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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multi-mode transceivers used to be a lot cheaper than single mode, but now they're around the same price for short distances. From what I can tell, most datacenters appear to be making the switch to single mode even for in-room networking.
Why does multi mode sound like it should carry more bandwidth but from context seems to be the less interesting option?
Now lets say you want to send multiple signals to get more bandwidth on one fiber, you just need to move the frequency/wavelength of light so different signals have different wavelengths and can be discerned at the receiving end. That's gonna take even more optics and filters on both ends, but works quite well to add more bandwidth to existing fiber installations where running more fiber would cost a lot more than installing new equipment on the ends.
We've almost come full circle with the idea of "run more cabling" already in some ways. For example, a building built in 1960 had analog phone lines. Then in the 80s network lines were added. Then in the 90s - 00s more and more and more network were added. Then in the 2010-2020's we're starting to wind back down. Removing switches and racks that used to be fully populated with CAT5 which are now mostly empty. The end…
I've been in many, many buildings for cabling issues. While I generally agree with your assessment of "run more everything" I think this could be taken out of hand for a lot of smaller IT departments who aren't capable of using more advanced methods of network building. Like subnetting, VLAN trunking, or redundant links.
Why would you need to learn about these things if you've got 3 or 4 more pairs of fiber hanging down? Then you have a situation that I've seen before, where you have 2 fiber runs carrying flat networks right next to each other with just a couple of IP phones on each one.
Yeah, we got a new house built 4 years ago and one of the biggest regrets is not enough ethernet outlets (running fibre in the house isn't practical yet) and power outlets in various places. It is really hard to think of all the places you would want them ahead of time unfortunately and as each has a cost you don't want to incur it unnecessarily. But my biggest regrets were: - Only a single ethernet port in the basem…
If you have any way to pull cables between floors, try pulling DAC cables. They give you 10+G, require no splicing (hardware can be found cheap now), and generally just work as you'd expect. With a 10G backbone, you can get away with basement->main and main->upstairs in a three-floor house, with a small bridge on your main floor.
Many of my devices take 10G ethernet, like MacMini and my MacBook Air docking station. Is there an easy way to convert from DAC to 10G Ethernet? The desktop has an SPF+ card so that will take DAC no problem.
Unfortunately there is no way to pull an any cables easily. But someone else suggested replaceable baseboards that hide cable runs, I should look into that.
I just had this experience. I had a 200ft run between my house and barn. The original builder put a direct bury ethernet between the two and it failed. I dug a trench, put in a conduit, pulled 2 fibre lines and left a pull string in. I recently had the primary fibre fail and am now on the backup. If I need to pull new ones in the future I can do that pretty easily through the conduit.
Originally thought this was excessive, but at least 4 per outlet/room. Saves buying a bunch of smaller switches. 1 for a switch (Although VLans can help) 1 for telephony if required 1 for media devices / peripherals 1 extra Optional fun use of HDMI over ethernet for more runs. Behind TVs, you can break it down, or just run a bunch of runs.
I routinely wish someone had designed a power outlet shaped switch that runs on POE. But some brands would run too hot for an enclosed space and a Netgear one would burn your fucking house down.
I have no experience with them, though.
Yup, always run extra everything. At least you can splice fiber now. And be careful of the minimum bend radius. Once, in the 90s, we were having intermittent network failures in our data center. I kept trying to troubleshoot it with the fluke, but the problem kept moving. When I pulled up the raised floor, I discovered that rats were eating the exterior sheath of the network cables. That was some fun troubleshooting!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multi-mode transceivers used to be a lot cheaper than single mode, but now they're around the same price for short distances. From what I can tell, most datacenters appear to be making the switch to single mode even for in-room networking.
Multimode transceivers are still a slight bit cheaper ($30 for 10GBASE-LR vs $22 for 10GBASE-SR on fs.com) but that's more than offset by the single mode fiber being slightly cheaper, even for short distances.
For short runs inside a building, the transceiver prices are much more comparable. Compare https://www.fs.com/products/251819.html?now_cid=4089 to https://www.fs.com/products/282973.html?now_cid=4089
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.
No mention in the article of making sure to run conduit , so you can always add more cables easily.