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Wiring my home with fiber

sschueller.github.io

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Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#291

Post by midoridensha »

latchkey wrote: post #280
midoridensha wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is why it's immoral to cook your own food for dinner, for instance, instead of going to a restaurant or hiring a personal chef.

Nice sarcasm. My thought as well. Where do you draw the line?

It's really simple: if you want to do something yourself, do it. If you want to pay someone to do it for you, do that. There's many reasons you might choose one route or the other, and they're all valid. Ignore sanctimonious assholes who tell you that you should support workers just because.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#292

Post by yencabulator »

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…

Imagine going up or down a floor. Really hard to do on top of existing walls, pretty easy with conduits in walls.

For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#293

Post by alanwreath »

I recently had my home wired with cat8. In the back of my head I had wondered if anyone was doing fiber instead. Nice to see this write up of your journey.

I wonder what convinced you to go this route, like some of the benefits up and above just regular Ethernet. I’ve noticed ad’s like the one in this page https://shop.fibercommand.com/pages/applications-home-builde...

And wondered if it was fake or not.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#294

Post by kkfx »

detaro wrote: post #53
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?

The active apparatus. Not the fiber, but still a cost issue.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#295

Post by angry_octet »

Contrary to what the author and others have written, I would discourage wiring with single mode (SM). For ethernet the cost of modules and patches might not seem so significant, but structured fiber can be used for things other than ethernet, for which SM is vastly more expensive than multimode (MM). Think 4k display port for cinema/follow-me TV, although that is being replaced with SDVoE for 4k@60. However, you do want to use higher quality OM3 or OM4 MM cable (aqua or violet sheath). If required you can carry SM origin signals over OM3/4 by using a mode conditioning patch cable.

In terms of pulling, a lubed cable sock can get through lots of places, and save a ton on termination. Cablers often use a strip of yellow tongue (the nylon tongue on chipboard flooring panels) to poke through a run, and then run a conduit or pull cord. Pre terminated MPO/MPT (which is 12 core) and MPT breakout fans are very cheap in comparison to splicing. It's generally much cheaper to run more fiber than it is to run conduit so you can run more fiber.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#296

Post by aix1 »

LaLaLand122 wrote: post #290
aix1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

FWIW last time I checked, central London did indeed have slow connectivity, but it didn't extrapolate to the rest of the UK. No idea why the center of the capital was equivalent to a remote small town in this regard.

I agree, that's very counterintuitive. You'd think the economics would generally be in London's favour, given the high population density. (Though digging up the streets might be harder and therefore more expensive?)

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#297

Post by psychlops »

js2 wrote: post #281
sponaugle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a new house. The 18 AP locations serve a couple of different long run purposes and reasons: The first is to have direct nearly-line of sight locations for the majority of the house which is primarily to support higher frequency(60GHz) and beyond which have poor wall penetration. The second is to provide good wifi coverage due to signal attenuation from the construction techniques. I did many of the walls in do…

> I did many of the walls in double 5/8s drywall, some in green wall, all insulated, and all solid hard doors I gather you did this for noise isolation? And by green wall do you mean green glue between the drywall layers? I'm only familiar with this for home theater construction, not an entire home.

I think he means the greenwall (rather than drywall) used in bathrooms and damp areas.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#298

Post by kotaKat »

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 resisted the "cheap chinese" modules for a long, long time, but then discovered that most of my uplink carriers used them.

MSP ISP here, we just rock the FS optics combined with an FSbox to code them as required. ;)

Just a warning for the weary: don't put a non-Fiberstore optic in their FS coding box -- you'll lock your account for a week. Ask our field team how they know this.

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#299

Post by anarticle »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #100
latchkey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently in the process of literally tearing down walls in my old house (built in the 40's). I used to fear smashing into walls. Once you do a bit of drywall and mud yourself, you realize it isn't that big of a deal. Everything I've learned has been off YT videos and there are some excellent channels with all of the professional tips and tricks. It isn't rocket science by a long shot.

I’ve done a lot of drywall work and I still avoid it whenever possible. Doing basic drywall and paint isn’t rocket science, but getting a professional level fit and finish actually takes a lot of practice and experience. It’s also a completely different experience when you’re trying to match old specialty paints from a previous homeowner, blending repairs to match the wall texture, and other complexities that don’t s…

The trick, in my experience, is to use very fast drying joint compound always in powder. You can mix joint compound that will dry faster than you can put it up, which enables you to put multiple coats on. Sanding stinks, but if you've a good hand you can minimize the amount of post skim finish work.

Used this technique to rip out and then match a ceiling in a bathroom, and also to patch up work after some HVAC dudes blew part of a wall out for mini splits.

It was tough to learn as there is a knack, but paid off. Having good hand eye coordination pays off in many ways.

The most important part was learning from an experienced person: "No wall on earth is perfectly flat, you just want it to look flat." Good advice, especially in a town (Philly) where there are old houses with not a square corner in the whole place. :)

Re: Wiring my home with fiber

#300

Post by phonebanshee »

wyclif wrote: post #269
Aeolun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europeans are the most inclined to modify stuff around their homes in my experience. In Asia I don’t see it at all.

Yes, here in SE Asia almost nobody who owns a home does the work, there's a very strong culture of hiring someone to do it.

How much of that is just a cost thing? Is hiring people to do home maintenance inexpensive and easily available where you are? That's usually not the case in American cities.
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