Comment by simoncion
9 hours ago
You've been able to get Intel X520 NICs [0], with transceivers included for ~40USD on Newegg for a long time. This is a little more than double the price of Newegg's cheapest single-port 10/100/1000 copper card, but even the cheapest available such card is three times your "chicken and egg"-solving price point.
I suspect the combination of the absence of cheap-o all-in-one AP/router combo boxes with any SFP+ cages and fiber cabling's reputation of being extremely fragile have much more to do with its scarcity at the extremely low end of networking gear than anything else.
[0] This is a two-port SFP+ PCI Express card
You can get copper ones for $5.99 (quality may vary):
https://www.amazon.com/1000Mbps-Network-Performance-Gigabit-...
https://www.amazon.com/SALAN-Ethernet-Portable-Internet-Conv...
But it's not competing with those, it's competing with the copper port which is already built into most devices.
Another thing that would work is something like this (also $5.99), but with one of the ports as fibre:
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Splitter-1000Mbps-In...
The point being you need some cheap way to plug in existing copper devices if you run fibre to the endpoints.
This plus $5 for a transceiver is pretty close at $15:
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet-Converter-Auto-Negot...
But +$15 and an extra wall outlet per endpoint is still an inconvenience, and if a two-port device with its own power supply can be made for $15 then where is the PCIe/USB to fibre adapter for <$10?