Depends what exactly you want to do with the traffic. NAT v4 out to the internet at 25G? Yeah, nothing is going to beat the price for performance of a software box. Route+switch your home lab at 25G? You can get a 4 port 100G (up to 16 ports of 25G via breakout) line rate hardware offloaded performance using a $700 MikroTik switch which runs pretty damn quiet (and you can always throw in Noctuas if you really want it dead silent).

I am so jealous of your ISP situation! I’ve got symmetric gigabit from Verizon FiOS, which is great for what it is, but there is zero roadmap to anything faster in the US.

You can look at commercial offerings, but they charge way more for much less speed on a dedicated line. The cable folks are bragging that they hit 10Gbit in the lab, but no indication of when they will actually sell that. 25G is a fantasy.

The only reason we have this is because the people of the city voted for requiring every home to have fiber. It cost a lot of tax payer money but now the infrastructure exists and is run by the state owned power/phone company. Any private provider can use the infrastructure to offer what ever they want and since the fiber has no real limit on speed, it just depends on what's attached to the ends. Every home has 4 (usually 2 terminated) strands p2p directly to the POP.

There has been on going battle in the courts because the state owned phone company started using p2mp fiber connections for new runs which limit the maximum speed to what ever hardware they have installed in the split. However they have now backed off because it looks like the state will rule against them as it is anti-competitive. Also requires power for the split which is not very green all because they save around USD 50 per link.

So it isn't all roses and takes effort by the people but if you ever get the chance to vote on municipal fiber/infrastructure do it. Even here in Switzerland we have a lot of people who do not understand this and it took a lot of effort. They are even defending the phone companies use of p2mp.

Thanks for sharing! I agree that publicly-owned, privately-operate fiber to the home network is currently the gold standard. The Baby Bells are lobbying hard for regulatory barriers to this[0] but there are some success stories like Chattanooga [1].

I'm definitely interested to support these efforts. Wireless Wide Area Networks are not gonna cut it. If we get the baseline up to 10g, all sorts of new applications and architectures will be feasible.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

[1] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/

I use an i3 on an x11 Supermicro board with ecc memory. Upgrading to 10gbit was easy. Once hardware costs comes down I may go to 25 or 100.

I suspect that a modest X11 Supernicro board alone is more expensive that this whole NUC from the article.

Also, it's 2-3 times larger, just the board.

That is, it's a great thing to have, but it's a different class of hardware.

The x11 board was less than $350 and the i3 was $140. I think I spend more on RAM than the board.

Lovely post. I enjoyed reading it :)