During a renovation, I ran 6-strand single-mode fiber to various locations in my home. I found the termination process (using an inexpensive Chinese fusion splicer) to be somewhat of a pain, especially for connections behind wall jacks rather than in a proper splicing cabinet.
What I found worked best was to buy a bunch of 50 meter pre-terminated plenum-rated cables and cut them in half. I'd plug the pre-terminated ends into the wall-jack coupler, then weave the cut end through the walls back to the splicing cabinet, where I'd leave several turns of slack and fusion splice the pigtail which I plugged into the patch panel.
I have a very few fiber runs, but I just used premade cables and didn't cut them, just made bigger holes. It worked.
If I were to do a major rebuild or new build I might consider asking around, finding someone with a fiber melter willing to stop by in the evening might be worth it.
Fun fact: the outdoor fiber run these days is NOT terminated on site; the installed measured how far away the box was, and then grabbed a pre-terminated roll of fiber that was a bit longer and used that. He said the ISPs don't trust them to terminate fiber, so they just have a bunch of various lengths in the truck, and connect them together, even into the house. So my modem is directly connected to a pre-terminated fiber cable that goes all the way through the ground (shoved into a slit made with a large blade tool) and off into the nearest box (which is just a dry empty box) and then into the pipe to the actual connector about half a block away.
Depends on the ISP and the teams doing the install. I used to work middle mile fiber along roadways from town to town and every bit of that was spliced on-site. There were very few exceptions where we would spec a pre-term cable for cell towers and certain buildings but we would often be splicing inside a building.
When they deploy FttH here in the Netherlands, it seems that the first crew just puts unterminated fiber under the sidewalk tiles, and then you make an appointment for someone to come along and splice it into your utility closet.
Technicians can be trained to fusion splice at a consistent quality. It's just cheaper to order pre-terminated SC APC cables of various lengths and have them plug them in. FTTH deployment is constrained by financing not tech.
Interesting, when I got fiber they pulled a fiber without a connector inside the home and welded a pigtail to it with the machine described in the article.
> He said the ISPs don't trust them to terminate fiber, so they just have a bunch of various lengths in the truck, and connect them together, even into the house.
I suspect it’s more about simplifying the process and the equipment they have to carry.
Proper fiber gear has come down a lot in price, but it’s still expensive to put it in every truck, replace it every time someone drops/loses/steals it, and deal with servicing and maintaining equipment.
Keeping an inventory of standard lengths that get replenished in the trucks at night by someone who needs virtually no training to manage inventory can shave a lot of costs and headache from an operation.
I did the same thing running fiber in my older house, and was virtually always able to find a premade within a reasonable number of feet of the length I needed. Yeah, I had to widen a few holes to snake the connectors thru, but it wasn't horrible and all in places you don't see it. If it was new construction, I'd certain pay a few extra $$$ to have a pro do it, because I don't trust me to do a good enough job terminating fiber.
I think I paid $800 for a brand new SignalFire AI-8, but that was 5 years ago. Compared to the $9,000 Fujikura units used by pros, it was inexpensive :)
This X100. Monoprice fiber is crazy cheap. I just did an estimate of the run I would need and then got the shortest length that was at least that plus 10%.
I was averaging around 15 minutes per splice. I think I spent more time pulling the cable through the walls and attic, and that would have been a huge pain with the pigtails still attached (not to mention the increased risk of damaging the fragile pigtails).
I'd never terminated fiber before, so I just watched some youtube videos to teach myself. The main trick was making sure that the cleaver was cutting clean, and the fusion splicer would do most of the rest of the work. Every so often the splicer would detect a bad splice and I'd have to re-do. Since I did the work 5 years ago, none of the splices have had any issues, even the ones painfully terminated in a cheap splice tray behind the wall before I figured out the pre-termination trick.
I have slowly added fiber room by room to my house, have all my routers and work desks connected at this point. I 100% used pre-terminated. Don't think I even spent $200 in cables all in.
