Wiring my home with fiber
sschueller.github.io
sschueller.github.io
1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to.
2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negligible. In fact, SMF cabling is often cheaper than MMF. And no, you generally won’t have to worry about attenuating signal.
Also, in my extensive experience, FS.com optics modules are typically better manufactured and more reliable than OEM modules.
I resisted the "cheap chinese" modules for a long, long time, but then discovered that most of my uplink carriers used them.
It's been years now. I've had many Cisco OEM, Dell OEM, and a couple from another 3rd party manufacturer go bad, but I have yet for one FS.com SFP to go bad. I've got several hundred deployed in a wide variety of environments, from great (cool, clean areas) to bad (hot, dirty areas).
I would strongly agree that if you are running fiber, run single mode everywhere. It is amazing how far singlemode fiber can go compared to copper if you are willing to spend money on the endpoints.
At the termination of the runs I have fiber keystone jacks and I can extend/replace the last bit if I need to move equipment.
My setup is much simpler - I get 25Gbit/s from init7 to Mikrotik CCR2004 https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs and then distribute it to 2x1Gbit access points, and use the other SFP28 port to power my PC (in another room) via the Intel E810 card.
I use the Feller fiber extension cable (20m) and bought some cable puller to pull the fiber via the plastic piping, and then finished it with the Feller outlet. Looks rather clean :) Photo: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FWhHwD0WAAIb3Dt?format=jpg&name=...
PS: ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs is barely coping with 25Gb/s routing. It can do it, but for multiple TCP sessions, a single one chokes the router at something like 20Gbps (down), 15 Gbps (up).
The cable extension is expensive, 150CHF or so for 20m, but you'd probably need it for this outlet because it's specially designed so it can be attached to the LC/APC module manually (no splicing). Something like Swisscom's ClickLC, just a different system.
Generally not worth it unless you have existent infrastructure and want some more density
i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?
I wish the concept was more clearly legal in Australia. I’m pretty sure once you glue the fiber in place it becomes ‘permanent’ and thus has to be done by a licensed cabler with a fiber endorsement.
To the point that we even printed out a picture of their warehouse from google maps and wrote “thank you” on it before stapling it to the wall.
They were the best support we received.
So I'm not saying it's right, but I can at least understand where a mandate like that might come from, if perhaps outdated compared to the current state of the industry.
If you’re the largest employer in the state, there may be some personal implications to a CIO telling a major OEM to f-off.
1) I question his choice of OpnSense vs. OpenWRT. I've found OpenWRT to be less demanding on the hypervisor/host, and quite scalable.
2) Not about the article, but about your comment on Chinese modules. I've tried Chinese 10Gb SFP+ modules and I've returned all that I tried. They would overheat, and they would not operate up to the specified data rates. The name brands cost twice as much, but they work.
https://www.tlnetworx.com/blogs/news/single-mode-vs-multimod...
And to be clear, there will be hacks that scale MMF a bit, but it’s not really “infinitely” scalable due to relatively poor attenuation and light mode. Keep in mind, there isn’t one MMF spec, there’s many: eg. OM1 through OM4
We’ve been using the FS modules too for years, they are very reliable. It does totally make a mockery of the vendors who claim they need to lock out other brand’s modules (from their 100% standardised port) for reliability etc.!
MSP ISP here, we just rock the FS optics combined with an FSbox to code them as required. ;)
Just a warning for the weary: don't put a non-Fiberstore optic in their FS coding box -- you'll lock your account for a week. Ask our field team how they know this.
I know that Verizon also has fiber with a stiffer jacket that they can push through conduit a pretty good distance. I know this because I helped the Verizon installer run FIOS at my daughter's apartment in a building that was over 100 years old. The conduit had a crimp in it so it took the two of us a while to get past that.
If you don't have an initial wire installed you can use a magnet kit with a specific wire to pull it through the conduit.(e.g youtube "magnepull"). A camera small comes in handy as well.
If you need to pull wires through the ceiling and you already have recessed lights you can use their wires to pull your new wire.
Unfortunately, in my experience of 6 or 7 new builds in the last 15 years or so, coaxial cables are usually staples to the studs and useless for this purpose.
