Wiring my home with fiber • Hacker News Board

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#51

Post by sponaugle » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

uncanneyvalley wrote: post #44

Unklejoe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can attach a string to a foam ball/plunger type thing and then suck it through with a vacuum from the other side. Then, fix your wire to the string and pull it back in the other direction.

A plastic bag tied to pulling twine works really well and is less likely to get stuck than a ball or plunger. I always leave a length of twine in my conduits so I only have to use the vacuum method once.

Indeed the plastic bag trick works very very well in a lot of different use cases. I was able to pull twine over 500 feet with this technique while doing my driveway conduits.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#52

Post by uncanneyvalley » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #32

mr_sturd wrote: post #23

I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.

Agreed. In most US homes, by code, there needs to be a fire-stop between floors but also for practical reasons there are often cross-bracing mid way up each wall, therefore going from one place to another often involves multiple holes in drywall (which is relatively inexpensive, but also a dusty/annoying nightmare to patch). If I built a home I'd add conduit, but that's an extremely niche idea.

A flexible drill bit[1] can be used to pass a horizontal member within a wall. You can enter the wall through an outlet hole or use the length of the bit to drill straight up through bottom of the wall, if you’re able to access it from a basement. They usually have a hole in the tip to pull twine along with the head of the bit.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#53

Post by detaro » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

kkfx wrote: post #43

While I like the idea I do not like much fiber or to be more precise their live stuff, since they degrade far faster than copper. A copper switch might work well for 10+ years, and since at home we normally not need such extreme performances and these days 2.5GBE on cat 8.1 copper are relatively cheap and common... Sure, it's very "blinkenlichten" but...

What exactly degrades in a fiber setup?

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#54

Post by sponaugle » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #50

sponaugle wrote: post #13

Nice read, and great work on the terminations. I did an extensive amount of both fiber and CAT6A in my recent house build, totally about 21 miles together. I did a mixture of single mode and multimode only because of some AV device support for multimode, and because all of it was so cheap compared to the labor and time. I ended up with significant fiber runs between the MDF and IDF closets, the server room, and all o…

Not surprised to see you on here. I was the guy who got into the discussion about the merits of single mode vs multi mode with a few of your friends on Facebook a while ago. I was in the multi mode camp mainly due to cost reasons whereas they were in the single mode camp for future proofing reasons. That said, the cost gap between MM and SM optics today is much smaller especially for 10G (and for the fiber itself it…

It was surprising the amount of AV related gear that was multimode specific! The cost differential has dropped so much now you can run either at low cost so if you have the space you can run both.

MM is easier to do mechanical splices on, and does seem to be overall less sensitive to damage. If your need is 10G and less than 300m it works well.

As an aside I ran a USB over fiber repeater that was multimode specific by accident I used a single mode fiber (same LC connector), and it worked perfectly.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#55

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

> My ISP plans on proving 100gbits in about 2 years so I don’t need pull new fiber if I decide to upgrade.

Jesus. Meanwhile, here in Germany, right in the center of Munich the best I can get is 100/40, because while there is FTTB buildout, the last 20m in the building go through the telephone wiring from the late 80s.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#56

Post by runjake » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #37

runjake wrote: post #5

This article is great overall, but there is some stuff you should do differently, if you're wanting to follow in the author's footsteps: 1. Just use UPC connectors everywhere unless you have really good reasons not to. 2. Use single mode fiber (SMF) everywhere, including internal wiring. SMF is infinitely scalable for future needs, multimode (MMF) is not. These days the cost differences for cabling and optics is negl…

I had a hard time finding UPC wall outlets since most that are available in the Swiss format are for FTTH use, so they all have APC LC connectors on them. The keystone versions are available as UPC but they lack any fiber routing in the back.

This is what I suspected. Great write-up. Thanks for putting all that effort into it.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#57

Post by spaceywilly » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

Salgat wrote: post #25

jeroenhd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's ISP delivers up to 25/25Gbps connections (and 10gbps connections for the same price as 1gbps connections, about $65 dollars per month converted) so if he is planning on using such a high bandwidth uplink, I don't think ethernet makes a lot of sense. If I had a 10gbps uplink for that price, I'd certainly look into getting more out of my network than just standard ethernet. 10gbit ethernet at least, though…

I have 1gbps fiber and it's extremely rare for me to come across a server that supports anything close to that bandwidth. At 10gbps you're able to upload 500GB/hour. For home use this seems extremely unlikely, even if you're using this as part of your job. Even my 4K surveillence cameras only require 20mbps each, that's 50 4k cameras to saturate a 1gbps line.

Have to think about the future though when you’re dealing with running stuff in walls. Think about what would’ve been acceptable throughput 10 years ago. If you built your home network around that, you’d probably be kicking yourself today.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#58

Post by dazc » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

pooper wrote: post #42

mr_sturd wrote: post #23

I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.

> I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls. I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious. Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit…

A friend of mine lives in a building with concrete floors above and below, all his wiring runs through plastic, surface-mounted, trunking and it is aesthetically disgusting.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#59

Post by yummypaint » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #34

jonatron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you're in the UK. Even in my relatively new house (80's), almost all cables are chased in, no conduit anywhere. Standard construction in the UK could be improved by just doing basic obvious things that other countries do.

Likely the US. Unless it’s a very new high-end house or you got lucky and bought the house a contractor built for themselves to a high standard, they did the cheapest thing the electrical code allows them to get away with, which certainly wasn’t conduit in the 80’s, unless that was local code somewhere. Certainly not in CA or FL.

Renting a place built a few years ago in NC. It has only one conduit, it runs from the networking panel to the outside where fiber comes in. Unfortunately there was nothing left in the empty conduit to pull things through with and the installer didn't want to spend half a day with a fishtape, so it didn't even get used. Companies really couldn't care less about doing things right w/ regards to people's homes unless there is some direct monetary consequence for them.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#60

Post by shmerl » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

> In order to use the SFP+ modules you need the correct PCIe cards on your PC

Are there good SFP+ USB 4 adapters that work on Linux?

One of the bad trends in recent motherboards is minimal number of PCIe slots, which are very clearly focused on GPUs only. So basically there is no room for any extra devices. Their idea seems to be pushing everyone to USB 4 for use cases like that (which supposedly should be able to route even PCIe?).