121–130 of 174 posts
why not use fiber directly and use whatever sfp for much cheaper without worry of heat
For connecting via say a Macbook Pro, there used to not be Thunderbolt 4 SFP+ interfaces. So, you were pretty limited to some ethernet SFP+ module that you hope would actually work. Also personally, if you can get away with a copper DAC, I would rather use that instead of fiber because you don't need any special modules.
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I did just that relatively recently in a house we bought. OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. It's basically future proof, but also has its own well, things. You can't really plug into a duplex (I wish though), you have to put a small switch to it with SFP+ or 28 or whatever the speed you want. Higher speed switches are also a tad…
Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.
I feel like we have moved into the era now where if you were putting cabling in the walls for networking you should be choosing fibre now. Not necessarily because we are definitely at the stage where the home needs it, but because the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet at 10gbit/s and its really high consumption and heat. Switching to fibre after 2.5gbit/s seems like the thing to do now and plenty of us now h…
[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
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I did just that relatively recently in a house we bought. OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. It's basically future proof, but also has its own well, things. You can't really plug into a duplex (I wish though), you have to put a small switch to it with SFP+ or 28 or whatever the speed you want. Higher speed switches are also a tad…
Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.
100G on singlemode (100G-LR4 being the most common) uses the well-known two-strand ("duplex") fiber. Or you can get 100G bi-directional ("BiDi") over a single strand of singlemode (fiber-to-the-home often uses this).
100G on multimode is weird. As the name implies, one beam of light, sent down the core of a multimode fiber, results in multiple modes (search "Laser modes") being sent down the strand. As they overlap, it gets hard to get a clean signal out the other end.
To deal with this issue, 100G on multimode uses fiber cables containing multiple strands per direction of travel. MPO-8 and MPO-12 are common cables used for 100G multimode: It contains eight or twelve strands of fiber. Four strands are used to send, four to receive. And the prices for those cables are higher than standard duplex singlemode cable.
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> Regular people don't know this stuff... Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7. So... yeah. > ...OM3/OM4/OM5? Single mode/Multi mode? LC/SC?... My answer is OM4, Multi-mode [0], LC. OM3, 4, and 5 will all work at 10gbit for any run you'd expect to make in most houses. I chose cable grade based on what was in stock at the local store. I chose connector type based on what fit into my NICs…
> Regular people don't know whether to get Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, or Cat7. What are you talking about. It's right in the manual for some switches like the TP-Link TL-SX105 V4 [1]. It's not even an expensive or fancy one. Network Media (Cable) 100BASE-TX: 2-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5 or above (maximum 100 m) 1000BASE-T: 4-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5e or above (maximum 100 m) 2.5GBASE-T: 4-pair UTP/STP of Cat. 5e or above (maximum…
Because 6 has the plastic separator its much more of a bastard to pull through things. I imagine that 7 is also a dick in that regard because the shielding stops it from bending as readily.
Some time ago I was playing around with 10GbE using a Macbook Pro. At the time that meant a Thunderbolt adapter (and still does). Thing is, the one I got was essentially just a giant heatsink [1]. It was a beast and belied just how much of a problem heat distribution was. I'm not an EE so I'm not really sure why, other than by looking at what high bandwidth cables have done since. 10baseT (!0Mbps) came out in 1990 (t…
We never really got mass market 10GbE. The controllers were too expensive. The cable requirements were quite high. And heat was an issue. It's coming sooner than you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423967
After stepping up in networks periodically (coax, then twisted pair with hubs, then 100mbps dual-speed switching hubs, then finally non-blocking 100mbps switches), I finally upgraded to gigabit ethernet at home because that had became cheap enough.
That last upgrade was 18 years ago, in 2008, and by that point I wasn't even an close to an early-adopter.
And now, 18 years hence: It seems absurd that the next 10x improvement is still not quite ready yet.
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>because they already have copper in the walls. Makes a decent draw wire.
If the cabling was installed before the drywall, good chance it's stapled.
Residential low-voltage cable plants are almost never implemented in a way that makes upgrades simple.
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I have ten gigabits throughout most of my house, and you're right: copper is not happy pushing ten gigs. My 10 gigabit thunderbolt dongle weighs about a pound, and I think 90+% of that weight is just heatsink. If I've had it plugged in for awhile, if I accidentally touch that dongle it actually hurts because it's so hot. I cannot image that much heat is good for, well, anything. I have another Thunderbolt dongle that…
> I have ten gigabits throughout most of my house, and you're right: copper is not happy pushing ten gigs. DACs are copper, and they're happy. > I have another Thunderbolt dongle that has an SFP+ module, so I ran a fiber line from my switch to my computer, and that runs considerably cooler. That's what I use nowadays. This is also what I am doing, and I love it. Much better and more reliable than WLAN. I want as much…
Yeah, but DACs are pretty short and tend to have much thicker cables than regular copper Ethernet.
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I did just that relatively recently in a house we bought. OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. It's basically future proof, but also has its own well, things. You can't really plug into a duplex (I wish though), you have to put a small switch to it with SFP+ or 28 or whatever the speed you want. Higher speed switches are also a tad…
Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.
The math worked out just to move to single mode a decade ago