Well, that's part of the fun/job. Usually you end-up with a few holes as well so you try to get hold of anything that helps you, "one inch" at a time.
As always, the easy way to deal with this is to let someone else do the job(hire a pro/custom installer).
The biggest skill is you have to hold your jaw just right when you do it. Then, it’s a piece of cake.
If I built a home I'd add conduit, but that's an extremely niche idea.
[1] similar to https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/flex-bit-accessories/flex...
Similar to: https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/wiring/runni...
There are some considerations if it's a firewall or an insulated wall, but it can be really nice.
The US can add it but it’s an extra cost and so rarely done.
I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious.
Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit just hanging on a wall? What is this obsession with hiding all wiring within the drywall? What am I missing here?
It could be something as simple as a conduit like https://i.imgur.com/6X5of8Y.png
Not that I have a leg to stand on because I still can't afford to buy a home outright (and at current rate, never will). I live in an apartment and I don't make any changes to it. I cannot even imagine doing something simple like drill a hole on the door for a doorbell. So, I am definitely hypocritical when I say this. Maybe I am just being salty as a non-home owner. I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
If you own your own home, why not live in your home like you own your home? Run that conduit across all the walls (and through inside door frames or something like that if you must). If not, do you really own your own home? Why not just live with housing insecurity like I do?
Edit: spelling
Or they just run cable along the walls.
Many garages will be as you describe.
To me it just feels good to wake up in a visually simple environment with things out of sight. It feels like magic, in a good way, to be surrounded by performant, reliable and useful technology but to be able to see almost none of it. And I have an automatic negative reaction to visual clutter or conspicuous machinery in my house.
I don't see anything wrong with your way of thinking. I can't easily change how I feel about it and I see no reason why either of us should have to.
Edit: this makes me think about sci-fi spaceships. Battlestar Galactica vs. the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide. One has its conduits and controls run every which way and the other is minimalist to a fault. I like them both but would definitely prefer to wake up every morning in the latter!
Also, I would say writing bad code makes the code very inaccessible...just like burying important infrastructure in a wall.
Did that water leak last year cause mild growth in the wall? Don't know without some demolition! Want to upgrade your piping or electrical? Gotta destroy some wall, hooray, and then do more work to hide it again. Lunacy.
One of the apartments I looked at recently had this really annoying buzz in the kitchen, turned out it was a transformer that the previous owner plastered in. Definitely a big minus for me.
In my current apartment all cabling and piping is outside the walls because it was built before electricity was everywhere and I find it really handy <3. If the look bothers you it's not for you obviously but I don't think it's inherently worse.
Good code also doesn't need to "look pretty", it needs to be correct, and maintainable. Preferably maintainable by a less skilled developer with less domain knowledge. Following that logic, the code that follows the pattern of "highly visible and obvious", like the conduit, is probably the better code.
All that being said, I prefer simple walls, with conduit hidden inside it. I'm just happy to admit that what I like it not universal, and that other have their own styles.
My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.
Most interior doors have a gap between the bottom of the door and the top of the floor, and you can cable in the gap if you don't mind the look. If the threshold is carpetted, you can often squish the wire into the seam where the carpet meets the door frame.
You can get one, maybe two, runs into a room that way, so don't put your central switch in a room like that, and if you need more than one drop in a room, put a switch in the room.
I have made many such holes in door frames for passing Ethernet cables or TV coaxial cables.
When you do not want to touch the walls, such cables can be routed on the edges between walls and floor and they can be masked by a cover having the wall color, to be invisible, except where passing through a door frame.
At least in Europe where I live, I have not seen any walls through which you can make clean holes with high probability. Almost always there is some small damage, which must be repaired, e.g. by filling with plaster and/or repainting. In most cases you also need a percussion drill machine, not just a simple drill machine. Here most walls are made either of concrete or of bricks.
So at least in the kinds of walls that I have seen, passing a cable through a wall requires more time, more diverse skills and a larger set of tools and materials than passing a cable through a door frame, which requires only that you have and know how to handle a drill machine and a cable crimping tool.
