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If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

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Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#151

I subscribe to this philosophy. I recently had my house remodeled. A lot of the walls were opened up and I asked the contractor to run fiber and cat 6a everywhere. Now every room has multiple drops of each. Even the outdoor and garage have several drops. Bathrooms have ethernet. Attic, basement and storage room has multiple drops. I may have overdone it. But, I never wanted to every worry about this ever again.

Nice story. Why did you choose to drop both fiber and copper? My assumption: You can run 1/2.5G very cheap these days over copper. When 10G/25G gets much cheaper later, you can switch to fiber.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duct capacity is finite, but fiber cables are tiny and they are very nearly free compared to the cost of having them run.

Not quite tiny - a basic armored (rats !) 12 strands cable may be around 10-15 millimeters, whereas similarly specced cables in the 500 strands range might reach 20-30 mm. In crowded Paris downtown, it adds up fast. On the countryside, that is a lot more weight to hang on poles.

Interesting. I would use the ability to get 40x the strands for 4x the weight as evidence against extra strands adding up fast.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#153
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A family member who's doing better in life than I am purchased a house built within the last 5 years, and it didn't even _have_ Ethernet run anywhere. WHY!?! I can't fathom how it's possible anyone would find that a negative. I'm less sure. Are there any 40 year old cables that you'd consider a positive in your house today? 20 year old cables? I wouldn't be too excited about having a house full of Coax, 10Base-T, a…

Cat6 is twenty years old and still entirely usable today in a residential setting.

Even cat5 is not only usable but will probably give you 5gig or higher.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#154
post #65
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO a not-tiny house should have several sub-panels: Kitchen (enough to run the big stove + ~100A, but every outlet it's own 20A circuit), 'lab' / workshop (same idea), laundry room (lock-out breaker near / in room for connecting / disconnecting), etc. A family member who's doing better in life than I am purchased a house built within the last 5 years, and it didn't even _have_ Ethernet run anywhere. WHY!?! I can't f…

> A family member who's doing better in life than I am purchased a house built within the last 5 years, and it didn't even _have_ Ethernet run anywhere. WHY!?! I can't fathom how it's possible anyone would find that a negative. I'm less sure. Are there any 40 year old cables that you'd consider a positive in your house today? 20 year old cables? I wouldn't be too excited about having a house full of Coax, 10Base-T, a…

I was thankful I bought a house full of coax recently - now I have MoCA 2.5 adapters installed in the living room/kitchen/office/den/bedrooms all connecting to a central coax manifold which became my server room - this lets me hit ~2Gbps. Sure, cat6 would have been better, but that was 30 years from being invented when my house was built.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#155
post #143
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently bought my first house, and there was only one coax outlet in the entire place, and zero ethernet. I wanted to move where the coax terminated, and after some searching around, found MOCA. Had never heard of it before, but a hundred bucks or so later, and it's a fantastic solution.

for those of you using MOCA, what kind of bandwidth do you get? And what kit would you recommend? I ask, as my brother-in-law just finished a house where he had asked the contractor to put in internet cabling everywhere, and... drum roll... yes the contractor put in coax everywhere. I tried powerline adapters, but could only get ~30-40mbps (he has a 1gbps fiber connection from the ISP) over them.

I use the MoCA 2.5 adapter by goCoax. I won't say I recommend it since I haven't compared it to other adapters, but it appears to do what I want it to do and I get about 2Gbps through the adapters. Every one I could find seemed to be around the same price point ($60-$80 per adapter) so I just went with a well reviewed one.

I would definitely recommend if fishing cat6 is not an option and you would need to open up walls. Unless your BIL has a lot of kids and their friends over who all like to stream different 4k movies from a NAS, I can't imagine any normal user with 1gbps WAN finding 2gbps LAN insufficient.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#156
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, conduit makes sense. The future in homes - from this current vantage point - is likely all wireless via multiple APs around the house that have short range but very high bandwidth. Only us power users will have wired ethernet.

Wireless will _never_ have the bandwidth nor wall-penetration people want. If it has the latter all the neighboring houses / apartment units will bleed through, and if it doesn't even the limited frequency domain won't be enough unless you're in the same room as an AP that doesn't penetrate walls... at which point everyone will want drops running to the rooms they stay in anyway. Yeah, conduits with pull strings and…

5-6GHz is good at covering a house without too much leakage. And with 9 separate channels that each run at a gigabit or higher, you can have very good neighbor avoidance. That seems fine to me for covering both bandwidth and wall-penetration needs.

In a big apartment building you might have to use more narrow channels but I still think the overall picture for 5+6GHz is a good one. Especially because MIMO can squeeze a gigabit into 80MHz or theoretically even 40MHz.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#157
post #8

1. High-level, the post is all wrong. The point should be that you always need to make sure you can pull new cable . The poster illustrates this: single mode, multi mode, non-fiber, etc, etc. And if one "goes bad", you still can't run a new one, unless you have a pullstring. 2. The post cannot apply to fast/large networks - will be prohibitively expensive. 3. If running a few at home, I suggest to run MTP/MPO. It's b…

> If running a few at home, I suggest to run ... that can have around 12 fibers in them, plenty of future expansion. What kind of home network needs 12 fibers on a single run!?

Tautologically, a high-bandwidth one.

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite tiny - a basic armored (rats !) 12 strands cable may be around 10-15 millimeters, whereas similarly specced cables in the 500 strands range might reach 20-30 mm. In crowded Paris downtown, it adds up fast. On the countryside, that is a lot more weight to hang on poles.

> Paris downtown Where is downtown Paris? 1/2/3 arrondissement? I never heard the term used for Paris. Mostly, it is used to describe the Wall Street area of Manhattan (NYC) as the island is relatively north-south and Wall Street is on the southern end.

I notice that non US English-speaking tend to use the term CBD instead of downtown, my assumption is that it is because of the NYC thing you mention

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People commonly use the word "Ethernet" to mean "Ethernet cable", as in a copper cable with an RJ45 on it, not just "Ethernet protocol", which is used over both copper and fiber alike.

It's interesting how long twisted-pair cabling has stuck around, to the point that it's associated as being the physical medium for Ethernet. Ethernet started with coaxial cables, but soon lost its association with those as twisted-pair was cheaper & easier to work with. And it's stayed that way for so long that a CAT-5 cable with RJ-45 (really RJ-38 but that's excessively pedantic) connectors is an "Ethernet cable",…

> (really RJ-38 but that's excessively pedantic)

RJ-38 is a 8P4C (eight pin, four conductor) modular connector with shorting bars used to allow an alarm system or similar to seize a phone line when plugged in but for the line to still operate normally with the plug removed.

You might be thinking of RJ-48 which is used in T1 service and thus often has "RJ45" cables plugged in to it, but technically that's 8P4C as well, also with (differently configured) shorting bars that will physically loop the T1 if disconnected.

Ethernet uses an 8P8C modular connector but it's not any of the Registered Jack standards

Re: If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling

#160
post #147
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while some people preach hard-wired everything I’d probably increasingly not bother at home. . I’ll have to see how much networking and audio stuff I even do given a kitchen fire with s

Maybe in an apartment. In a house, you want wired backhaul on access points, and wired streaming devices.

Why? Is this an actual problem? I have a bunch of wired connections (or at least had) but I'm not sure I ever saw a difference and I'm certainly not going to spend time or money retrofitting them for some Platonic ideal--ADDED, at least in recent years or outside of specific situations.
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