Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

The reason this is available for this price in every house in the city of Zürich is because of a law that passed requiring every house to have fiber. The infrastructure is operated by the power and phone company and any service provider can use this fiber.

I hope the whole of Switzerland will do something similar because there are still a lot of places without good internet and fiber is quite future proof.

Home office out of a mountain cabin would be cool...

View on HN

> fiber is quite future proof

To give an example - OS2 single-mode fiber is the standard fiber for contemporary datacenter deployments and I assume also for last-mile deployments. It's super cheap (less than 20cpf for indoor cable, whereas cat7 copper is closer to 60cpf), has an insane range (a standard $25 fiber PHY can operate with a cable from 0m-10km), and has an insane bandwidth limit (it's currently used for everything from 1gbps to 400gbps).

If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.

> If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.

Won't you end up with a bunch of media converters everywhere though?

A dualport 10 Gbit/s SFP+ PCI-E card with an optic is like 25$ on ebay.

If you're wiring a home - wouldn't lay-people want it to look nice? Are these made with any way to hide them in walls, exposing a usable port (even if RJ-45?)

Or if not - how should one think about deploying all this in a new home?

What about things like my AppleTV? I’d probably run both

SFP module > pigtail > wall patch > OS2 > wall patch > pigtail > SFP Module.

If I were wiring a home, I'd probably run some multimode fiber alongside CAT6 or maybe even 2 shielded CAT6 to support a secondary LAN like for surveillance cameras.

Avoid multimode. Unlike singlemode fibre it needs upgrading as speeds increase.

> If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.

OS2 is not needed for most homes. Use multi-mode fibre (OM4 or OM5), which can do 25-100 Gbps @100m (or more):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mode_optical_fiber

You'd have to have quite a house to need internal runs longer than 100m (300'). For runs up to 100m: 2.5 Gbps can be done with Cat5e, 5G with Cat6, and 10G with Cat6A:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Var...

Multimode fibre is expensive, and quicky dying.

I never seen it used outside North America.

The biggest reason to use multimode - cheaper equipment, is no longer here. High-end multimode NICs, and transmitters now cost more than SMF.

There is zero reason whatsoever to use OM over OS. The PHYs are only like $5 cheaper and it's worse in every way.

> If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.

It would be future-proof but not present proof, as you likely don't have anything else than RJ45 plugs on your devices…

On the other hand, replacing a cable in a conduit by a fiber is a half-hour task (you just stick the fiber to the cable, then pull the fiber with the cable) so it's not really worth it to be future proof in this case. You'll only be saving a hundred bucks in cable by doing so.

Source: I wired my entire home last year.

If I were wiring a home I would probably run two OS2 cables (just so I do not have to deal with one breaking in the future) from one side of the house to the other and also a termination somewhere central. And then probably Cat7 everywhere else honestly. The cost of the actual cable does not seem to be really all that much comparative to other costs

If you're wiring things today and you want them to be truly future proof, run some kind of conduit from everywhere to a central location. It makes replacing broken cables easy and you can focus on just installing the relevant types of cable in locations that make sense right now.

It's not just the city of Zürich, Adliswil has it too, at the very least.

I believe Init7 leases fibre from Swisscom in other locations. My understanding is that federal law requires Swisscom to give access to its infrastructure to other companies for a fair price.

Yes Swisscom has to lease it's infrastructure to every ISP the product is called BBCS [0]

[0] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/wholesale/angebot/anschl...

Gee... wouldnt it be cool if the USA paid telecoms $400,000,000,000 to build out said infra?

Oh wait..

The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal And Free The Net

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

Writing out all of the zeros in $400 billion doesn't make your point any more compelling.

Thats because my point is compelling enough

Moreover almost all local power companies (e.g. ewz in Zurich) have laid fiber cables and lease them to ISPs. Most of them don’t even sell internet access directly, therefore they don’t have the same conflict of interest that Swisscom has.

I also hope all of Switzerland would do this. Downgrading from fiber to ADSL is ok, but was definitely not fun.

I'm glad init7 went to the government to complain about the new "fiber" Swisscom decided to deploy in some places that would make it impossible for competitors to provide full service.

I am also glad the government saw that it was an anti-competitive move and blocked it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com