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Comment by fleventynine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I suspect middle-mile has more trusted crews, this was literally "last hundred feet" or so. He did say he had pretty long pre-termed.

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.

Took a while, was fun to watch.

> 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.

Got fiber installed yesterday, they spliced it both inside the house and at the PON splitter.

> using an inexpensive Chinese fusion splicer

How inexpensive are we talking here? $30? $100? $300? $1000?

500$ apparently: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/cheap-fusion-splicer.html.

Not too bad, way less than what I imagined !

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 :)

I did an half hour ‘training’ with this $/€950 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZL6KGQW/ https://elfcams.com/en/product/3881. It was used by students to setup internet on campus dormitories and they were satisfied with it.

I wouldnt have cut them.

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

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).

Fair, but just shifting faulty points down to "pickup that can citizen"

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'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.

100% This. Just coil it in a hidden space and save all the hassle/$ buying a splicer.

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.

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