Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

What about PoE for 10G Ethernet? I see that there are some vendors (e.g. Ubiquity) that are offering devices with it, but I don't see it in the standards?

As of 802.3bt (PoE++) the standard includes support for “all standardized copper link speeds of up to 10GBASE-T.” The previous standard 802.3at (PoE+) added gigabit support.

So any 10GbE (and 2.5GbE) PoE/PoE+ devices out there are technically not to spec (lots of these on Ali Express) but I believe the the Ubiquiti 10GbE stuff is all at least PoE++. [1]

(They do have their own non spec labeled PoE+++ products though, which are really just “802.3bt Type 4” but they added another plus because that probably sounded better.) [2]

[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/us-xg-6poe, https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-poe-power/co...

[2] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-poe-power/co... , https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000263008-PoE-Avail...

I think every major vendor has had 10G PoE switches: Arista, Aruba/HPE/Juniper, Cisco, Extreme, and Fortinet for sure. The problem is there is little use case for 10G + PoE in the enterprise and even less for consumers. Ubiquity likes to tout it for the 10G APs... but, realistically, most are worried about airtime with APs, not 10G wired throughput from a single one when they have a thousand.

As a result, it tends to be relegated to the "high end switch which has every feature those one-off customers demand but costs an arm and a leg as a result" model/family. E.g. the only ones I ever sold were to a hospital that wanted to have select switches have 10G for radiology workstations but also wanted to still be able to plug 1G APs in without having to think about the port types. Radiology was covering the cost, so they didn't care it was a waste of money.

I find it useful in Broadcast Video Production (that’s where I end up using it most) and yeah with Wifi7 supporting > gigabit speeds I’ve seen some Wireless Access Points supporting it (though 2.5GbE Poe++ is more common there and practically speaking enough)

My question is this: what would you plug into POE that would need 10gbe?

A multi-radio WiFi 8 AP?

an all nand-flash NAS ?

What if you need a small switch somewhere due to the runs otherwise being too long?

I had no idea it could supply 90 watts or so. At that point you could power some pretty powerful terminals.

The new 14” MacBook Pro comes with a 70 watt charger. An M4 Air only gets a 35 watt adapter.

Basically seems like enough power is available to run something pretty powerful.

I have a WiFi 6 AP that can saturate a 2.5GB link when I test it with two devices. So far, for me the peak speed for an individual device was around 1.6GB

I have not yet tested WiFi 7 APs, but they are supposed to be even faster. The use-case for me is video editing over WiFi (I do have a 10GBe Thunderbolt adapter but hey, I like wireless).

You would likely need fiber to saturate it...

Ubiquiti sells Wi-Fi access points with 10GbE uplink ports that are PoE powered: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wifi/products/e7

In theory at peak throughput the access point might use close to 10 gigabit. But definitely more than 1G/2.5G.

Another smaller switch closer to the location of your devices.

Should work just as well as PoE for 1G ethernet. All four pairs are active data, but you should be able to add a DC bias between pairs and tap it off the transformer on the other side, just like 1G

It's really ~71 watts on the device end (not counting any inefficiencies in the device itself). Still plenty powerful to do a lot with, but also more limiting. Especially if you don't already plan on having a built in battery to handle bursty workloads for whatever reason the device needed a 10G port for.