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.
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?
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!
I use a mikrotik RB5009 for my 2.5gb routing. It technically can hit 10gbps via routing.
Switching you can try https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in
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.
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.
Check out https://www.fs.com/c/25g-smb-switches-4247
FS have inexpensive switching and SFPs. Even if you get another brand switch I still recommend FS SFPs which can be ordered for compatibility with various vendor equipment.