I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals (so not pro gamers, not folks running some automated trading from their home or whatever corner case there is) that can't be covered by latest wifi. Even with all the interference everybody talks about yet I struggle to see it happening for us. And there is always next version just behind the corner, ie v7 looks very nice on paper.
I go the opposite direction, will eventually rip out/cover all the network cable outlets previous owner put in in various rooms.
> I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals (so not pro gamers, not folks running some automated trading from their home or whatever corner case there is) that can't be covered by latest wifi.
Wired 10G connections are vastly superior for file transfer. It's not even close.
Even 1G wired connections feel substantially snappier for remote desktop use than a high-speed WiFi connection 10ft away, in my experience.
But for browsing the internet and gaming? WiFi is great.
Depends what you're accessing. A top of the line SSD can easily reach speeds of 5 GB/s in the real world, for which you'd need 50GbE for full saturation.
I had bad latency issues on WiFi with wireless. It made video calls bad. The problem went away completely with a MoCA wired connection.
The fact that the computer in question is an ancient PC running Windows 10 on some old WiFi standard surely does not help. Probably a new computer would fare better on WiFi.
But going wired allowed me to keep using ancient hardware that is practically free. A better PC would have cost hundreds of dollars more.
WiFi is fundamentally shared media. If you're in a relatively populated area and competing with a ton of neighbors all streaming 4k and playing CoD, there comes a point where no amount of new computer will make it faster.
I've been surprised by how many random devices experience terrible wifi interference. I just bought a new Mac Mini that experiences a ton of interference, sometimes going offline completely. I can browse the web fine but I can't screen share on Zoom or even speak in Discord without noticeable lag multiple times a minute. It's not in some Faraday cage or anything, it's just sitting on my desk not 3 feet from my Ubiquiti access point. But I do have a USB dongle plugged into it which I have heard can cause a lot of interference. My phone, even when sitting on top of the Mac, gets a solid 800 mbits down. It's silly to need an ethernet cable for 3 feet of distance from my switch but here we are.
On my 2017 macbook pro, the wifi drops completely when I plug in a usb3 external hard disk. The connection is still up but data doesn’t get through. And because the connection remains I have to manually switch to 5.5GHz
Accessing a NAS at decent speeds. Even for a single 7.2k rpm drive that's rated at 120 MB/s, a gigabit link speed is a bottleneck (120 MB/s = 960 Mbit, add protocol overhead and you're over 1 Gigabit). If you have any kind of array (zfs, raid ...) of drives you need more speed again. If you have an SSD cache (an option even in Consumer NAS now) not having a multi-Gbit/s link is essentially a waste.
Of course you can send 10GbE over copper, but the needed amplification is a major heat source. So if you're running cables anyway you might as well run fiber and be prepared for 100GbE.
Mainstream copper connections can't really go above 10Gbps. Also 10GBASE-T runs hot. If you think you will ever need more speed then just running some fibre makes sense - just a transceiver upgrade required in the future for higher speeds.
I remember when it was "mainstream copper connections can't really go above 100Mbps" and we ran fiber. Not that there isn't some physical limit to how much data you can reliably push down 4 pairs of copper (that sort of physics isn't my bag), I just wouldn't bet against running 100G over Cat13++ or whatever standard emerges down the road.
But, yeah, fiber is always gonna be more 'future proof' and damn my 10G gbics do get annoyingly hot.
You can get a good idea of the current state of the art in pushing bits over copper in internal PCIe cables. Those are short, thick, and pricy and the connections even within a single chassis often needs a retimer / redriver chip [0] to recover signal integrity.
That's some pretty cool tech, but 'State of the art' wasn't really what I was talking about. I mean at some point, there's likely a physical limit to how many bits per second that can be pushed down an 4-pair copper networking cable of current girth no matter how clever we get. My bet is that it's north of 100G; a beer to the winner.
> I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals … that can't be covered by latest wifi.