While common outside the US, most of it in newer constructions tends to be light concrete which is trivial to drill. But even 40MPa concrete is fine with an SDS, rent one if you don't wish to spend money on. In short drilling through outer walls is not difficult either.
Wiremold 500 surface raceway is what I would recommend, it’s a basic surface raceway for electrical conductors or cables: https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...
There are probably residential raceways that blend in better, but I’m not familiar with residential construction.
There are plenty of ways to get a cable from point A to point B inside of a wall, particularly if you have a single story home with an unfinished attic and basement. A spade drill bit, a fish tape, and a multitool/rotozip can get a cable pretty much anywhere if you can drill a hole into the wall cavity from above or below.
If I walked into a listing and saw surface raceway everywhere, I’d only bid what I was comfortable paying leaving room for a gut rehab. It’s evidence of a high level of DGAF at a minimum and likely isn’t the only place that corners were cut.
Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.
The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.
That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.
easy, skip the decoration
This seems like you are missing the point. The REASON that having a conduit hanging on the wall lowers the home value is because it looks bad and ruins the aesthetics… for both the current home owner and a future home owner. The reason the person buying the house would pay less is the same reason me, the current home owner, doesn’t want it… it looks bad.
I understand that some people don’t care about aesthetics at all (I am probably closer to that end of the spectrum than most), but you also have to realize that people care about how their home looks for more reasons than just resale value. Do you think the whole world only makes their houses look nice in case they want to sell?
For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.
I saw a video where someone was doing this and they used little plastic bend guides that were painted trim color.. not perfect but also not as noticeable as I would have thought.
Doing small repairs is easy enough that everyone should at least know the concepts involved.
It takes a lot of practice to be smooth enough at doing it to have a nice result over any large area before the concrete sets. It’s not the type of thing that benefits from going ‘hmm, maybe I should do it this way’ after you’ve started.
Also, it’s much, much easier to do as a small crew - easily 3-5x more productivity per person. Same as drywall. It’s not easy to do as a solo worker, even if you know the tricks.
In my very limited experience, many textures are often harder to make look right than flat surfaces. I think I am sensitive to texture variation, because with textures I notice mistakes and I often notice where alterations have been made.
Either way, your Santa Fe look is irrelevant to the topic of fixing problems in walls when they are not textured like yours.
When the walls are off in the house is the best time to get anything done. Sometimes I don't even want to put the walls back on- for example, an unfinished garage with exposed studs is very convenient.
Some areas where plywood would be preferrable for durability, like a garage, are often prohibited from using something other than sheetrock due to the fire risk. Probably not a big deal unless you have entire walls of it.
Every town in America has at least one, if not several Home Depot’s, Lowe’s, OSH’s, etc. and at least 75-90% of the traffic at any given time is private home owners, not contractors. Americans do a LOT of DIY.
There isn’t any real comparison anywhere else I’ve been able to find, and I’ve looked. Not as much in France, but Germany, Switzerland, Italy, India, Bulgaria (closest to having something like that), Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, etc.
Doing basic drywall and paint isn’t rocket science, but getting a professional level fit and finish actually takes a lot of practice and experience. It’s also a completely different experience when you’re trying to match old specialty paints from a previous homeowner, blending repairs to match the wall texture, and other complexities that don’t show up in those basic YT videos. If you’re in a situation with untextured walls, known paint colors, simple repairs, and a forgiving eye, then it’s really not bad, but the complexities can add up quickly.
Even in the best cases, cutting into drywall all across the house to pull wire would be a project I’d try to avoid at all costs in an occupied home. The fast path still requires multiple days to go through all of the drying and re-application cycles to build up all the right layers, not to mention dust control to keep that fine dust out of everything you own.
Certainly, if you're looking for perfectly smooth walls, then you're never going to be happy regardless. My place is Santa Fe, which is perfect... it is supposed to be messy. But this is a place built in the 40's... nothing is perfect. Doing something perfectly would stand out even more.
If you want old paints to match, then just paint the whole wall. That's easier and probably the right solution anyway.
A good feathering job saves a ton of wasted sanding effort and drywall dust. When I ask GCs and tradespeople which job they would would never do themselves, drywall is far and away the most common answer. It’s the only job I regret doing myself.
