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)
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.
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.