My home WiFi network is running Enterprise grade Aruba hardware using latest WiFi spec gear, where I did intelligent zone planning with no rooms not near max RSSI for devices, proper handoffs between APs, and 2.5GbE or faster backhauls to the controller, yet can still get SIGNIFICANTLY faster access to my NAS over even gigabit Ethernet. Hell, I can’t even consistently have my internet connection be the bottleneck over WiFi.
So yes, “mere mortals” can saturate a consumer grade wifi ap quite easily, using latest specs or not.
No it doesn't. Concrete floor and structural walls, rest is some form of bricks, typical European modern building (Switzerland), absolutely good enough wifi signal in all rooms, on 2 storeys, no repeater or anyhow enhancing the reach. Router is in a far corner of whole structure, as far as possible from being in the center.
This is just basic phone company wifi router provided to us. It works well with all laptops, at least 20 different phones based on various visitors, desktop with some basic external wifi antenna (this one is farthest, 11m and 1 wall).
But we don't have any 'smart' crap in our house, no zigby stuff, no fridges with tablets in front or similar.
Interesting how many downvotes this triggered on all of my comments on HN that could still be downvoted.
As a former network engineer ... at home I've just gone with wi-fi. A nice mesh system isn't very costly and depending on your situation IMO is the most bag for the buck and a whole lot less hassle. Good mesh systems are crazy fast / capable now, I'm not sure I'd see any real performance increase if I bothered with rewiring the house.
Agreed on that. A friend of mine was recently renovating his house on a budget, and I pushed him really hard to put in ethernet. Somewhere on our third discussion, I realized:
- he lives on a 5acre tract in the absolute middle of nowhere. He can see other houses from his, but not many--and subdivision of those properties is prohibited.
- neither he nor his family are big gamers or streamers
- the best internet service he can get is Starlink, by a significant margin.
In a low-noise environment like that, wi-fi was going to work fantastically well for all his anticipated uses and then some. There was literally no point in installing Ethernet for him, while I've been longing for ethernet for years.
I had a mesh network before and it really sucked. You're cutting your Wi-Fi bandwidth in half or even more a lot of the time. I replaced the backhaul with MoCA and I'm much happier with it.
It depends on what gear you get. Some gear do backhaul over a different channel which doesn't cause reduction in WiFi bandwidth on the channel being used for end-user devices. E.g. some Netgear Orbi models do this such as the one I use at my home.
Mesh with wired backhaul is a great sweet spot if you can manage it. When we renovated our house I had Ethernet run just from the router location to the spots where the WiFi meshes would be. Bandwidth, latency, and coverage are all excellent, with minimal wiring.
what device would you recommend? as of now I use dLAN my one room where I use to play video games a lot. low latency is king but I only get 20MBit/s out of the 500 that the ISP delivers to the router.
I use Amplifi Aliens. They are expensive but have been rock solid for me. I do way more videoconferencing than gaming and it’s been a great experience.
> Unlike copper Ethernet cables, which are very bulky, warm up, [...]
Ummmm warm up?? You're really using it wrong :) Unless you try to really pump a lot of PoE++ power over totally inadequate CCA perhaps (copper-clad aluminium rubbish), it really shouldn't warm up at all.
The other drawbacks are true though.
Ps never use CCA for PoE for anything but patch-length runs unless you like dealing with random brownouts. Unfortunately real copper cable is very hard to find these days.
Sure, if everything is installed properly with proper cables you'll be fine. But if there is any damage the cable could get hot. With fibre you don't need to spend a single thought on fire safety.
In my experience, if you go anywhere near max length on Cat6(a) and need SFP+ modules, those modules will get insanely hot and probably start dropping packets.
10gb Ethernet is known to be power hungry. The latest wifi standards can achieve faster than 1gb speeds (at least on paper, I suspect none in the real world can do that). If you have outbuildings you want to network (or perhaps even just a outdoor access point) then fiber is much safer from lightening and so would be worth it. If you have two NAS systems you will probably want the speed of fiber between them to make for faster backups. Only the outdoor application seems compelling of the above though, and most homes don't have that.
That said, this article looks more like an office or apartment building than a home. In both of those applications fiber is much better than CAT cables for the longer lines.
