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Comment by mysteria | Hacker News Reader

Localized floor switches with SFP are actually quite common in commercial installs. At home it's possible to have one basement rack and connect all the wall jacks to it, but those runs are too long and clumsy in a large office building. I do the same thing at home actually, I just put the floor switches in closets/etc. so the fan noise isn't audible in the living areas. The rack and core switch sits in the basement. However I just run copper instead of fiber as I can't justify the expense and 10G lines should be future proof for a while.

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.

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I used the VLAN "trick" for connecting my cable modem to my router for a few years in an old multi-floor apartment with pre-wired ethernet, but it's not ideal because the router is then not able to detect the link state of the modem. For example, if you unplug a cable modem and plug it back in, normally the link would go down on the router and then come back up, and when the link returns the router will attempt to fetch a new DHCP lease.

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.

The way I handle this is to have a cronjob on the router that automatically resets the (virtual) interface when it can't successfully ping the modem.

For home use, fiber links from your main cabinet to distributed switches, then copper from switches to outlets makes a lot of sense.

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.

This is exactly what I did last summer. 10Gb fiber backbone between big switches, copper fans out from those to devices. I don't really need that much bandwidth but it's nice to have transfer faster than spinning rust write speed between my primary and backup storage servers.

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.

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