Adding a fiber link to my home network

If you're in Switzerland like the OP, the Swiss government has comprehensive maps of fiber coverage [0] as well as the speed you can attain [1] (there are more breakdowns, check Geocatalog > Population and Economy > Communication.

Even better, you can download the maps and load them into GIS software. I grab listings from real-estate portals then load them into QGIS, where I intersect them with zoning maps, fiber coverage, noise maps and public transit isochrones. I can then filter them at will.

[0]: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss...

[1]: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss...

The best way I've find out if you're "on net" (have fiber going to your bldg or near it) is to befriend someone in the networking and telecom space who hoard KMZs files that map out what's installed (each telecom develops them and shares them internally and sometimes with customers). I know of folks who treat these like gold and carry them from job to job and have most of the US and other nations covered. These are the folks I call when I need an address lit up to see which options and which carrier is out there vs. contacting one who is going to try to work it thru them. Most metro areas if you're on net you can get dark fiber for a flat monthly fee. Construction and permitting will bring an additional cost and things are delayed quite a bit with covid.

I've known a few folks who've got their own dark (or point to point wireless) to colos in downtown areas where they and their friends will rent half a rack or less to drop in a router and buy cheap transit and become their own little ISP.

For Australia, to check if FTTP is possible (without spending five figures to connect) look for the purple dots here:

http://nbnmtm.australiaeast.cloudapp.azure.com/nbnmtm.html

Unofficial, maintained for years by some awesome guy. Govt refuses to share.

If you are lucky enough to move house, right next to a purple dot you can save $many $thousands getting FTTP because your neighbour has already paid for it, and houses nearby that want FTTP will still be up for a few grand but not ten grand plus, like your neighbour already paid.

Sucks that Abbott the onion muncher lied and spent $10 billion more on copper (than fibre would have cost) plus took 4 years longer than promised to deliver slow copper MTM NBN because he blocked the just-begun original FTTP NBN rollout (with lackey Turncoat effectively spruiking that nobody will ever need more than 25Mbps)

Except they are politicians and we have the "The Game Of Mates"

FTTP would have devalued Murdoch's 25 year old Foxtel copper that we are partially using for slow NBN that drops out when it rains.

Would love to see Abbott and Turncoat fully ICACked for their plethora of dodgy favours to donor mates, detrimental to everyone (except them and their donors).

Don't even get me started on Pyne (the fixer) and his $200Bn diesel MTM submarines.

Yeah, not remotely accurate for me. I'm typing this on consumer/residental symmetric gigabit fiber (albeit a bit oversubscribed on the downlink side, but I still get hundreds of megabits both directions). Not listed in the results table.

Can you share more details on the data source for this?

Seems highly inaccurate for the somewhat rural addresses I’ve checked in Pennsylvania.

Is there any service that will monitor MLS/others and look for houses and apartments in a price range, within a commute distance (by train or car or bus), and with internet access?

I think I'd pay for a service that did this.

This (and other aggregator websites) are consistently wrong for my address. Shows CenturyLink with 1000/1000 available, check CenturyLink's site, 15/10 max (lol).

Not sure where they pull their data from but it seems quite inaccurate. Max CLink has offered me for over a decade is 15mbps down.

Nice tool but at least in my area it’s wildly inaccurate.

(I know it’s not your fault)

Thanks, great tool! It gave me the same results that I found with a lot of manual research so it's definitely accurate. It's even more accurate than one of the ISP's own websites (I've confirmed multiple times with them that their website is wrong and your tool is showing the right info).

I'm currently looking into homesteading on acreage and your site is extremely valuable in that search. Thank you!

Maybe add a note on the page which regions/country this is intended for (assuming US only?)

Wish I had known about this months ago! Any more info you can share on data, plans, etc.?

This is excellent! All the other ISP-finding websites are ad-ridden inaccurate trash.

Edit: yuge suggestion: make the results linkable. I wanted to share them with friends and had to make a screenshot, so you're missing out on visits.

Doesn't seem to work with addresses outside of the US

Is this US only? I got "This address is invalid". I live in the UK at the moment.

Would be good to know a bit more about this tool. I'd love to get FTTP!

Not accurate for me. Claims I should be able to get 1gig fiber from AT&T but AT&T site says 25mbs max

I checked this site for my own address and it's wrong, unfortuantely.

As I wrote in another post, <1km fibre runs don't need fusion splicing. This is what I tell all people still insisting on using expensive multimode for local fibre setup for ease of splicing.

Multimode will start to struggle at distances at which even worst quality single mode setup will work just fine. I feel SMF has no sense economically these days.

Low power, single mode SFP transceivers are everywhere now, and in general, SMF setup is incomparably more future proof.