Running fiber will get you above 10Gb if you need that, and for longer.
It also completely removes certain electrical grounding issues, and makes connecting separate buildings easier (there are requirements for wires connecting different buildings, like a house and a detached garage; most people ignore these requirements).
In the US at least, those requirements are quite straightforward. The major issue is that you probably ought to use outside plant cable for the outdoor run, and most outside plant cable is messy and not listed for indoor use. And if you run shielded cable, you’re supposed to bond both ends near the points of entry.
But you can buy indoor/outdoor unshielded OSP/CM cable, run it in conduit outside, and connect it indoors with no special considerations. (Also, unshielded Ethernet cable is fully galvanically isolated, whereas if you have crappy electrical wiring that confuses ground and neutral or an unnoticed ground fault, a shielded cable may carry “objectionable current” (yes, the code actually uses that term).
Those tiny 24awg conductors are not very likely to cause major damage even in the event of a lightning strike, especially if they’ve run underground. They will, however, certainly conduct enough lightning current to fry the magnetics at the ends.
(If you think the National Electrical Code means that your circuit breakers will safely and reliably trip in the event of a fault, e.g. a neutral-to-ground short or a cut, stripped live wire stuck directly into wet Earth, I have some snake oil to sell you.)
> If you think the National Electrical Code means that your circuit breakers will safely and reliably trip in the event of a fault, e.g. a neutral-to-ground short or a cut, stripped live wire stuck directly into wet Earth, I have some snake oil to sell you.
Could you expand on this a bit? Do you mean that ground fault interrupters are not fast enough/threshold currents too high to prevent harm in some cases? (Non American; not familiar with your National Code but curious)
GFCIs are great: they detect even small leakage currents and modern ones also detect neutral-to-ground faults. But, in the US, it’s very unusual to have any sort of ground fault/residual current protection on anything other than individual branch circuits, and even then it’s usually just the outlets. GFCIs are also fixed at 5mA, and they don’t coordinate with each other (meaning that if you have two GFCIs in series, they are both likely to trip in the event of a fault).
So individual outdoor wires in rust metallic conduit without GFCI protection are very common. Outdoor receptacles in nice “extra-duty” boxes, where the receptacle itself has “weather resistant” GFCI (modern code) are very common, and nothing protects effectively against water getting into the box itself and causing a problem immediately upstream of that fancy GFCI.
I don’t understand the European codes well, but as I understand it, it’s common to have a big RCD in the distribution box, and that will protect the distributed wiring even if it doesn’t have the magical 5mA threshold that supposedly makes wires extra safe if you touch them by accident.
(I’d like to see standardized ratios of ground fault current sensitivity to breaker size, so a 15A residual current device downstream of a 60A one would coordinate properly. The hardware is cheap enough these days that this could be done cost-effectively.
Even the best arc fault breakers (which are NOT the same as ground fault breakers) will not detect certain faults, mainly those that look like normal usage.
A GFCI should detect a live wire into wet ground IF a ground is present, but not all breakers are required to be GFCI.
> Do you mean that ground fault interrupters are not fast enough/threshold currents too high to prevent harm in some cases?
There’s some over generalization and outright misinformation in this thread. The required threshold for a Type A GFCI (aka normal residential) is 6mA in the US. GFCI breakers or outlets just need “another path” for the electricity to flow to trigger. Water / grounding / etc are not required, it could be a largish capacitor recharging. The way GFCIs work is by detecting a current imbalance between the positive and neutral wires. Electricity flows in a loop, so if more current is going out on the positive wire than what’s returning on the neutral wire, then it has to be going somewhere which could be bad if say it’s a hairdryer in the bathtub, but very much might be fine in the case of a VFD used with a spindle on a hobby CNC.
> In the US at least, those requirements are quite straightforward.
Not typically. The requirement to directly bond to a ground rod can be hard/expensive to meet (because said ground rod is nowhere close to the cable entry to the building).
