12 ms·

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

230 points by hggh 2y ago

JoshTriplett 2y ago
No mention in the article of making sure to run conduit, so you can always add more cables easily.
- paulkon 2y ago
  This right here is important. We could be running fiber end to end in the near future. Ethernet would end up obsolete like the phone line.
  - fach 2y ago
    How would running fiber make Ethernet obsolete? Physical medium and framing on the wire are fairly orthogonal.
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago
      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.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
        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", and a perfectly usable fiber optic cable is something else!
        recursive 2y ago
        I've been in software for decades, and it was only right now that I realized that what I'm calling "ethernet cable" is maybe something else. Not that I understand the finer details of what you're saying.
        Symbiote 2y ago
        You can find them all described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet Specifically these: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 (early 1980s) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 (mid 1980s, cheap installations like my high school in the early 1990s).
        mbreese 2y ago
        It is an Ethernet cable. It’s just not the only kind of Ethernet cable.
        LukeShu 2y ago
        > RJ-45 (really RJ-38 but that's excessively pedantic) connectors If we're being overly pedantic: - the RJ numbers refer to not just the connector but the pinout and such - the RJ (registered jack) numbers refer to just the "jack" side, not the "plug" side So even though an "Ethernet" cable has plugs on it that fit into an RJ38X jack, its wrong as well to call it an RJ38 plug: - different pinout - the plug is the mechanically the same, but pedantically it isn't correct to call any plug a registered jack, because it's a plug not a jack - the jack is mechanically different; an RJ38X jack shorts pin 1 to pin 4 and pin 5 to pin 8 when there's not a cable plugged in to it (this makes it a "series jack" instead of a regular "jack"). Name | Mechanical jack | Mechanical plug 47 CFR part 68 (registered jacks) RJ45S | miniature 8-position keyed jack | miniature 8-position keyed plug RJ38X | miniature 8-position series jack | miniature 8-position plug ANSI/TIA-568 (Ethernet) T568A | miniature 8-position jack | miniature 8-position plug T568B | miniature 8-position jack | miniature 8-position plug I don't believe any registered jack uses a miniature 8-position unkeyed jack (but scanning through 150 pages is a pain and for some reason Ctrl-F isn't working reliably in this PDF). (ANSI/TIA/IEC calls them "modular" jacks/plugs, while the FCC calls them "miniature" jacks/plugs, but same thing. Well, same thing the way that CAT-5 and CAT-5e are the same; same, but with different specified tolerances. And just saying "Ethernet" or "568" isn't specific enough here; CAT-6 requires an IEC 60603-7-4 connector, while CAT-5e only requires an IEC 60603-7-2 connector; even though most people would call those the same, they have different tolerances. I don't care to compare the FCC's 47 CFR part 68 requirements with the IEC 60603-7-{2,4} requirements.)
- jedberg 2y ago
  It should mention conduit for sure, but sometimes conduit is hard if you want to stick to the rule of no more than 180 degrees of bend in the line (and no more than 90 at one bend). Long conduit runs need junction boxes at some of of the bends, and it's hard to always make those accessible.
  - dnemmers 2y ago
    I thought you were allowed 4 90 degree bends, or 360 degrees between boxes.
    - jedberg 2y ago
      Code allows up to 360 degrees, but it gets really hard to pull after 180.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Well, conduit plus multi-cell innerduct to make it easy.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    First I've heard of this! What's the advantage, in your experience?
    - quickthrowman 2y ago
      It’s easier to pull new cables in a conduit through an empty cell of innerduct than it is to pull a new cable through a conduit with existing cables already in it. It tends to be used for fiber conduits. Here’s a product I’ve purchased for my electricians to install: https://www.maxcell.us/shared-downloads/cp145_MaxCell_Edge_Data_Sheet.pdf https://www.maxcell.us/shared-downloads/cp145_MaxCell_Edge_D...
      - JoshTriplett 2y ago
        Fascinating! Thanks for the explanation and the example.
js2 2y ago
> Some of the time this fiber failure is (probably) because a raccoon got into your machine room Or into your handhole/vault, along with her babies: https://old.reddit.com/r/FiberOptics/comments/1ji3rrt/its_not_always_backhoes_and_construction/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FiberOptics/comments/1ji3rrt/its_no...
jonhohle 2y ago
As the article says, this is true for just about any cabling, copper, power, etc. I’ve done cabling in two houses and I’ve never had too much. I’m always finding reasons to run more to new places.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
msarrel 2y ago
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!
- cyptus 2y ago
  _minimum_ bend?
  - zygentoma 2y ago
    minimum bend _radius_ A straight cable has an infinite radius, the more bend the smaller the radius
