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Wiring my home with fiber

sschueller.github.io

121–130 of 305 posts

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#121
post #42

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…

Because what you propose is fugly and you don't want to live in a mess.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conduit would look terrible. Most people care about how their houses look. Decorative trunking exists: https://www.d-line-it.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1240-x-... , I've used it, and it blends in well enough.

To be fair, it looks terrible to you (and to me), but there are plenty of people who have no issue with it. Just like there's people who get agida when there's things like toasters that sit out on the kitchen counter, but a lot of people think it's fine.

Just like there are people who don't care about how good or bad code they write as long as it works. Doesn't mean we should accept or promote this as 'good'.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of >1 GBps speeds as something that serves burst rather than streaming needs. The use case isn't "I need it to watch youtube", but "I want to be able to restore from backup in hours rather than days", or "I want to play the latest Doom today and not tomorrow". Eg, say you're backing up your data to a remote site. Great idea, but what if you need a restore, how long will that take? Downloading say, 100 TB on a…

That would only works if the other end can push 25gbps as well. I wonder what's the maximum throughput of various cloud storage services commonly used for off site backups (S3, B2, etc). Would they artificially limit the max bandwidth or allow you to go as fast as possible?

I've had trouble saturating my 1 Gbps connection in Sweden. I did tests with B2 and Wasabi roughly every quarter for a couple of years trying to see if it was feasible to move some data hoarding activities there, and never got more than ≈100 Mbps when downloading from them.

Don't know if it's still the case, or if my ISP was to blame (or just being in EU/Sweden).

On the other hand, I don't have a problem maxing out 1 Gbps when downloading both metaphorical and actual linux iso's. A lot of the microsoft stuff is really fast as well, wouldn't be surprised if they could saturate ≈ 10 Gbps.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#124
post #117
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you ever again close doors that it needs to go through? Most interior doors have a gap between the bottom of the door and the top of the floor, and you can cable in the gap if you don't mind the look. If the threshold is carpetted, you can often squish the wire into the seam where the carpet meets the door frame. You can get one, maybe two, runs into a room that way, so don't put your central switch in a…

I’m picturing this as a tripping hazard, unless there’s some kind of well to shove the cable into (like your carpet example).

Even without carpet, you'd tack it so it stays pretty close to the side of the threshold. 'Nobody' uses the outside inch or so of the threshold, so it's not going to be a tripping hazard. If you are going across the threshold that's different, but in that case, it's better to go over the top of the door frame.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#125
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k sq ft as "somewhat large" ha! ;) With 18 APs are you using campus wifi style things, or just a bunch with the same SID?

I'm using Ubiquity Unifi 6 Pros right now, but am going to switch to the Enterprise ones (with 6Ghz) at some point soon. They are all integrated to the same controller (a UDM Pro), so all SSIDs I use are available everywhere. I even have a couple of them down the driveway all the way to the gate so I have wifi coverage all the way out.

Why switch?

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#126

This is likely not useful in most west european homes (even gigabit connections are unheard of in the uk, 10 megs being advertised as “superfast”, let alone tens of gigs). But still a fun project!

About 70% of UK homes have access to a gigabit connection through either fibre or the Virgin Media HFC network. FTTP coverage is about 40% nationwide. It’s not that rare.

Respectfully, I find the 70% figure for access to a gigabit line extremely hard to believe.

When I lived in central London (tube zone 2), all that was available at my address was a wet-noodle quality 20 Mbps DSL connection. No BT FTTP, no Virgin, no Hyperoptic, no G.Network. This was in early 2022.

I now live in Switzerland and have a 25 Gbps FTTP connection, paying about 30% more than I paid in London for the DSL line.

It's a completely different world connectivity-wise.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#127
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…

3rd party and maybe 1-2 of each type from the vendor (used to show their support that the 3rd party transceiver isn't the problem) is what we usually buy, basically an open secret. Though I've seen 97% off the price for vendor optics, still more expensive than 3rd party

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#128

This is likely not useful in most west european homes (even gigabit connections are unheard of in the uk, 10 megs being advertised as “superfast”, let alone tens of gigs). But still a fun project!

Here's some actual data that contradicts your hyperbole:

In March 2021 the median download speed of UK home broadband connections was 50.4 Mbit/s

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/224192/...

"Superfast" is not used to describe 10mbs, it is 30-300mbs.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#129

This is likely not useful in most west european homes (even gigabit connections are unheard of in the uk, 10 megs being advertised as “superfast”, let alone tens of gigs). But still a fun project!

Fast local network is useful even without fast uplink, e.g. for accessing data on local server. 1 Gbps is still several times slower than disk speeds, so going to 10 Gbps seems like reasonable future-proof config.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#130
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which video you mean, but you use either a fish tape or a pull line. I know that Verizon also has fiber with a stiffer jacket that they can push through conduit a pretty good distance. I know this because I helped the Verizon installer run FIOS at my daughter's apartment in a building that was over 100 years old. The conduit had a crimp in it so it took the two of us a while to get past that.

Probably referring to this demonstration video regarding the FTTH Squeeze plate where the pull line comes flying through the conduit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARSpp4B9-X4

That's a fish tape being pushed through from the other end.
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