You generally need to bond to the intersystem bonding terminal, which is required to already exist (per modern code) or is easy to install (older buildings), and you can run a wire to make that connection.
But, as I mentioned, if you use UTP cable, there’s nothing to bond, although you might still want to install a surge protector. And fiber with a metallic armor layer needs to be interrupted or bonded — see NEC 770.
I am about to put in a garage 300' from my house. I will already have a trench for power and water. What kind of network cable can/should I drop in the same trench?
300 feet is at or beyond the edge of copper CAT cables, I'd run multimode fiber of the appropriate type (run a few to be safe?) - fiber doesn't care about power interference.
NOTE: See comments - I ran multimode because that's what the connectors in the off-lease hardware I had came with. Seems single mode is better in general.
300 ft. is long enough that fiber will be the better choice if only to reduce signal loss. CAT6 has a maximum length of 328 ft., so while it would work, you're going to have a faster, more reliable connection all around with fiber.
If your garage is going to house cars or tools and it's questionable whether you need to run a network cable to it anyway, go for wired cable so you don't need a $500 fiber splicer. 300' is the maximum you can do, but the spec has some wiggle room.
If your garage is actually going to be a home office, you're a networking enthusiast and you feel running fiber would be a fun learning experience, and you've got a buddy who can lend you a fiber splicer (or giant holes you can fit a pre-terminated cable through) - then go ahead and run fiber if you like.
I barely use the network link I ran to my garage, and I literally have a CNC machine in there. Turns out sneakernet works fine when you've got to go set up the workpiece anyway, and I ain't buying a car that needs a wifi connection. A gold-plated setup would have been a waste of money.
If you have some extra length, just coil it somewhere in the wall and don't bother splicing or re-terminating it. You can also use keystone jacks or couplers at both ends too so you have flexibility later without re-running it through the conduit.
I strongly recommend against this unless you have bonded earth connections between the buildings. During a storm the ground potential between the locations is likely to exceed the 1500V rating of the magnetics in your switches, and your equipment will be destroyed. Fiber is the only safe option at this distance.
In my country lightning strikes are rare, the equipment on each end of the link costs substantially less than a fiber splicing machine, and we get bonded earth connections as a matter of course.
I agree it's worth keeping an eye on your earthing, of course - if you get a noticeable difference in ground potential and you plan to plug in an EV charger outside in the rain, you might need some extra grounding. Unless your garage, your EV and yourself are all on an insulated concrete slab.
Voltage differentials in the earth that exceed 1500V will occur even without a lightning strike, and the greatest danger is when the ground is dry. Even something as simple as a strong wind blowing on a tree can charge things up significantly...
The cable TV shield is grounded where it enters the house. The POTS lines aren't grounded (they're differential, like 1000base-T), but the telephone company installs some sort of protection device in the exterior box that allows sparks to jump across to the local ground if the voltage differential gets too high.
It’s so frustrating the amount of over generalization, anecdata that’s actually dangerous, and/or outright misinformation in this thread. Thank you for being one of the folks with spot on accurate info!
The garage will have a home office and TV area, so I need some kind of network connection. I was planning to use a wireless bridge, but it seems like it might be worth adding a run of fiber.
Make it easy to change your mind later, run some PVC conduit and make sure you include a pull tape for your networking stuff. A pre terminated fiber cable and some fiber to ethernet media converters should do the trick for isolation.
I have been leaning towards a wireless bridge. There are not a lot of houses around, so the environment shouldn't be too noisy. My only concern is that I don't want to mount something external on that side of my house.
A good brand link with directional antennas will punch through quite a bit. I just mounted the wireless units inside at one end for my sister (although I did choose a mounting location that had thin wall).
If you ever want to send >1 Gigabit over that cable, use fibre. 10 GbE is pretty much the limit of copper cables at that length and create tons of heat (in the switch if RJ45 port, or worse on the SFP+ module). Also fibre has no fire safety considerations and no problem being right next to a power line carrying high-current AC. Also fibre does not corrode. As a bonus, it costs pretty much the same (but switches/sfp+ transciever are more expensive).