Since the house is old, it is plywood floors and they aren't even enough for vinyl. Going to have to learn how to fix that too. From what I can tell, it is basically just mud like on the walls... but portland cement on the floor.
Electrician is the answer I usually get, largely because if you do electricity wrong, you can kill yourself or burn down the house.
Doing it down to the studs and all at once is definitely the easier way to do it. Small patches and piecework suck, but if you’re living in it, especially with others, you don’t always get a say in the matter.
I'm glad you had such an easy time of it, but cutting, patching, and matching is a pain in most homes I've done it in. And don't even get me started on lath and plaster.
Used this technique to rip out and then match a ceiling in a bathroom, and also to patch up work after some HVAC dudes blew part of a wall out for mini splits.
It was tough to learn as there is a knack, but paid off. Having good hand eye coordination pays off in many ways.
The most important part was learning from an experienced person: "No wall on earth is perfectly flat, you just want it to look flat." Good advice, especially in a town (Philly) where there are old houses with not a square corner in the whole place. :)
I've started plastering a few of my walls and after wasting a couple days doing a few square meters ended up hiring a couple guys to do the rest of the house. There is just no comparison in value.
Guess how much they make if you don’t pay them?
It’s better for everyone if someone who can make more money per hour uses that higher earning power to offload lower income tasks to people in those jobs.
The view I replied to implied it would be gross to pay someone to make your meal because it’s cheap.
I wouldn't call this cheap :-)
Of course if I do something enough I can get good at it, the point of hiring someone is because I am not going to do it enough to get good at it.
Highly recommend Vancouver Carpenter on youtube, if you do want to go down that rabbit hole.
Plaster walls on wood studs is a lot harder, and plaster over brick or concrete is impossible.
I'm not sure whether older houses are more maintainable by default, or just once you have rocked over some threshold of continuous occupancy, there there are sufficient layers of repair and rework that you just stop worrying about (for example) sawing through a floorboard. While I didn't have to mess with the walls, if I had, I'd just have torn down the existing plaster and redone it, like you say it's not that big of a deal
There are so many parts of it that were "over engineered" for a house 50 years ago that are "oh, that's convenient" now.
I hired an electrician to drill the holes for me earlier this year and it took him over 10 minutes per hole to get through the 60cm (2ft) reinforced concrete slab for running cables between two floors.
This is an opportunity - you might want to brainstorm X.
anything in the kitchen (before you start depending on it for food and/or fill the fridge with perishable stuff)
mindfully adding specific storage. Could be the difference between moving in and piling all your stuff in random places.
related: garage - before it becomes the "catch all" for unresolved boxes of stuff you move with. A friend said overpaying closetworld for cabinets around the perimeter of his garage was money well spent.
adding electrical outlets, switches, etc
and yeah, cat5 or fiber
I had my house wired up with 30 Cat 6 drops (3 being in-ceiling for AP's) and in the end it was simpler to go up to the loft (2 story house) and come down that way, with all of the cables then being bundled up and coming down through a built-in-wardrobe into the garage below.
It required a bit of patching here and there where a small chase had to be chisseled out to get around a cable going through a patch of plaster used for dot and dab (technique to quickly plasterboard/drywall onto brick), but with conduit it would have been a much simpler job.
I live in a split level. The company I hired flat out refused to do a cat6 drop to my upstairs office, after spending nearly 40 minutes getting wire up a single story.
I did an extensive amount of both fiber and CAT6A in my recent house build, totally about 21 miles together. I did a mixture of single mode and multimode only because of some AV device support for multimode, and because all of it was so cheap compared to the labor and time.
I ended up with significant fiber runs between the MDF and IDF closets, the server room, and all of the AV endpoints which is a typical layout. I did run single mode fiber to all 18 wireless AP access-point locations, but I suspect those will not get used much given I also have 2 CAT6A shielded wires to each AP that can support 10G AND provided power. I do use a direct fiber connection in my office to provide 10G to my network core from that desktop, but that could have been done over copper as well.
