> My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet.
If you decide you only need 50 meters, that reduces both power and cable requirements by a lot. Did we decide to ignore the easy solution in favor of stagnation?
I'm not sure what you're saying. The cable length is largely fixed/determined by the building you're running cable in. I'd rather spend an extra $100 on cable than start ripping open walls/floors/ceilings to get a slightly more optimal run length.
If it's new construction or you already have everything ripped open it's less of an issue.
I'm not saying 10gig itself should have been range-limited. I'm saying if the reason it was expensive was cable limits and transmit power, both of those can be solved by cutting the range. And if cutting the range could have given us cheap fast connections 15 years ago we should have made it a variant. It could have become the default network port, and anyone that wanted full distance could have bought a card for it.
Instead we waited and waited before making slower versions of 10gig, and those are still very slow to roll out. Also 2.5gig and 5gig seem especially consumer-oriented, so for those users a cheap but half range 10gig would be all upside.
And 40gig can't reach 100m on any version of copper, so it's not like 100m is a sacred requirement.
If you decide you only need 50 meters, that reduces both power and cable requirements by a lot. Did we decide to ignore the easy solution in favor of stagnation?