It's mostly about future-proofing. If I had renovated my house 20 years ago, the "best" copper cable I would have installed was cat5e, which will never get much beyond 2.5G. But if I had installed SMF instead (which was available at the time), it would be compatible with terabit networking hardware that is available today, and the petabit networking hardware that is likely to be available 20 years from now.
When the lifetime of cables in the walls is typically more than 40 years, it makes sense to avoid limited technologies like copper or multi-mode fiber.
Based on the general availability of 10gbit on consumer-priced hardware, I wonder if we'll actually get past 10gbit over the next 20 years. Hell, even 2.5 is only _just_ starting to pop up and usually results in only a couple ports on consumer switches/routers.
Pretty high if you want to have storage separate from your compute (for example, editing video on one computer while storing the raw footage on a NAS, which is one of my use cases).
A single average consumer SSD can already deliver 30gbit/s, and having a few "prosumer" drives like the WD Black SN850 in raid can deliver 100gbit and cost under a hundred each.
1) Future proofing (the main geek justification we all tell ourselves when considering fiber hehe): There's terabits of potential in even the cheapest fiber. "I'll never have to run cables again!" This is actually nonsense since everyone needs outlets in new places from time to time. Better just get used to the idea that you'll be sweating your ass off in the attic (wear a proper respirator!) every few years no matter what you install =)
2) Long distance runs. You can run fiber kilometers and even the cheap SFP adapters will give you a solid 10Gbit connection.
A few secondary reasons:
Runs between buildings: Have a detached garage? You can run fiber from your attic to the garage in the air and not have to worry about lightning strikes destroying it and all your stuff/equipment. Just make sure to use a type of fiber cable that's made for that or it'll slowly droop until it breaks (or just gently wrap it around some strong rope that can withstand long term exposure to the elements or use tubing/pipe, etc).
Size requirements: You can cram a lot more fiber cables into the same space as you can Cat 6/8 (which are much thicker and stiffer than cat 5/cat 5e). I have some "outdoor" (buryable) Cat 6 that is nearly as thick/stiff as RG-6 coaxial! If you have a tiny hole/pipe and you need to run a lot of wires through it fiber is what you want. I bet you can cram 5-6x more singly-jacketed fiber cables through a 1-inch PVC pipe/conduit than you can Cat 6. A LOT (100x) more if you use a fancy cable with lots of individual fibers within (there's a lot of different styles).
> Better just get used to the idea that you'll be sweating your ass off in the attic (wear a proper respirator!) every few years no matter what you install =)
Real buildings have conditioned attics and don’t have loose fiberglass in them. :) This can even be fixed in an old building as a fairly straightforward retrofit if you can get into the attic, and it goes well with a re-roof so you can cleanly remove all the vents.
You assume this makes sense everywhere. I live in Florida. Air conditioning your attic is akin to burning money. Even filling an attic with loose insulation isn't really enough since there's just that much heat and humidity most of the year.
I'm not saying it's a great design but there's absolutely no way to retrofit Florida attics in such a way where air conditioning that space makes sense. The house would need to be designed to have an air conditioned attic for it to make sense but there's probably a really good reason why no house in Florida is like that (probably humidity and mold related).
You have hot, humid air in your attic. You have much cooler air below your ceiling. You have something fluffy in between, which is almost certainly inadequate to keep said hot humid air away from your ceiling. So the hot humid air diffuses and otherwise reaches your ceiling, where it leaks through your ceiling, heats your ceiling, and condenses on your ceiling. And it’s essentially impossible to seal all the gaps. (And you have wood structural members going right through the insulation, and most structural designs make it essentially impossible to insulate them, so you may well have cold structural wood in your hot, humid attic. This is not a good situation.)
Oh, Florida also has hurricanes. Attic vents can let wind driven rain in and they can contribute to roof failures during high wind:
Instead, you can seal and insulate your roof deck, skip the insulation above your ceiling, and treat your attic as conditioned space.