Perhaps the biggest gain over copper is my switch interconnects which are 40G from the upstairs closet to the server room. If needed it would be easy to upgrade those to 100G, and since there are 24 strands available you really could expand as far as you are every going to need to go with WDM and the like.
The one really good use case for only fiber was running it down my driveway to our gate, which is about a 1/4 mile in distance. That is something that would be more challenging to do with copper. [although I do have copper installed].
From my perspective the cost of running fiber was almost 0 compared to the entire project because so much more cost is involved in path finding and clearing ( cutting holes, etc), and the actual pulling. I was very fortunate to have a large group of friends who spent a couple of days working with me to do the large pulls, combined with many weeks of evenings and weekends doing the rest myself. Many hands makes that task much much easier.
My particular build is documented in a build thread: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...
The first is to have direct nearly-line of sight locations for the majority of the house which is primarily to support higher frequency(60GHz) and beyond which have poor wall penetration.
The second is to provide good wifi coverage due to signal attenuation from the construction techniques. I did many of the walls in double 5/8s drywall, some in green wall, all insulated, and all solid hard doors. Steel cross structures as well. As a result wifi propagation is surprisingly bad across rooms.
The third is to provide lots of locations to aid in flexibility of having the best locations. I do not use all 18 locations right now, but I may use more in the future.
It is also a somewhat large (>10,000 sq ft, ~ 1000 sq meters) house, so that facilitates a need for a bit more coverage.
With 18 APs are you using campus wifi style things, or just a bunch with the same SID?
Understatement of the month right here.
I gather you did this for noise isolation? And by green wall do you mean green glue between the drywall layers? I'm only familiar with this for home theater construction, not an entire home.
That said, the cost gap between MM and SM optics today is much smaller especially for 10G (and for the fiber itself it seems to have even reversed), so single mode definitely makes more sense. For some reason, MM fiber is still widely deployed in certain niche use-cases though. Not quite sure why.
For example, I know that it's used on modern military jets for their 10GBASE-SR networks. I wonder if it has something to do with being able to repair terminations in the field? I know MM is pretty forgiving that way. Or maybe it's just another case of them adopting whatever was popular at that exact moment.
MM is easier to do mechanical splices on, and does seem to be overall less sensitive to damage. If your need is 10G and less than 300m it works well.
As an aside I ran a USB over fiber repeater that was multimode specific by accident I used a single mode fiber (same LC connector), and it worked perfectly.
CHF 1 ~= USD 1 these days
Question for OP:
Why did you build such an expensive "router" - you justify it by saying you also want to run PiHole, but you probably could have done this whole setup much cheaply
More importantly, I and many geeks I know but/bought several when a new model first comes out because they are (were) cheap but electronics wholesalers don’t offer free shipping so it makes sense to buy as many as you think you’ll use (until the next one comes out) in one go to minimize the amortized cost.
I miscalculated and ended up using all of mine, but I have friends that still have some of their stock.
I can just recommend going for it if you're curious. Cables and tranceivers really aren't expensive from fs.com (though their sales people may start bothering you).
Edit: And old, used network cards from ebay, of course.
[1]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...
For anyone trying to emulate this: I would very much NOT recommend using 16mm conduits for LC duplex patch cables. It's doable for some short/straight runs, but the connectors like to get stuck in bends. For me it was the final r=3cm bend in a ~20m conduit. I ended up pulling Cat7 into that conduit and routed the fiber through a tree-like network of wider backup conduits.
Since the backup conduit ends up in the wrong corner of the room, I might one day 1. cut the 30m fiber patch cable, 2. pull it into the original 16mm conduit (w/o connectors), replacing the Cat7 and 3. splice the fiber again. Using a "mechanical splice" that should be doable quite cheaply, but I didn't yet get around to learning/practicing that.
e.g.: https://www.fs.com/de-en/products/35165.html (there's instructions if you scroll down)
Jesus. Meanwhile, here in Germany, right in the center of Munich the best I can get is 100/40, because while there is FTTB buildout, the last 20m in the building go through the telephone wiring from the late 80s.
If enough people in the building care, it might even be relatively cheap.
I was really dubious at first but they work really well
PoE is still a must for powering wireless access point and perimeter security cameras.