You may underestimate the time and effort that can be involved in in-wall cabling in a retrofit situation... like most in my area I live in a house that is coming up on 100 years old, while I do my best to run all cables through walls there are situations where I have to run cables in conduits on the exterior as the only way to do otherwise would be to resheetrock most of the ceiling. There's just a cost-benefit analysis here, and most contractors aren't willing to put in the time (because the customer doesn't want to pay for the time!) to open up the walls to get access to run cables through them. Keep in mind that when you consider demolition, hanging sheetrock, texture, prime, paint, and clean, any cabling situation where walls need to be opened is probably going to be billed as a full day, and local building/licensing codes may not allow a low-voltage technician to perform that work, requiring a builder to be subcontracted.

There are tricks like flexible installer bits that allow for short runs through-wall without removing the wallboard but you're going to need an access hole every couple of studs at least... and at that point you're setting yourself up for so much patching it might be faster to just open up the wall entirely. You can also use all kinds of wire-pulling tools, I have a 30' telescoping fiberglass pole that I have used to run cables through inaccessible attics (flat and shallow roofs common here), but once again, you get into situations where running the cable for a single surveillance camera is an 8-hour job! I put up with this for my own house but clients aren't so happy about it...

And all of this is assuming wood-frame walls which are the norm for interior walls but exterior in many areas can be brick, adobe, etc., and blown-in insulation is great for heating bills but can make cable runs in exterior walls a huge headache.

At the same time, cables run "cable-installer style" (stapled to gables and run down exterior to straight-through holes) regularly last for over a decade and are very easy to repair when there are problems and modify when needs change. It's hard to blame them.

You also have to consider the author is located in Switzerland, which has a much different construction style when compared to, say, California.

In order to actually lay wiring underneath a masonry wall, you need to rent/own a wall chaser, be aware of where existing cable runs are, and be prepared for a lot of work: prepare the room for dirty work (cover the floor and furniture, isolate the affected rooms from the rest of the house), do the actual cutting work, lay the conduit, re-plaster the entire run, re-paint it (sometimes re-paint the entire wall if you don't have a good color match), clean up. You're basically looking at an entire day of work if you're doing this solo, plus prep. And it's pretty much never doable in any rental.

In residential places in Europe I‘ve seen this mostly in old buildings where the walls are stone/brick underneath, so I am assuming it would be hard to put the cables inside walls?

Also, this was always inside, not on the outside walls, plus the cables were laid in tubes fixed to the wall and painted over, so well enough protected, probably.

Did you see issues with decay with this sort of installation even inside an appartment?

Depends on the walls. At my parent's, the house was built ~60 years ago with solid brick walls, no space to run fiber or copper cables.

My internal walls are solid brick. In the last 3 years, I've moved my router twice (moved from DSL to coax and to FTTP),and I've ended up running Ethernet cabling around one room.

Fixing the walls after cable runs is nasty. Underfloor is possible but usually involves pulling up a floorboard or two which isn't ideal...

A tip for surface cabling without major digging for houses with baseboard is to use a router to make a channel in the backside of the baseboard and just run in that. I've seen electricians in the US do this for outlet wiring, in addition to phone/data.

What’s the right way to do it?

I honestly found it no harder than anything else - I just did a 300m run to an outbuilding, as 802.11g just wasn’t cutting it, and the project basically compromised two media converters, a reel of armoured fibre, and a termination kit - took all of an afternoon to do.

I guess it’s just overkill in most scenarios - but for long runs, you can’t beat it. I’ve also got a 200m cat6 PoE run with a repeater/voltage booster halfway down, and it does duplexed gigabit just fine - which even further limits the scenarios in which fibre is the better option. Even with the repeater it was cheaper than the fibre alone, never mind the media converters.

My training in the US Army included learning to splice fiber optic cable by hand, including polishing the end of the fiber itself! That was in 1993.

If you want thinner than normal Cat6 but can handle a bit more than 0.9mm, there is also thin Cat6 available: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=34213

It's 2.6mm diameter, and I had success running it between baseboards and carpet.

I switched to cable when I moved to an apartment. Channel 11 was becoming unusable right around 8:00 every morning when all the WFH people got online.

My apartment has a nice patch panel though so I don't have to actually run cables everywhere.

There's also powerline, which works very well for me and all you need are power sockets to bridge the distance between your desk and the router.

Yeah can confirm for the same use case though I use Ubiquiti Edge Router X SFPs off a Ubiquiti Edge Router 12P so I get more ports.

Of course at this point we're close to Wi-Fi 6E hardware and I probably wouldn't have done all of this at this point.

A quick search shows that single strand fiber is available with a white outer color. That would almost visually disappear in your mopboard example.

They are so thin I covered mine with the wallpaper

QNAP has some fairly cheap routers that have a couple 10GbE ports, like this one: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qsw-308-1c

I paid $200 for mine. Not cost-effective if you have more than a couple 10GbE-capable devices, but great for hooking up a fast NAS to a couple primary workstations and leaving the rest of the network 1GbE.

I suspect one reason he's doing it is for the super-slim cabling.

You can get super-slim ethernet cables, but they have really fine wiring and don't go very far. But with fiber you can go vast distances with no problem. You can even get GBICs that will take you 10km.

I've been considering it for... well, ok, no reason.

