Is it economically viable yet to use fibre cable to wire a house?
Last time I read up on this, the cost of fibre cable itself wasn’t the issue, it was the termination and converting from fibre to ethernet which was the expensive part.
I might be moving house in the near future, the property have a main house and flat which is around 10 - 20m apart. One of the things I want to do is to run a network cable between the 2 buildings.
For starters I’ll use the different brands of wifi routers and AP’s I already have, but the plan is to eventually convert everything to Unifi gear.
I think @Phil.g00 reported once on a fibre link he was using, mostly because it also offers isolation and thus protection from weather related electrical disturbances and damage.
Terminal equipment ( media converters) are inexpensive enough. (see FS.com) I don’t think I’d bother with 10-20m if the earthing on both buildings is good and mutually connected.
100 - 200m+ apart is a different story.
I recently upgraded some network points to 10Gb and was pretty surprised how affordable Fibre was, even getting things locally. Between buildings, I’d just get a ready made 50m LC-LC patch cable that’s rated for outdoor use and terminate each end into an SFP that goes into a switch. Muuuuuch less of a risk as far as lightning and cable degradation is concerned
If you install a conduit in the ground you will be ok with copper. When last I checked you can safely have a 100m cable.
Agreed that outdoors fibre is the best but since your buildings are so close together you can do without.
I haven’t heard of installations within the same building structure being fibre (yet)
I’ll look at different options, I still have plenty time for reading up on it.
My reasons for wanting to go fibre rather than copper is because of the lightning factor and also because of interference.
I’m a radio amateur and long network cabling runs is one of the major RFI headaches in life.
Until the ideal solution comes along I can always just put up a high power AP which should cover the flat, but I want to ultimately wire it.
In the example I used above, I’m running two 10m fibre patch cables to two servers in the same room. It was cheaper doing it this way (with fibre SFP+ Modules) than it would be to run 10m Cat6a (with copper SFP+ modules). The point I’m trying to make is that fibre really isn’t expensive if you buy pre terminated patch cables (and you can get them up 300m in MM) and they have way better bandwidth than copper
This conversion is through whats called transceivers,
You get 1GB which is SFP and then you get SFP+ which is 10Gb.
Have a look at the attached, nice overview of fiber. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DEJ7odWq0
You would not normally/yet run fiber all over to the house to all points, it’s currently financially a viable idea to run between switches.
so,
if you going to do this between buildings, I’d say yes definitely do it, use SFP+ other words plan for 10Gb, allot you to put a NAS down the other side and have amazing network speed between the locations, run the fiber switch to switch,
switch itself though, you will pay through your ass for a 10Gb switch, aka client ports.
or well, maybe really the R5k Unifi USB Aggregation switch is not paying through your ass, and you can use one of this ports into a NAS/media/Plex server.
G
You can even buy a 4 port Mikrotik 10Gb switch for around R3k, which has served me well till now. But yeah, it’s getting upgraded with the 8 port Aggregation UniFi switch this weekend
https://www.southernelements.co.za/ have a tool kit to make up your own fibre cables, takes a bit of practice but no more difficult than RJ45 cables after you have watched a few Youtube video’s.
So the house move happened and I’m planning the network setup again.
Plan is still to eventually go Unifi, but it will happen in stages cause budget.
Plan is still to do fibre between buildings, between switches, main reasoning being lightning and interference as previously mentioned.
The downside is that I’ll need a PoE switch in each building where if I did everything with copper, I could have only used a single PoE switch to power the AP’s and other future things in all buildings and around the property. Ultimately this will probably mean higher cost, but lightning is a huge factor in this area, so I want to do everything possible to mitigate the risk.
With that being said if looking at a traditional copper network, factoring proper surge protection on all lines, proper surge protection where everything comes together at the patch panel, then going fibre might even be less expensive. A copper patch panel, shielded and with built in surge protection costs over R10k for example as per my quick Google search. That R10k should already cover a couple decent PoE switches plus the SFP adaptors.
Main house, cottage around 10m away and then 2 more cottages around 30m away. For now I’ll just start with the main house and closest cottage, we are still deciding what to do with the other 2 cottages, whether they will become long term rentals or weekend AirBnB places.
I haven’t decided on the final equipment list yet, I’m still doing some research.