I went with singlemode fiber. Don't really see the point of multimode. At all. After doing some research I am not sure who it is made for.
Sure, the BiDi SFP+ modules are a bit more expensive but not overly so.
The fiber is cheaper.
It's easier to splice/use field assembly connectors if needed.
Much easier to hide the cables. If you go with 0.9 mm you can even hide it in nooks and crannies under door trim etc.
It is future proof. SMF will always be supported.
Now the only problem is that the Mikrotik CRS routers I want to get are either out of stock or have insanely inflated prices. Seems to still be affected by component shortages. I already have a couple of CRS305 and some CCS610, but I'm going to need more of those now plus a CRS309 to scale it all up.
They are cheaper and and you don't need the extra range of single mode if you are only wiring your house/apartment.
I wonder what convinced you to go this route, like some of the benefits up and above just regular Ethernet. I’ve noticed ad’s like the one in this page https://shop.fibercommand.com/pages/applications-home-builde...
And wondered if it was fake or not.
In terms of pulling, a lubed cable sock can get through lots of places, and save a ton on termination. Cablers often use a strip of yellow tongue (the nylon tongue on chipboard flooring panels) to poke through a run, and then run a conduit or pull cord. Pre terminated MPO/MPT (which is 12 core) and MPT breakout fans are very cheap in comparison to splicing. It's generally much cheaper to run more fiber than it is to run conduit so you can run more fiber.
Are there good SFP+ USB 4 adapters that work on Linux?
One of the bad trends in recent motherboards is minimal number of PCIe slots, which are very clearly focused on GPUs only. So basically there is no room for any extra devices. Their idea seems to be pushing everyone to USB 4 for use cases like that (which supposedly should be able to route even PCIe?).
I just use premade MMF in my house.
Using the splicer gave me the flexibility to splice pig-tail ends or just two fibers together with a small loss.
As you see this makes no difference for a residence where all your links are much shorter than even 0.1 km ! All I'm saying is you had cheaper options than buying a fusion splicer. But I understand you for buying it — it's a cool tool to have fun with, and to get some experience. I would have probably done the same since fiber is also a hobby of mine (though I reiterate I have never built a cable myself) :)
Also I'm still looking for a solution setup a ~200m link, Ethernet and WLAN are not an option, so I'm only left with fiber, 1Gbps would be sufficient, but I won't be able to do it myself because of the price of a splicer. I thought about asking an installer to do the splicing for me, it shouldn't be that expensive, maybe on day.
https://www.flukenetworks.com/sites/default/files/blog/101_s...
http://www.fiber-optic-cable-sale.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
I think its worth choosing fiber in a new deployment, at least at the distribution level (between floors, or zones of the home). Most new computers come with ultra fast solid state storage, so even between systems on a local network, 10GbE speeds could be useful.
With the way the price of copper is going, and how much less efficient rj45/copper chipsets are compared to optical, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a shift to optical as a replacement to rj45 in the next decade.
However in a small town in Switzerland we have 25Gbps available. The UK could be in this position, but Thatcher happened unfortunately, and the project was canned.
When I lived in central London (tube zone 2), all that was available at my address was a wet-noodle quality 20 Mbps DSL connection. No BT FTTP, no Virgin, no Hyperoptic, no G.Network. This was in early 2022.
I now live in Switzerland and have a 25 Gbps FTTP connection, paying about 30% more than I paid in London for the DSL line.
It's a completely different world connectivity-wise.
In March 2021 the median download speed of UK home broadband connections was 50.4 Mbit/s
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/224192/...
"Superfast" is not used to describe 10mbs, it is 30-300mbs.
That said 25Gb is a lot outside of switzerland.
Yes, “even” the barbarians of east europe have it. In romania you get around 10 gbps per second for roughly 10 euros a month from what i hear, and pretty much everyone has fiber. I believe Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are doing great as well.
Yes it's not necessarily nationwide but "unheard of" is way off, before you even consider Virgin cover a sizeable chunk of the country and their DOCSIS upgrade means they can push gigabit now.
To me it looks like just standard, modern bend insensitive single mode fibre but in a clear jacket.
