It's wild to me Time Machine works on your network. Are you just doing "first backups" over and over again, or have you somehow achieved the very rare state where Time Machine can run for, say, a week at a time without falling over?

Sorry, this is snarky and off topic, but I'm nostalgic for the days when Time Machine "just worked".

> It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now

I honestly just don't need it. Part of that is my ISP options top out around 1200Mbps, certainly. But I also just don't need that kind of speed inside my home. Streaming video needs at most 20Mbps or so, and I don't do much in the way of large file transfers. And when I do large file transfers, it's usually from or to the internet, and my home network is not the bottleneck there.

Getting Time Machine to work reliably over a network is painful, even the old Apple-made Airport with built in TM stopped working twice a year.

However, I have multiple Macs where I simply have a USB-C laptop SSD attached for Time Machine and they have worked without issue for years. These laptop SSDs come in huge sizes nowadays, and you don't need an especially performant one, so they can be pretty cheap.

You can definitely get stable 1gig throughput through WiFi. Doesn’t even need WiFi 7/6E - possible on 6. Ran a WiFi bridge like that for years and - no packet loss, consistent gig through and maybe +1ms latency

The gotcha is both ends needs to be good radios. So a router to router bridge tends to work better than router to end user device. Also had near LoS which presumably helped a ton

> It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now

10G was too big of a step up from 1G. The expense and power required made it unattractive. Only recently have the interfaces for 10G over twisted pair become reasonably low power.

2.5G and even 5G are in a much better spot. It's where I recommend most people start as a default.

>It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet.

2 things here. Upthread is the discussion about the old 10GBE modules that would constantly turn off due to overheating. Thats left a sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths.

I dont have anything in my home network that matters enough to have 10GBE anywhere. If I did, I would just get fibre. My wireless is fine for most purposes except some HD streaming, and plain old 1 gig works fine there.

> It was much more expensive than I thought it should be

For 10G with copper, short runs will work fine on most anything (10m), with longer working ok on cat-5e cable (20 - 30m or so).

So, if you have existing wiring, especially in wall, just give it a try first, before gutting things. Most 10g ethernet adapters give you BER stats to see the error rate.

And, if there are issues, multi-gig may be an option, where it will drop down to 5 or 2.5 gbps, which is same as 10G, but with a reduced symbol table to handle the lower SNR.

Heh it's honestly wild to me anyone needs over a gig. My work has a one gig fiber line supporting hundreds of employees and usage generally remains below 10%.

The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.

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