The climates where a vented attic is less unreasonable are perhaps places with mild, dry weather and no wildfires. So maybe urban areas in Northern and Central CA? There aren’t too many places like this.
i run cat6 for 10gb link. SFP+ dongles were running at 95C. I had to glue on them heatsinks and add fans to switch to keep their temperature down, otherwise switch could shut it down.
I just spent a few hours in my attic running Cat 6 but before I did that I actually did some research to figure out what it would take to run fiber instead: Too much. Not way too much. Just "too much" compared to cheap cat 6 (of which I already had a spool and tools; sunk costs and all that).
In theory, modern fiber is fantastic! You no longer need incredibly expensive tools and the cable itself isn't really any more expensive than Cat 8 (the current standard you should aim for if you don't already have a spool of Cat 6). It's also much more flexible than in the past and less fragile. There's still some big issues making it problematic for DIY home installation...
You gotta be careful and thoughtful. With something like Cat 6 or Cat 8 it's stiff enough that you can just push it through from above/below, go into an attic/crawl space and just tug on it. Yank that sucker! If it gets caught, push it back and yank again... It'll probably be fine! Even if it's not (you pulled too hard on a loop and kinked it), you can always just cut off that end of the cable or use a coupler and you won't lose much other than your time. Fiber isn't like that: You need to attach it to something like a solid metal cable snake while you fish it through a tight spot otherwise there's a good chance it can get caught and kink/break. Forget pushing it through from below something! It's just too floppy. You also shouldn't let it dangle! Be very careful and use proper screw-in or nail-in wall fasteners.
Very few things accept the various fiber cable connectors/standards. The modern solution to that is to wire your home switch-to-switch, using fiber as the back end connection between them. You buy switches with SFP/SFP+ ports and use fiber SFP adapters with your connector/standard of choice. This isn't really a problem per-se but it means that instead of "just" having a keystone outlet on the wall near the device-to-be-connected you'll have a little switch there and your device(s) will connect to that.
Aside: SFP is fantastic! It's absolutely awesome that even cheap, consumer switches have SFP ports now. Just bought a 2.5GBit ethernet switch for $50 the other day that had 4 2.5Gbit ports and 2 10GBit-capable SFP ports :thumbsup:
It's way too easy to break your fiber cable when you need to run something else alongside it. For this reason, when you're running your cables make sure you drill separate holes for all your fiber runs. Don't just shove it through the hole that already has your home's coaxial cables and other wires (e.g. phone, alarm, smoke detector wires). In fact, go the extra mile and install a grommet in any holes you drill (or just use some PVC/PEX/PTFE pipe/hose with couplers to prevent it from coming out) and WRITE WITH A SHARPIE on or near it, "FIBER ONLY!". Make it glaringly obvious that it's a bad idea to try running anything other than fiber through that hole.
Anecdote: A friend of mine ran fiber through their attic and an air conditioning repair technician stepped on it and broke it. Keep those wires up high and out of the way of possible accidents like that.
Localized floor switches with SFP are actually quite common in commercial installs. At home it's possible to have one basement rack and connect all the wall jacks to it, but those runs are too long and clumsy in a large office building.
I do the same thing at home actually, I just put the floor switches in closets/etc. so the fan noise isn't audible in the living areas. The rack and core switch sits in the basement. However I just run copper instead of fiber as I can't justify the expense and 10G lines should be future proof for a while.
You can also have your modem or ONT connected to any of your floor switches routed to a seperate VLAN and keep your router in the rack. This avoids you having to run another line for the WAN side.
I used the VLAN "trick" for connecting my cable modem to my router for a few years in an old multi-floor apartment with pre-wired ethernet, but it's not ideal because the router is then not able to detect the link state of the modem. For example, if you unplug a cable modem and plug it back in, normally the link would go down on the router and then come back up, and when the link returns the router will attempt to fetch a new DHCP lease.
If you have a static IP, it should be fine, but this became an annoyance the couple of times the IP changed when I was living there.
For home use, fiber links from your main cabinet to distributed switches, then copper from switches to outlets makes a lot of sense.
