Is anyone aware of any switches (or media converters) with SFP+ ports capable of negotiating 2.5Gbit speeds that don’t cost an arm and a leg?

I have the Google Fiber 2 gig plan and I’d like to get rid of the fiber box since they’ve been extremely unreliable and our 4th one has just died. Unfortunately in order to get the full speeds I need something that can take a 2.5 gig SFP+ connection. 10 gig will not work, and 1 gig obviously only gets me half the speed.

I’ve found a few Unifi compatible switches, but they’re between $600 and $900 which is just insane for all we need.

Media converter wise everything I’ve found is 2.5gig on the rj45 side and 10 gig only on the SFP.

Something has to exist out there right? It can’t only be Google who are the freaks using 2.5 gig SFP modules.

  • MSids@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    Last I knew Google Fiber used PON. With PON a provider would not allow a subscriber to use their own equipment.

    The above is important because PON is essentialy one bidirectional fiber from a central office serving dozens of customers in the field. If you plug in with something on the same wavelength you could interrupt all the other customers on your PON. In PON since your fiber is not dedicated all the way back to the CO, they would have no way to know what device was trying to connect to their access node. They would need to configure your devices Mac address similar to how DOCSIS cable internet works.

    If they ARE using dedicated fibers back to the CO then that would more likely be Active Ethernet, a slightly different technology. They would probably still tell you no because of how the CPE (the box at your house) needs to be remotely configured by the access node for shapers etc.

    Is it possible that you have a power issue at your house that is causing the failures?

  • peregus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Have a look at the Mikrotik switches (the ones that can run routerOS like the CSS610-8P-2S+IN). I don’t know much about fiber and up to now I didn’t even know that the 10Gbps SFP+ transceivers couldn’t work at 2.5Gbps, but have a look at the Optcore Sober transceivers. I’ve just found them doing a rapid searche, I don’t know them.

    But if you could go the OPNsense route that @ostsjoe suggested, that would be better!

  • ostsjoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have no way to test this with the equipment I have, but what about opnsense on an x86-64 box and throw an sfp+ pcie card in there. You could then in theory turn off auto negotiation and set it to 2.5g. Has anyone out there tried this?

    I’ve been running opnsense with my CenturyLink 1g setup, though I’m still using their ont to convert to copper, and been very happy with it.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
    PoE Power over Ethernet
    Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

    [Thread #87 for this sub, first seen 28th Aug 2023, 12:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Be wary of the unifi ones. I just got the Unifi enterprise 8-poe and the SFP overheats constantly. There’s a bug in the firmware where the fan doesn’t kick on, from the forums I read it’s because “users don’t like fan noise”, but uh, I also don’t like my switch crashing and freezing to where I have to do a full power cycle to get it back on. If you go unifi read reviews first, get something with active cooling.

    If it’s just on the first bit of your network, could you do a pfsense/opensense box with a 2.5gig card? Then everything after that could be whatever you need

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Finding a 2 gig capable card is even more of a problem. I’ve found switches capable of 2.5 gig, eventually I found media converters capable of 2.5 gig. But I haven’t been able to find a 2.5 gig capable SFP+ card.

  • gingerman@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I don’t have an exact answer for you but went through this a few years ago with the help of a thread on DSLReports

    There’s a lot of info there and can be a bit tough to follow but it should get you what you need.

  • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    10G SFP+ devices should be able to negotiate down to 2.5G. It’s 10G SFP devices that aren’t able to negotiate lower speeds, as 10G actually came a generation before 2.5 & 5G. I think it was something like it was realised that it was overkill in many cases.

    • BritishJ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      SFP+ is 10Gb/s not SFP. The ASIC needs to be capable of the speeds for the transceiver to work. SFP+ is the name given for 10Gb/s module and transceivers.

      So if a device supports SFP+ it supports 10Gb/s. It doesn’t automatically mean it will work with 5 or 2.5Gb/s transceivers.

      • gramathy@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        The whole point of 2.5 and 5 is to support higher speeds over existing lower-rated cabling so I don’t see the point of multigig fiber connections when 10g fiber runs on the same cables that 1g fiber does

        They make make it but it seems silly.

        • DrinkMonkey@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Their enterprise line has switches with 2.5Gb ports. They’re particularly popular among the rack-porn crowd as they have all their ports in a single line instead so they can have just one patch panel and all the ports line up nicely. It only does POE+, not ++, which would be nice for running a POE switch in the garage that could drive both an access point and some cameras.

          They also sell SFP+ modules that do 10/5/2.5 Gb