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.
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.
You’d need a card capable of 2.5 gig and I haven’t been able to find one of those either.
My friend did find these which should work. I think I have a spare 2.5 gig nic somewhere that I could install into my server. I’ll have to do pcie pass through straight to pfsense since ESXi doesn’t support this el cheapo consumer grade nic. But it should work.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4JKSFW6
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C871SQVQ
This guy managed to modify a Broadcom NIC to support 2.5G SFP: https://github.com/Berzerker/google-fiber-2gbps-bypass
I mean it isn’t great to have to mod something, but at least it’s something
Edit: or apparently you can just ask for a 10G transceiver now: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlefiber/comments/tdgag5/google_fiber_now_installing_fiber_jacks_w10gbe/
Also I thought I should mention I don’t have Google Fiber so I can’t say if any of this works.
Awesome, I did not know about the 10gig they install now. We have someone coming on Tuesday and I was wanting to convince them to replace both the SFP module and the fiber box. But if we could just replace the SFP and get something that actually works then that’s great.