Deploying fiber in the home
blog.daknob.net
blog.daknob.net
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.
How inexpensive are we talking here? $30? $100? $300? $1000?
Not too bad, way less than what I imagined !
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.
Took a while, was fun to watch.
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.
Light is pretty quick. We used to test fiber via a 25KM spool to text assumed distances btwn things...
Save all time and energy and thought and just bundle a ratnest of fiber in any place where you can.
Dont attempt Home Splicing because thats how Big Fiber wins
When I designed LDAC the requirement was "fiber to desktop" (2004)
Your 10 minutes doesnt scale to folks who dont have your skills, thus more fishing...
I go the opposite direction, will eventually rip out/cover all the network cable outlets previous owner put in in various rooms.
I don't see much benefit to fibre though. Copper cables and connectors are more durable.
If you already have cables, isn't it best to keep them? Connecting the TV to a network socket beats fiddling with the WiFi.
But, yeah, fiber is always gonna be more 'future proof' and damn my 10G gbics do get annoyingly hot.
[0]: https://www.asteralabs.com/smart-retimers/pci-express-retime...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got any measurements to the contrary?
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.
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.
I get excess jitter and latency spikes. For everything else, mesh is amazing
But Wi-Fi reliability and performance is very much dependent on the environment you are in.
- 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.
The best is to have a mesh network backed by a wired backbone. The next best thing if your house is not easy to rewire is Powerline Networking.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.lanshack.com or similar should have something in the $400 range.
You could be super cool and run conduit, but that itself has a cost (spooled conduit is what I'd do, but costly)
Get a nice OFN/OFNR/OFNP cable and you don’t need to worry about grounding. And you can legally the same cable indoors too.
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.
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.
On fs.com you can order fiber in custom lengths. An armored pre-terminated 350ft OS2 duplex cable costs $128: https://www.fs.com/products/20720.html Non-armored would be as cheap as $40: https://www.fs.com/products/50147.html?attribute=58053&id=17...
If you don't have a conduit, you can buy direct-burial cable. Two strands at 350 feet would be $590: https://www.lanshack.com/2-Strand-CustomLine-Corning-ALTOS-O... 6 strands at 350 feet would be $687: https://www.lanshack.com/6-Strand-CustomLine-Corning-ALTOS-O...
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.
Just need two dishes pointed at each other. That hard line is nice until it fails, which it will eventually.
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.)
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)
A GFCI should detect a live wire into wet ground IF a ground is present, but not all breakers are required to be GFCI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.servethehome.com/mikrotik-crs504-4xq-in-a-4x-100...
If you're serious enough about home networking to run cables through your walls, $700 for a switch is nothing compared to the labor cost.
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).
To those people i want to say conduits exists :)
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.
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).
https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-015-top-t...
(And there are plenty of papers like this.)
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:
https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-088-venti...
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.
What SFP adapters did you use?
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.
The biggest problem is that there aren't a lot of (consumer accessible) ethernet switches capable of doing 10Gbps with copper ethernet cables.
There's a lot more equipment out there in the small office space that can do SPF fibre.
eventually switched from it to fiber
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.
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
What's the brand/model?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CJNND118/
Super generic design. Probably the exact same circuit board/chips as a dozen other similar switches you can find on Amazon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've never been able to figure out what I'm supposed to use for any given non-mains-electrical run.
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 know it's penetrating a fire barrier (e.g. normal flooring OSB), so should probably have some sort of break... but what's typically used there?
Common recommendation seems to be "in-wall-rated whatever", but I'd rather do it right if I'm taking the time to do it.
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.