Do Ed-Tech devices need multigig?

[TP-Link_Gary]

I am interested to find out how many screens, laptops, Classroom tech or phones need more than a 1Gb copper port?

[psydii]

It depends.

None (in general)

 

If it was 2005 though, 2.5/10Gig would give enormous opportunities around super-fast device reset/reimaging even allowing for swapping out software sets or personalised device image deployments at logon. Heck, everyone would agree that roaming profiles were the right solution!

 

It's 2025 though, so maybe devices in a media classroom where the raw footage is on a SAN?

 

If a school has a fast internet connection, everything has moved to the cloud and since almost no one has a multi-gig internet feed, having more than a gig to desktop seems unnecessary.

If a school has a slow internet connection, and is still server heavy because of it... maybe? But the theoretical 2005 scenario isn't well (at all?) supported by industry tooling because of the move to cloud and the rise of wifi (nobody is getting 1G+ to any devices in a room full of laptops, and nobody has ever demonstrated that even a modern AP can push 1g+ in total once its supporting more than a handful of clients) so that is moot.

 

The final concern I have is cabling.  If the endpoints and switches support 2.5G+ what happens when the cables don't... not everyone is has a Cat 6a network, not every cable is 90m or less.

 

 

HOWEVER. If we are talking about it as part of 15-30 year investment I'd want things spec'd for it because a multi-gig internet connection will become the norm, and so will 2.5G+ switches and endpoints.

[PotNoodleTech]

Frankly, no - end user devices do not need more than 1GB at the moment norprobably for the next 5 years.

 

Only exceptions to that could be specialist IT kit, video editing music editing, etc that may need to store large amounts of data on a server.

 

But normal PCs/Laptops/Chromebooks/etc?  No.

[FN-GM]

I would say the closest thing to the edge that could utilise 2.5gig are Wireless Access Points.

Edited July 21, 2025 by FN-GM

[TP-Link_Gary]

On 18/07/2025 at 19:30, psydii said:

It depends.

None (in general)

 

If it was 2005 though, 2.5/10Gig would give enormous opportunities around super-fast device reset/reimaging even allowing for swapping out software sets or personalised device image deployments at logon. Heck, everyone would agree that roaming profiles were the right solution!

 

It's 2025 though, so maybe devices in a media classroom where the raw footage is on a SAN?

 

If a school has a fast internet connection, everything has moved to the cloud and since almost no one has a multi-gig internet feed, having more than a gig to desktop seems unnecessary.

If a school has a slow internet connection, and is still server heavy because of it... maybe? But the theoretical 2005 scenario isn't well (at all?) supported by industry tooling because of the move to cloud and the rise of wifi (nobody is getting 1G+ to any devices in a room full of laptops, and nobody has ever demonstrated that even a modern AP can push 1g+ in total once its supporting more than a handful of clients) so that is moot.

 

The final concern I have is cabling.  If the endpoints and switches support 2.5G+ what happens when the cables don't... not everyone is has a Cat 6a network, not every cable is 90m or less.

 

 

HOWEVER. If we are talking about it as part of 15-30 year investment I'd want things spec'd for it because a multi-gig internet connection will become the norm, and so will 2.5G+ switches and endpoints.

Thanks for this.

[TP-Link_Gary]

54 minutes ago, FN-GM said:

I would say the closest thing to the edge that could utilise 2.5gig are Wireless Access Points.

That is what we are seeing as well - there are some niche requirements around screens.  

[DalekSec]

We only use 10GbE for our Marketing team for fast access to the NAS,

 

Pretty much everyone else is on WiFI, slowly moving to WiFi 7 with 2.5GbE uplinks to the AP

[machy]

I Think it also depends on how much extra would it cost. 

If its an extra £5 on a device for a faster Nic, it could be worth it over a long term project.

 

But if its £100 a device, its a harder sell for whats going to be useless for most people. 

[TP-Link_Gary]

3 minutes ago, DalekSec said:

We only use 10GbE for our Marketing team for fast access to the NAS,

 

Pretty much everyone else is on WiFI, slowly moving to WiFi 7 with 2.5GbE uplinks to the AP

Thanks - what APs are you using and are you putting in 2.5Gb switches as top of rack only or the whole cab?

 

[DalekSec]

1 minute ago, TP-Link_Gary said:

Thanks - what APs are you using and are you putting in 2.5Gb switches as top of rack only or the whole cab?

 

 

We use UniFi U7 Pro XG mixed with the USW Pro Max 16 PoE (is higher port models etc available but we don't need higher capacity ones) 

 

Unsure what you mean by top of rack / whole cab, they are 1 u and need an adapter to fit in a rack but we tend to wall mount them 

[Koldov]

On 18/07/2025 at 19:30, psydii said:

The final concern I have is cabling.  If the endpoints and switches support 2.5G+ what happens when the cables don't... not everyone is has a Cat 6a network, not every cable is 90m or less.

 

This point is interesting... we had our network infrastructure upgraded just before I started here back in 2010/2011 by the BSF. If they hadn't we might still be on Cat5 (or whatever was installed previously).

 

The funny part is that although they ran 'future proof' Cat6 everywhere and GB fibre links between the switches/core, all the actual edge switches they installed to connect devices were mainly Cisco 2960... so 10/100! 

 

It was a good few years after I started (in my defence it was my first IT job ever) that it finally dawned on me that our servers were sitting in a cupboard connected to a 2960... so I moved them and plugged them directly into the core cab.

[k-strider]

I have Zabbix installed and we watch our links in graphs form form all our main distribution cabs back to the core... we only have 1gb on 1gb bearer leased line internet connection so that is  our pinch point.  almost all our resources are stored on google drives - so for everyday the leased line is always going to be the pinch point... our internal lan has 10 or 25 gb links between main distributions points but are never saturated or even close...

 

if i run a restore (for off site backup purposes) via DPM that traverses across these links i see a spike but honestly it rarely goes above even 1gig even though the DPM server and target to restore (for off site backup) are linked up above that. 

 

so no i don't think 2.5 is needed to the desktop now.. i am trying to get all our capable APs on 2.5 which i will achieve by the October holiday and if I'm being honest these are the only devices really that might ever use that right now.  Re-imaging is a time where having lots of bandwidth is important and we still do it.... but having say 10gig now to the switch and 1 gig to each endpoint means that doesn't get massively slowed down... if the imaging server in our case FOG has that 10Gig link all the way to the end points where it drops to 1 but you are doing a room of 32 having endpoints at 2.5 isn't going to make it quicker... 

[PotNoodleTech]

98% of end user devices do not need more than 1 gig.

 

Some exceptions might be computer science, media and music creation of those devices are using NAS/SAN storage.

 

This may change, but for the forseeable as we only have 1 gig internet and most usage nowadays and moving forward is all internet - what's the point of having 500 devices each with 10 gig connectivity all going through a gynormous 1gig WAN bottleneck?  it would  be  a total waste of time and money.

[TP-Link_Gary]

1 hour ago, PotNoodleTech said:

98% of end user devices do not need more than 1 gig.

 

Some exceptions might be computer science, media and music creation of those devices are using NAS/SAN storage.

 

This may change, but for the forseeable as we only have 1 gig internet and most usage nowadays and moving forward is all internet - what's the point of having 500 devices each with 10 gig connectivity all going through a gynormous 1gig WAN bottleneck?  it would  be  a total waste of time and money.

Agree - Only use case we see is for APs.

[PotNoodleTech]

Yep APs are not end user devices though they are already infrastructure.  A different classification than pcs phones etc.