In a brick house, wireless isn't a good choice for desktop computers and smart TVs.
I am glad now that I spent the time to put it on github.io and not on some old server of mine that would have been hugged to death.
You pay the SFP module tax on every port for that model, and also have a loud fan. You also probably can't put a copper SFP module in every cage without overheating.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009upr_s_in
That will let you receive 10Gbps fiber, and maybe route 3Gbps or so. No fans. No SFP module tax. And PoE on every port.
Mikrotik is definitely missing a product that has maybe 1 SFP28 port, 1 SFP+ port, 4 10GBps ports and 5 2.5Gbps ports. That would let you take in 25Gbps fiber, have a 10Gbps fiber run to a switch someplace, and run 10Gbps ethernet as needed.
Otherwise, you can get a powerful router with 2 SFP+ ports and link an SFP+ switch for the rest.
Sometimes people have money to burn and want to do something for the fun of it.
The other things they grew were also equal or better to the most expensive produce at the most luxury supermarket, like tomatoes that tasted of tomato rather than the watery, red golf balls they sell in Asda.
It allows you to centralize more things. For example, you could just have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a hub in a room for a computer, where the computer is actually somewhere else (such as a server room).
There is no need to have 10Gb in bedroom, such tech produces a lot of noise and heat. Maybe Stadia or similar video streaming could use such bandwidth. But this looks more like wiring for residential building with multiple flats, or office building. Or like some sort of tech flex.
…until later in the home’s life when that bedroom is no longer a bedroom, for whatever reason. If you’re gonna do a project like this you might as well take it to its logical conclusion.
It’s the same kind of advice I’d give to anyone who buys e.g. an iPad Pro - you might not think you need a cellular model right now, but that one time you do need it two years from now you’re gonna be very glad that you paid the extra ~$100.
You cannot take your mantra to its logical conclusion and apply it to everything, everywhere, at least not unless cost is absolutely a non-issue for you.
Until you’re driving, hypothetically, through rural Arkansas, where there's no Starbucks and your iPhone has juuuuuust enough signal strength to receive the WhatsApp telling you that you need to turn around a couple of slides but not enough bandwidth to download the deck.
Your iPad, though, for reasons known only to the black magic gods of RF design does have a stable-enough LTE connection and it saves your bacon with the large corporate client that dragged you to razorback country in the first place.
Hypothetically.
> You cannot take your mantra to its logical conclusion and apply it to everything, everywhere
There’s a reason I wrote iPad Pro. It’s not my mantra - it’s advice that applies to specific kinds of people in specific kinds of situations. The kind of people who have the means and motivation to run fiber throughout their house, for example.
25Gbps would be hard to saturate with an NVME SSD. Even if you like to mirror hard disks to remote locations all the time, you can just RSYNC, and then your needs are limited to the rate of change.
I'm getting a 10Gbps from the same provider, and even that is not likely to saturate, and I'll only have 1Gbps CAT6 links. The main benefit is that the clients are absolutely independent, i.e. downloading a Linux image can't affect someone's video conference, since each client can only pull 1Gbps of 10Gbps total.
If I had a 10gbps uplink for that price, I'd certainly look into getting more out of my network than just standard ethernet. 10gbit ethernet at least, though fiber may be easier to install depending on the size and layout of the house.
The use case isn't "I need it to watch youtube", but "I want to be able to restore from backup in hours rather than days", or "I want to play the latest Doom today and not tomorrow".
Eg, say you're backing up your data to a remote site. Great idea, but what if you need a restore, how long will that take? Downloading say, 100 TB on a 1 Gbps connection will take you more than a week.
Don't know if it's still the case, or if my ISP was to blame (or just being in EU/Sweden).
On the other hand, I don't have a problem maxing out 1 Gbps when downloading both metaphorical and actual linux iso's. A lot of the microsoft stuff is really fast as well, wouldn't be surprised if they could saturate ≈ 10 Gbps.
I have a 10Gb backbone for my “servers” and then a single 10Gb Ethernet cable to my main Mac- works well enough for now and probably not worth upgrading until I have internet beyond 10Gb.
Sure, it's very "blinkenlichten" but...