Is there a justification for this? What are the chances your CAT cable is a bottleneck to network speeds?
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just need two dishes pointed at each other. That hard line is nice until it fails, which it will eventually.
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.
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.
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?
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