on both LAN and WAN sides, if its WAN port is actually Multi-Gig or not, etc. Rest assured that I’ll add this new information in future reviews.

The takeaway

Again, it’s impossible to get a real sustained 10Gbps connection — we need faster equipment to have that. It was likely for that reason, Sonic told me that my broadband was “up to” 10Gbps. And so far, that proved to be a genuine promise.

So 10Gbps broadband is great. Just be aware of the hidden costs if you want to truly experience all or even just most of it. But ultra-fast broadband still works great if you use existing Gigabit equipment.

In daily usage, though, any Internet connection faster than1Gbps makes no difference in most cases — the remote party or those in between will be the bottleneck anyway. And the 10Gbps pipe only means you can have multiple such connections simultaneously.

As I said before in the post about Gigabit Internet, it’s not how fast a connection is but what you do with it that matters — you should appreciate and make the most of what you have is the point. Speaking of which, I’ll still keep my “slow” Gigabit Cable connection for now. Dual-WAN has its unique benefits, and that’ll be another story.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about how fast your Internet is, hit the Go button below to find out. And don’t be jealous!

• This test transfers data between your device and an Ookla test server.