---
title: "When to Stop Using 10G SFP+ and What the Upgrade Path Actually Costs"
type: comparison
target_audience: sales
score: 9/10
---

The 10G to 25G or 100G upgrade conversation has a specific trigger point that most network architects know intuitively but rarely quantify: when uplink ports on access or aggregation switches sustain above 70 percent utilization for more than four hours per day, the economics of the upgrade shift from discretionary improvement to capacity-driven necessity. Below that threshold, 10G is cheap, operationally stable, and fully adequate for the workload. Above it, packet loss, latency variance, and increased retransmission rates are degrading application performance, and the cost of that degradation is larger than the cost of the hardware upgrade. The challenge is that most organizations reach the trigger point before they have done the cost modeling, which means the upgrade happens reactively and expensively rather than proactively and efficiently.

The 2026 per-port economics are more favorable for upgrading than they have been at any previous point in the technology's lifecycle. Compatible SFP+ SR optics for 10GBASE-SR run approximately $20 to $28 per port. Compatible SFP28 SR optics for 25GBASE-SR run approximately $35 to $45 per port — a premium of $15 to $17 per port for 2.5 times the bandwidth. Compatible QSFP28 SR4 optics for 100GBASE-SR4 run approximately $50 to $65 per port, a premium of $22 to $37 over SFP+ for 10 times the bandwidth. The per-gigabit cost at 100G is now approximately 20 percent of the per-gigabit cost at 10G. Stating it as an absolute per-port premium — $37 for the 100G versus 10G optic comparison — obscures how favorable the relative economics have become. The historical inflection point where 100G optic cost per port dropped below the 10G optic cost per port plus the bandwidth premium justification was 2022. In 2026 the economics of 100G are unambiguous for any application that generates over 3 Gbps of sustained traffic.

The full migration cost calculation includes four components that are routinely underestimated or omitted. The first is switch hardware: the access or aggregation switches must support the target port speed, which for a migration from 10G to 25G at the server access layer means replacing the switch rather than just the optics if the existing 10G switches do not have SFP28 ports. A 48-port 10G SFP+ switch with 4x 100G uplinks typically costs $2,000 to $4,000 to replace with an equivalent 48-port 25G SFP28 switch with 4x 100G or 2x 400G uplinks in 2026, depending on vendor and whether OEM or white-box hardware is used. For a 40-switch deployment, that is $80,000 to $160,000 in switch hardware alone — a cost that does not appear in the optic-cost-only analysis.

The second component is the cabling audit and remediation. OM1 and OM2 fiber, which was widely deployed for 10G SR connections in enterprise buildings from 2005 through 2014, is compatible with 10GBASE-SR at lengths up to approximately 33 meters on OM1 and 80 meters on OM2. Neither is compatible with 25GBASE-SR at those lengths — the 25GBASE-SR specification requires OM4 or OM5, and OM3 is only supported to 70 meters. An enterprise with 200 servers connected via OM1 patch cords to top-of-rack switches, each patch cord 2 meters long, might find that all 200 connections need OM4 replacement to support 25G SFP28. OM4 patch cords cost approximately $12 to $18 each in duplex LC format, but the labor to replace 200 patch cords in a live server environment during maintenance windows adds substantially to the real cost. Organizations that undercount this component discover it during the migration as a project-stopping surprise.

The third component is the operations labor for the migration itself. A 10G to 25G optic swap on a running server requires a maintenance window if the server has a single NIC port, or can be done hitlessly with a dual-NIC server that can failover. A 40-switch deployment with an average of 48 ports per switch is 1,920 port conversions. At a conservative estimate of 8 minutes per port including the optic swap, cable verification, link confirmation, and documentation update, that is 256 hours of hands-on operations labor. At $85 per hour burdened cost, that is $21,760 in direct labor — again, a cost that rarely appears in the optic-purchase-only budget that is often the only number leadership sees in the business case.

The fourth component is testing and validation time. A migration of 1,920 ports that is done without per-link validation produces a post-migration environment with some number of marginal or misconfigured links that generate support tickets over the subsequent 60 to 90 days. Those tickets cost roughly $200 to $400 in engineering time each. A migration with per-link validation before cutover costs 3 to 5 minutes of validation time per port but eliminates most post-migration tickets. The investment in validation is usually less than the avoided support cost for deployments larger than 200 ports.

The 25G versus 100G decision framework for server access versus aggregation layers has a clear structural answer that holds for most enterprise and cloud topologies in 2026. Server access ports connect servers to top-of-rack switches, and server NIC bandwidth requirements determine whether 25G or 100G is correct at that tier. A server running typical enterprise workloads — virtualization, database, application serving — with a 2x 25G bonded NIC produces a maximum of 50G of traffic toward the access switch, which makes a 25G access port (used in active-passive bonding) or a 100G access port (used in active-active LACP bonding with two 50G NIC ports) correct depending on the NIC configuration. Servers running storage-intensive or machine learning workloads with 200G or 400G NIC cards dictate 100G or 400G access ports. The aggregation and spine layers, which aggregate traffic from multiple access switches, need the bandwidth multiplication headroom of 100G or 400G regardless of access port speed.

A common planning error is selecting 25G server access ports based on the observation that existing servers only use 5 to 8G of bandwidth, without accounting for the server refresh cycle. Enterprise server lifecycles are typically 4 to 6 years. Deploying 25G access infrastructure today means the first generation of refreshed servers will arrive in 2029 to 2031. Server NIC bandwidth at that point will be dominated by 100G and 200G NIC options, and the 25G access infrastructure will be a bottleneck within 18 months of the server refresh completing. Deploying 100G access infrastructure today and accepting that current servers use only 25 to 30 percent of available bandwidth is the architecture that remains correct through the next full server refresh cycle and eliminates the access infrastructure replacement that would otherwise be required in 2030.
