Wiring my home with fiber • Hacker News Board

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#211

Post by philjohn » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:18 PM UTC

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.

Agree with this.

I had my house wired up with 30 Cat 6 drops (3 being in-ceiling for AP's) and in the end it was simpler to go up to the loft (2 story house) and come down that way, with all of the cables then being bundled up and coming down through a built-in-wardrobe into the garage below.

It required a bit of patching here and there where a small chase had to be chisseled out to get around a cable going through a patch of plaster used for dot and dab (technique to quickly plasterboard/drywall onto brick), but with conduit it would have been a much simpler job.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#212

Post by namibj » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

y04nn wrote: post #193

10 Gbps is really a game changer if you have large quantity of data to transfer (multiple terabytes), but 10G cards and equipment are power hungry so I only put out a dangling fiber one in a while to make a backup but the speed is appreciable. Also I'm still looking for a solution setup a ~200m link, Ethernet and WLAN are not an option, so I'm only left with fiber, 1Gbps would be sufficient, but I won't be able to do…

There are toolless mechanical splices for about a buck each. Pre-terminated cable also exists, and a single fiber with an LC plug for bidi is small enough to fit through typical conduit.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#213

Post by y04nn » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

yuvadam wrote: post #209

y04nn wrote: post #193

10 Gbps is really a game changer if you have large quantity of data to transfer (multiple terabytes), but 10G cards and equipment are power hungry so I only put out a dangling fiber one in a while to make a backup but the speed is appreciable. Also I'm still looking for a solution setup a ~200m link, Ethernet and WLAN are not an option, so I'm only left with fiber, 1Gbps would be sufficient, but I won't be able to do…

Any reason you can't use pre-terminated fiber?

I have to pass the fiber cable through conduits that are not very large and they are not straight. So I will need to use a pull line. Using pre-terminated fiber will either bock or destroy the connector.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#214

Post by namibj » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #115

bombcar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want it, and are willing to pay, you can often negotiate with the building owner to get the last 20m run (up to and including conduit hidden on the outside of the building, etc). If enough people in the building care, it might even be relatively cheap.

The latter is the problem. Half the people in the building are old, the other half of them are happy with the way it is - I'm the only IT guy. Might be possible to pull fiber through the conduits, but not sure if the Mnet FTTB box can actually give me fiber - I think it's a miniature DSLAM only.

Mnet should be able to CWDM (of they don't just have a fiber to spare for it) you a link on the DSLAM's fiber uplink. Provided the building owner allows the fiber from the DSLAM to you. They could also put an Ethernet switch needy to the DSLAM so more people could share one uplink connection.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#215

Post by fifteenforty » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

Does anyone have any more info on Huawei’s FTTR concept? https://www.huawei.com/en/technology-insights/inspiration-la...

To me it looks like just standard, modern bend insensitive single mode fibre but in a clear jacket.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#216

Post by fifteenforty » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

coder543 wrote: post #207

voidwtf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a best practice for which bidi direction to choose for which device type? i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?

Aren’t BiDi transceivers usually a good bit more expensive, especially compared to how low the material cost of fiber is? What’s your use case for BiDi? I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with this stuff, though. I can easily imagine BiDi being useful to retrofit/repurpose some existing fiber, since labor costs can be a lot.

I can see it being useful for running ultra thin bend insensitive fibre around base boards; just like the FTTR thing Huawei is trying to sell.

I wish the concept was more clearly legal in Australia. I’m pretty sure once you glue the fiber in place it becomes ‘permanent’ and thus has to be done by a licensed cabler with a fiber endorsement.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#217

Post by archi42 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

minus7 wrote: post #75

I also installed fiber a while ago after being told "this isn't hard" by Michael Stapelberg's post [1]. Luckily I managed to get by with patch cables; a 30m cables really goes a long way! I even managed to get a duplex LC through a 16mm conduit with a pretty tight 90° bend, but just with lube, quite some force and luck. I can just recommend going for it if you're curious. Cables and tranceivers really aren't expensiv…

Kudos for pulling those through these small conduits :)

For anyone trying to emulate this: I would very much NOT recommend using 16mm conduits for LC duplex patch cables. It's doable for some short/straight runs, but the connectors like to get stuck in bends. For me it was the final r=3cm bend in a ~20m conduit. I ended up pulling Cat7 into that conduit and routed the fiber through a tree-like network of wider backup conduits.

Since the backup conduit ends up in the wrong corner of the room, I might one day 1. cut the 30m fiber patch cable, 2. pull it into the original 16mm conduit (w/o connectors), replacing the Cat7 and 3. splice the fiber again. Using a "mechanical splice" that should be doable quite cheaply, but I didn't yet get around to learning/practicing that.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#218

Post by archi42 » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #79

kube-system wrote: post #18

Is the equipment used for termination more expensive than the splicing equipment? I just use premade MMF in my house.

I have no experience with terminating connectors directly. There appear to be all kinds available, even ones with gel inside them but they suffer a lot more loss than if I splice a fiber. Using the splicer gave me the flexibility to splice pig-tail ends or just two fibers together with a small loss.

From what I read (never tried and not my area of expertise) for our short runs at home loss isn't that big of an issue, especially for 10km transceivers.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#219

Post by yakak » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

sponaugle wrote: post #20

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…

Fiber is, as runjake mentioned, very very cheap. The raw cost is less than copper, and that is part of why I ran so much of it in my build. (I am not the OP). I did however include some multimode in that equation only because some AV equipment uses is, and not all of them use replaceable optics modules. I would strongly agree that if you are running fiber, run single mode everywhere. It is amazing how far singlemode…

What kind of equipment outlay was necessary if you don't mind my asking? I.e. the splicer the OP bought seems a bit expensive and impractical to own compared to an ethernet crimper, etc.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#220

Post by avidiax » Sun, Oct 30, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #169

Is there a cheap as in < $1000 router with 10GbE (for fiber or copper) ports?

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_12s_2xs

You pay the SFP module tax on every port for that model, and also have a loud fan. You also probably can't put a copper SFP module in every cage without overheating.

https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009upr_s_in

That will let you receive 10Gbps fiber, and maybe route 3Gbps or so. No fans. No SFP module tax. And PoE on every port.

Mikrotik is definitely missing a product that has maybe 1 SFP28 port, 1 SFP+ port, 4 10GBps ports and 5 2.5Gbps ports. That would let you take in 25Gbps fiber, have a 10Gbps fiber run to a switch someplace, and run 10Gbps ethernet as needed.