Easier to do. Cheaper. Lets you leverage copper's strengths (physical abuse & high speeds over short runs). And future proof in the sense that switches and copper can be replaced later if/when deemed necessary.
And there's really only a few uses that need >250MB/s on a single port. It's the aggregated links that push over.
I feel like "install the fastest physical link possible" has always lost out to "make it easy to install a not-yet-existent future faster link" over the long term.
This is exactly what I did last summer. 10Gb fiber backbone between big switches, copper fans out from those to devices. I don't really need that much bandwidth but it's nice to have transfer faster than spinning rust write speed between my primary and backup storage servers.
For what it's worth, my reasoning had more to do with line noise and lightning isolation than bandwidth. I'm connecting between multiple "buildings" (two sides of my duplex-ish house and my shed) via buried 2" PVC conduit. Fiber means I don't have to worry about ground loops or static charge or lightning-induced faults.
Fiber to the home and then the fiber cable goes into an ultra cheap fiber/ethernet (either 8P8C/"RJ45" or SFP) converter: an Alcatel MC220L "Media converter", installed by the ISP. Then it's simply cat cables into the walls with plugs in each room.
> Aside: SFP is fantastic! It's absolutely awesome that even cheap, consumer switches have SFP ports now. Just bought a 2.5GBit ethernet switch for $50 the other day that had 4 2.5Gbit ports and 2 10GBit-capable SFP ports
Eh, I ran preterminated point-to-point single mode fiber through my house, wasn't that hard, and I didn't find them very delicate. I ran smurf tube (ridged blue plastic conduit) first, then just pulled them through by their ends using fish tape. Nothing broke, and I got rock solid 10 gbE links.
I also found it to be cheaper than my copper (which I did in parallel, non-engineers are more likely to know what to do with it). The fiber 10 gbE SFP modules were cheaper, run WAY cooler, and 10 gbE SFP switches seem to be cheaper/better/run cooler than those with 10 gbE RJ45 jacks. The copper/RJ45 10gbit SFP modules I used can burn you if you touch them, and the switch manufacturer specifies that you should space them out with an empty slot in between.
If you just want to run at 1 gbit, then I think copper is the clear winner for home use unless you need unusually long runs or something, but at that point, why wire at all?
That said, I installed this stuff a year ago, so maybe there are better switch/SFP module options now.
Technically you're supposed to use conduit that's made for the type of cable run that you're doing. Something that's certified for use in homes, that's fire-resistant and won't kill you with toxic gas when it burns.
IMHO you don't really need long conduits in a normal home so you shouldn't worry about it. You just need the conduit to act as a "longer grommet" where you drill holes through wood/joists or need a 90° bend somewhere. For everywhere else just make sure to secure the cables to the rafters (or as high as possible) so no one accidentally steps on them. You can even use tiny cuts of PVC conduit for that purpose with plastic U-shaped fastener things to keep them where you want.
I have FTTH and I am in the process of installing fiber connections in all the rooms of my apartment. I am using single mode fiber with 2x fiber connections to each room.
I am going to run them at 1 Gbps for now and upgrade to 10 Gbps in a few months when I 'I'll buy some better equipment.
I don't need huge speeds for now, but I want something future proof and since I am renovating the apartment, it was a good occasion.
Respect for referring to layer 1 of the TCP/IP model instead of the OSI model. Functionally the same usage at that layer but the TCP/IP model is both simpler and almost always what people actually use when they talk about OSI layers.
Well... Fiber means active apparatus that do last far less than copper, for normally sized homes they might be interesting if you have enough ground around the home to need fiber links to the portal or some perimeter cams and sensors, but inside a home IMVHO sound a nice things but not worth the price...
What I found worked best was to buy a bunch of 50 meter pre-terminated plenum-rated cables and cut them in half. I'd plug the pre-terminated ends into the wall-jack coupler, then weave the cut end through the walls back to the splicing cabinet, where I'd leave several turns of slack and fusion splice the pigtail which I plugged into the patch panel.