Gives me fiber for bandwidth and copper for PoE. Figured it was smarter to do both than compromise to either one, and surprisingly the fiber was cheaper than the copper to pull.
What do you mean by "trunk which is available in three locations"?
Usually cabling is home-run to a single, central patch panel. A cable (fibre, copper) would usually have one end in a room's wall outlet, with the other end at a patch panel: how would you have a cable one end at three locations? Do you have three patch panels? I.e., three hubs, with the room cables going to one hub and then you can have hub-to-hub runs?
In principle it sounds simple, but in practice I got lost in my own way too many times. Just glad that it's over, hahah.
A switch differs from a hub, a patch panel differs from a hub. Hopefully you haven’t touched one since affordable fast Ethernet switches hit the consumer market.
100G on singlemode (100G-LR4 being the most common) uses the well-known two-strand ("duplex") fiber. Or you can get 100G bi-directional ("BiDi") over a single strand of singlemode (fiber-to-the-home often uses this).
100G on multimode is weird. As the name implies, one beam of light, sent down the core of a multimode fiber, results in multiple modes (search "Laser modes") being sent down the strand. As they overlap, it gets hard to get a clean signal out the other end.
To deal with this issue, 100G on multimode uses fiber cables containing multiple strands per direction of travel. MPO-8 and MPO-12 are common cables used for 100G multimode: It contains eight or twelve strands of fiber. Four strands are used to send, four to receive. And the prices for those cables are higher than standard duplex singlemode cable.
The math worked out just to move to single mode a decade ago
OS2 transceivers are not that expensive anymore with the rise in third-party modules: sure, first-party, OEM SKUs are pricey, but a home user is not going to go that route.
Standard /r/networking advice is to go single-mode basically everywhere due to price drops over the last 10+ years.
The sibling posts have already pointed out the pricing has mostly equalized at this point too, especially if you're more realistic and look at 10G or 25G. (Or just buy a pile of used 100G CWDM4 transceivers off eBay.)
It shouldn't be that much different in price to run fiber verse running cat6. The expensive part is the labor, not the cable.
Ethernet specs are for cabling in dense conduit. Most people don't have dense conduit in their house. Much cable tests better than the rating on the jacket.
Four-fibre cable was about US$ 1.5/m (here in Switzerland, I am sure cheaper elsewhere).
I picked ONTi JT-S508CL-8S as the main 10G fibre switch (direct from Ali, for about 100 bucks).
For wired Ethernet and PoE, I have a couple of KeepLink KP-9000-9XHPML-X switches (I paid about 60 buck for each, they seem to cost around $85 now). I find that they work well and use them for 10/100/1000/2500 GbE switching and to power various devices (other switches, U7-Pro-XGS AP, Zigbee dongle, home automation server, rack fans etc).
The main splice box was about 60 bucks, 24 pigtails included.
From memory, 10G SFP+ fibre modules were about ten bucks apieces. (DAC cables are cheaper, 10G copper transceivers are more expensive.)
Plus various paraphenalia (wall face plates, keystone modules, more pigtails etc), all of which was pretty cheap.
Note that I was able to borrow a fusion splicer from a friend. Otherwise they seem to start at around 500 bucks; buying one would have been the single biggest expense.
I also run a 25G path from one point in my flat to my ISP. The cabling is exactly the same but 25G switching equipment and optics are considerably more expensive and less available than 10G.
I particularly like per-pert PoE power monitoring on the RTL837x. I hooked that up to my netdata to get a full history of how much each device in my rack is drawing. Don't need a fancy PDU or separate power bricks for each device -- everything is powered by the $60 switch.
(This is a home network and I'm not at all bothered about single points of failure or lack of redundancy/failover.)
If we're not accounting for switches, we're talking maybe few hundred euros at most including cables and outlets both for fiber and CAT6A, maybe 400-500 total or so where majority was CAT6A since I opted for the more _industrial one_, includes 150 I paid for help to run the cables through conduits. Fiber was all patch from distribution to walls, and trunk mainlines are _industrial_ fibers where in a single small diameter cable you have 48 strands of single mode. Actually in one I have 72 strands since guys didn't have 48 at the time and diameter is the same and price difference was small. This is for a three story house + basement and a run to the garage. I did the crimping myself, you do NOT "crimp" fiber yourself.. you get pre-made cables or for trunks you ask for pros with equipment to splice/fuse it for you.
Network equipment is a range of course. I opted for dream machine gateway for net and then the backbone is Switch pro XG Aggregation where most equipment is at with Switch Pro XG 10 PoE for APs (has dual 10GBit uplink), and a few smaller switches on the edges like Flex 2.5G for cameras etc. Yeah, I went full ubiquiti on that one and my mainline is basically 25Gb network, but it doesn't matter and that's the beauty of this setup - I could've easily gone full 1Gbit, 10, 25, 100, 400, even Nvidia/Mellanox 800Gbit OSFP with appropriate transcievers if one wants to go way overboard. Idea was to run this through to be future-proof cable-wise for another 10+ years (probably more), and for network setup to be for next 10 years (probably more) with 10/25G.