STH Q4 2025 Letter from the Editor Getting Across the Finish Line

Every quarter, I like to do a small update to give our readers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening. Often, there is a big difference between what folks see publicly and the inner workings of STH, so I like to peel that back. This quarter felt like a labor to get across the finish line, but we are (almost) there.

Previous Updates

If you want to check out how this series has evolved, here are the links to the previous ones:

• STH 2019: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2020: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2021: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2022: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2023: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2024: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2025: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4

It is amazing how time flies.

STH Q4 2025 Letter Getting Across the Finish Line

I have been running STH for over 16 years, and doing these letters for seven of them. Sometimes I feel like the quarters end and we have just done a rush. This one felt different. Just to be frank, over the past few weeks, I have just been spent, with the goal of just getting across the finish line into Q1 2026. Realistically, most of that change is still the same challenge it was in grade school, remembering to write 2026 instead of 2025.

Q4 was just rough. I was so psyched about the Equinix Silicon Valley tour but that one got delayed until just before Christmas. Another tour video we shot also hit a snag, so it will go live in Q1. We had another video where we finished the article and video, but then a few days before go-live, we were told a new revision of the product was coming out and not to show the previous version. When we do videos, especially tour videos, they suck up a lot of time for the team.

For folks reading, and wondering what that means, and why I mean we barely made it across the finish line, is really what happened to the content plan in Q4. We ended up getting a huge backlog of very complex reviews. A great example was the NVIDIA ConnectX-8 C8240 800G Dual 400G NIC Review.

Instead of just doing a straightforward review, we had to get 800Gbps out of NICs that only support 400Gbps from a PCIe Gen5 x16 slot, the top we could get in modern servers. That sent us on a journey of custom internal cables, NIC tuning, external cables, and more. We even had to get IxNetwork running.

Effort-wise, this took months. What is more, the CyPerf server we were working with was also being used for reviews, like the UCG-Fiber Review, as well as doing profiling work for our IDS security testing. That profiling looks like it is done, but it has taken a lot of time on the box.

Sometime in November, as the tour pieces were being delayed, I was on the road for SC25 and preparing for Ryan Smith to come on board, when I realized our schedule was too heavy. We had too many pieces that were high-effort for our team to do in conjunction with doing what was becoming Q1 2026 content, and all of the profiling work.

Over the last two weeks or so, Ryan has helped us start to get a handle on the chaos and also right-size the projects we are taking on. On that note, Ryan is helping move our editorial schedule from an aspirational state to something we can (almost) execute.

That is going to be very important going forward. In 2026, we are going to keep doing tour content. At the same time, we will expand our network testing. If you did not know this, we have been working on getting really good network testing for years. We should probably do a piece on this at some point, but just to give you some idea of a few of the major efforts over the years:

• Pre-2020 we were using a few low-end boxes for iperf3 generation
• In late 2020/ early 2021, we had built a Dell Precision T7920, and a Cisco T-Rex based setup. That ended up running into challenges scaling past 10Gbase-T with the setup we built.
• Later in 2022-2023, we expanded the setup to FPGA-based T-Rex, but the challenge was that we were still generating stateless traffic, and it just sucked to use.
• We ended up purchasing a Spirent TestCenter, which could do multiple 10GbE ports of traffic. Just downloading the client software was an issue, and a call with Spirent did not solve our challenge. We never got this one working.

That gives some idea of the road to where we are. After a significant investment this year and a substantial amount of time, we now have a setup that works. We are now working to operationalize it better so we can increase the tempo. Currently, we need to get boxes through faster as we move onto our Fortinet, SonicWall, and other gateway devices. The challenge with those is that going back to retest the population would take quite some time. We may add another dimension to our testing for sub-800Gbps switches in 2026 as well. Stay tuned for that, as it is very exciting.

I am very excited about 2026, and I hope this adds another dimension. One challenge is that it is quite expensive to do the network testing program we are doing. This is one where I just wanted to do this, but I do not know how we are going to monetize it since we have no ad revenue from networking at this point. Still, this is something I wanted to do, so we are doing it.

A lot of this has been focused on networking. The first half of the year really is going to be the Clearwater Forest launch, and some consumer launches before the second half of 2026 sees major platform refreshes. Just know, we have two new Arm server CPU platforms already being tested, and that does not include the ASRock Rack AMPONED8-2T BCM motherboard we just reviewed. We also have a really neat 8x GPU AI server, and some Xeon 6 SoC servers that we will be reviewing in Q1 in addition to some more standard issue servers.

You may have also seen that we have some mini PC systems that we have shown on STH that we have not reviewed yet. I think we have three or four of those where the review is done at this point, and we just need to publish.

Just to give you some context, I think Ryan is now tracking 60+ products with reviews that the team is currently working on. If you combine that with CES announcements, NVIDIA GTC in March, and some of the news coming, we are in a really healthy position for Q1 content, even if nothing else came through the loading dock. Part of what Ryan is doing is helping to moderate the types of content we have so we do not end up with weeks of all fanless 2.5GbE network switch reviews.

Luckily, the pain of this quarter and Ryan’s work putting a better process together should help us end Q1 2026 not feeling like it is an ending goalpost like Q4 2025 feels like.

The Axautik Group Update and Substack

In Q1 2025, we rolled out our new analyst arm, the Axautik Group. This is the “Analyst” part of our Analyst-Influencer-Other model. We had quite a few popular pieces this quarter.

The Axautik Group will produce content designed more for the financial and executive communities. Some folks will be upset that AG content will be priced more for those communities. This is not a replacement for STH in any way. Instead, it will be designed to take much of what we learn by doing STH and turn it into formats we can monetize.

There is a question of whether this will be more of a subscription model or selling one-off reports. We started doing a Substack in August 2024. That Substack has been growing really well and is becoming an important revenue source in 2025. It is now runing at a clip of over 100K views/ month this quarter which is not bad.

In 2026, we are going to have a lot more AG Substack content, so get ready for that.

STH Labs: The Shorts Channel Update

As a 2024 project, we have the new STH Labs shorts channel here. That has been in a slow growth mode for the last few quarters.

We have hit 20,000 subscribers and this is growing decently well. Maybe we will focus on this a bit more in the new year.

Subscribe to the STH’s Newsletter and YouTube

Did you know STH has a free weekly newsletter that comes out on Saturday with curated “Top 5” pieces from the week? We know you cannot visit every day, so we can deliver our picks for weekend reading directly to your inbox. Subscribing to the newsletter is easy. Here is the form.

We are not selling your e-mail addresses and MailChimp is managing everything at this point so you can subscribe and unsubscribe from the list as you want.

We are not promoting the newsletter via overlays and pop-ups. Those are very effective, but they are bad for readers. I do not like them, so as long as I have a say, we are not going to have newsletter signup overlays. I run STH as something I would want to visit daily even if I did not work on it.

Finally, subscribe to our YouTube and check it out here. Since that is a big focus at this point.

Subscribing to STH’s newsletter helps you see my favorite pieces of each week and a preview of the next week. Subscribing to the STH YouTube channel also helps us demonstrate our reach beyond just the website. Sometimes, doing things like showing power consumption or fan noise is easier than writing about it. This has also been something important for STH over the past few months. We have to demonstrate reach, and simple things like subscriber counts help explain reach.

Final Words

Thank you to all of our readers, Substack subscribers, clients, the STH team, and our advertisers for making everything possible.

I did 98 flights this year, so I am trying to do only half days for Christmas Even and Christmas (when I am writing this) and spend some time with the family. Hopefully, all of your reading this have a great holiday season and stay tuned for 2026 as it will be a big one at STH.