The main issue is switches, really. 5Gbps USB NICs are available for $30 on Amazon, or $20 on AliExpress. 10Gbps NICS are $60, so not exactly crazy expensive either.
But switches haven't really kept up. A simple unmanaged 5-port or 8-port 2.5GigE isn't too bad, but anything beyond that gets tricky. 5GigE switches don't seem to exist, and you're already paying $500 for a budget-brand 10GigE switch with basic VLAN support. You want PoE? Forget it.
The irony is that at 10Gbps fiber suddenly becomes quite attractive. A brand-new SFP+ NIC can be found for $30, with DACs only $5 (per side) and transceivers $30 or so. You can get an actually-decent switch from Mikrotik for less than $300.
Heck, you can even get brand-new dualport SFP28 NICs for $100, or as little as $25 on Ebay! Switch-wise you can get 16 ports of 25Gbps out of a $800 Mikrotik switch: not exactly cheap, but definitely within range for a very enthusiastic homelabber.
The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive, and you can't exactly use it to power access points either.
> The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive
What do you mean by that? My home isnt wired for ethernet. I can buy 30m of CAT6 cable for £7, or 30m of fibre for £17. For a home use, that's a decent amount of cable, and even spending £100 on cabling will likely run cables to even the biggest of houses.
Isn't the expensive part more the assembly aspect? For Cat 6 the plugs and keystone jacks add up to a few dollars per port, and the crimper is like $20. I understand building your own fibre cables-- if you don't want to thread them through walls without the heads pre-attached, for example-- involves more sophisticated glass-fusion tools that are fairly expensive.
A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.
If you particularly want to use a raw spool, then yes that's an annoying cost. If you buy premade cables for an extra $5 each then it's fine.
A practical drawback to premade cables is the need for a larger hole to accommodate the pre-attached connector. There's also a larger gap that needs to be plugged around the cable to prevent leaks into he wall.
My ordinary home-centre electric drill and an affordable ~7mm masonry bit lets me drill a hole in stucco large enough to accept bare cables with a very narrow gap to worry about.
Where are you finding them for that cheap? OP is talking about 20GBP for a run of fiber. If I look at, for instance, Ubiquiti their direct attach cables start at $13 for 0.5 meter cables.
I was looking at patch cables. Ubiquiti's start at $4.80
Right you're still going to need a module at each end, that's what really drives up the cost compared twisted copper pair. That means either direct attach cables (starting at $13 for a half meter) or standalone modules (starting at $38 for a pair of 10G modules).
But that also applies to a spool of fiber, and I was talking about the specific cost difference between fusing and premade.
The price of modules was built into the first post mentioning fiber up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891559
The worry was that the actual fiber would be "stupid expensive", and nah it's fine.
My single mode keystones pass through were about the same price as cat5, and pre-made cables were no harder to run than un terminated cat5.
Thanks - I genuinely didn't know. I assumed that you could "just" crimp it like CAT6, but a quick google leads me to spending quite a few hundred pounds on something like this[0].
That said;
> A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.
If you were paying someone to do it (rather than DIY) I'd wager the cost would be similar, as you're paying them for 6 hours of labour either way.
[0] https://www.cablemonkey.co.uk/fibre-optic-tool-kits-accessor...
Apparently there is the https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/us-xg-6poe from Ubiquity. It only has 4 10GbE ports but they all have PoE.