I just happen to have two openwrt routers that have an SFP port (mikrotik).

They've come out with some new ones that are all SFP port models, for not much money though the 10gbe ones are a bit more.

https://amzn.com/B07LFKGP1L

mikrotik 1x gbe ethernet, 4x SFP 10gbe, $138

No, all other devices are gigabit ethernet switches only.

I’m linking two switches together with this fiber, and the rest is copper ethernet cables in these switches and other switches :)

Behind each switch are 4+ devices, so individual network cards won’t help here.

Also check out https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in which is another popular and among the affordable home 10gbe switches.

1) Never never never never use copper ethernet between buildings. If lightning hits a tree or anything even remotely close to a buried cable you could be easily looking at frying every single device on the entire network in all buildings -- not even kidding. This happened to a popular tech youtuber TWICE before he switched to fiber.

2) If you want to know what went wrong and where use switches with SFP slots instead of media converters. This also makes fixing problem cheaper and gives you flexibility in choosing optics. Even if you do go with media converters, use ones with modules.

3) Build intra-building topology with some form of path redundancy. Since the cost of doing anything like this is so heavily weighted in building the physical links, you may find that you can build a redundant ring topology (only one extra link) at a 10+gbps at a lower cost than a non-redundant hub and spoke topology at 1gbps if the latter requires longer runs. Well maintained UPS's at each node are more important in rings, so think about this too.

Funny. Your first sentence had me wondering whether you're south african. Then you followed up with lighting strikes :-) Agreed, I think your best option is fibre. A few Mikrotik's (reasonably priced) and SFP modules will work perfect for you. I think just getting your own splicing kit will make this easier for you and allow some experimentation.

I ran fiber between my house and detached garage (which also includes my office). Installed some large conduit so the preterminated fiber could be pulled through, ran it just like any other cable (trying not to bend it too much), and installed SFP modules in two Unifi switches. I'd never done anything with fiber before, and it was incredibly easy.

I opted to install twelve strands of single-mode fiber. It's insanely overkill (I'm only using two strands right now), but the cost difference was minimal.

With something as complicated as 9 separate locations, I'd definitely avoid unmanaged media converters. Managed ones will be able to tell you how well, or how poorly, your fiber links are doing.

Metallic ethernet is explicitly not designed to be used between separate buildings so you really should not use it for that application. The physical layer can survive surprising overvoltage conditions, but it is insufficient for lightning strikes and there is no sane way to add surge protection at the building entry as would be done for telco outside plant copper wiring.

Wouldn't you still blow one of the media converters twice a year?

To expand on this - instead of using a media converter, use a small managed switch.

A 'dumb' media converter is a little bit cheaper but there's no way of knowing if the failure is due to the cable, the media converter on either end, or what. Without physically inspecting it, that is.

All fine for something inside your house but not something where you have a remote location.

That’s not a bidi SFP. The attenuators aren’t needed either.

Then there’s the fact you are ordering from Aliexpress, rather than Fiberstore. Fiberstore has multiple locations and warehouses, a returns policy, a level of customer service and no shipping charges.

People have to be careful when splicing fiber when every dB of loss is important, but modern fusion splicers make it pretty easy.

For just running between houses, I've seen links working over fiber that was cleaved with linesmens pliers before a crimp on connector was added.

It's actually rather difficult to break cladded G.657 fiber, and it's much cheaper than copper. Now, at the splice point where you must strip the cladding you are correct it is very fragile. At that point you heat shrink on a splint with a steel rod in it which protects it (and typically place that in a splice case).

For sure, if copper works, it’s more practical and slightly cheaper for most situations :)

Regarding the connectors, check out https://www.fs.com/de-en/products/35165.html for details. In particular, they come with a pre-installed and polished fiber, that then only needs to be matched to your fiber using an already-installed matching gel.

It seems like a pretty well thought-out system to me thus far.

Fusion splicers haven’t used microscopes for at least twenty years. In fact, I bet it was far longer ago than that.

Are you sure it was a microscope or are you really old skool?

> home grade routers

That's your answer. The average home user just wants to plug in a device, type in the wifi code, and never think about it again. Only tech nerds want fiber type connectivity. Putting SFP into home devices would see that SFP sitting unused 99.9999% of the time. Why incur the expense of adding it?

Netgear, Mikrotik and Ubiquiti have some that at least are in the price-range of "home".

I’m not sure I agree - I’ve always been a fan of FS for fibre stuff, at least in europe - their prices and support are both excellent !

Yeah I got the same feeling that this is an ad, or at least in part sponsored by fs.

10gig ethernet is bits.

100gbit ethernet does exist, but its not overly cheap. That will get you to about 10gigabytes a second. more or less.

Network speeds are typically measured in bits.

10 gbit/s, as is common in networking.

a lower-case b (10Gbps) should indicate bits while uppercase (10GBps) would indicate bytes. This is the correct notation but you definitely see it done incorrectly fairly often. It's usually easy to tell though as giving network media speeds in GBps would be very unusual.