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Though if it is on or under the surface of the earth, “straight” will be a bend radius of around 6,370km. We don’t make a lot of buildings that deal with this but transcontinental or transoceanic cables certainly do. If someone designed a fiber that required absolutely no bend in order to work you’d have to use it in buildings or dig much deeper holes. There was an encoding mechanism proposed about 10-15 years ago that used spirally polarized light to carry more channels, but it required the surface of the fiber to be polished to a much higher degree than existing cables in order for the light to go around bends properly.
      - jagged-chisel 2y ago
        If you’re using the planet as your “flat surface” then sure. If, however, you’re willing to deal with exiting the atmosphere at each end, you can use Real Straightness. But I don’t know anyone running a single segment for that distance.
        2y ago
yetihehe 2y ago
I left one small room in my new home without network cabling, finished just before covid. Guess where my home office ended up being located...
- thefz 2y ago
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-home-network/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...
aftbit 2y ago
Regarding single mode vs multi-mode ... other than cost, is there any reason at all to run multi-mode fiber in 2025? I was under the impression that single mode was better in basically every way.
- fleventynine 2y ago
  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.
  - FredFS456 2y ago
    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.
    - fleventynine 2y ago
      Apples to oranges. SR is for short runs inside a building. LR is for sending signals across a city. For short runs inside a building, the transceiver prices are much more comparable. Compare https://www.fs.com/products/251819.html?now_cid=4089 https://www.fs.com/products/251819.html?now_cid=4089 to https://www.fs.com/products/282973.html?now_cid=4089 https://www.fs.com/products/282973.html?now_cid=4089
      - eqvinox 2y ago
        SR is for when you accidentally installed MMF really. Except, no, you can run (single lambda, not muxed) LR transceivers on MMF, it's out if spec but you actually get around +20% range before hitting dispersion limits. I'll also note SR ranges are not in fact long enough for larger buildings. And this gets worse with higher speeds, since modal dispersion is a bandwidth problem, not attenuation. Also, using 800G for comparison is a bit ludicrous ;). 10G is bread&butter, 25G/100G is mainline. (40G is the shunned weirdo uncle.)
timzaman 2y ago
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 basically a structured cable that can have around 12 fibers in them, plenty of future expansion. Though I'll always run a large awg >>cat6 everywhere so it supports PoE++
- bananapub 2y ago
  what a bizarre reply. the author is a sysadmin, who can definitely change what is plugged in to the switches their employer has chosen to buy, but doesn't have the power to make physical changes between multiple buildings, easily authorise opex spending on cable pullers or retrain as a cable puller. please actually consider what you're replying to before pushing the REPLY button.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Pull strings don’t give you a way to pull new cables. They give you a backup way to pull new cables. Every cable in a conduit can be used to pull its own replacement or 2. But if anything goes wrong, you have a second chance before you have to go find the fishing rod.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  > 2. The post cannot apply to fast/large networks - will be prohibitively expensive. The expensive parts of fast/large networks are not the fiber strands. * right of use / lease * trenching and laying and covering * amplifiers on long lines * repair/maintenance * endpoints ... which is why the first thing you upgrade are the endpoints, and the last you do is lay more fiber. Get the most you can afford (often physically) at the beginning.
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  > And if one "goes bad", you still can't run a new one, unless you have a pullstring. The one that went bad is the pullstring.
j45 2y ago
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.
- hinkley 2y ago
  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.
  - toast0 2y ago
    I've seen some 'in-wall' access points that might be kind of what you're looking for. Designed for hotels, etc, they have an ethernet port on the back with poe-in, and usually two ethernet ports on the front, and also do wifi. I have no experience with them, though.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      There are modular jacks that can expose 6 or 8 different connectors on one outlet. I just figured the hotel ones were a slightly more sophisticated version of that.
  - lotharrr 2y ago
    I've been pretty happy with Unifi's "In-Wall" AP (e.g. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-wall/products/u6-iw https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-wall/products/u6-iw): PoE powered, has four downstream RJ45 ports (one with PoE itself), and is a side-firing WiFi AP as well. Like the sibling comment said, they're made for hotel rooms, but I've never been in a hotel fancy enough to use them (possibly because the RJ45 sockets aren't particularly discoverable, being on the bottom). It doesn't live in a power outlet, but it's meant to be mounted at the same height. Worked great for my home office. (I'm not associated with Unifi, just happy with their gear)
bhouston 2y ago
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 basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there. - No ethernet ports in the garage, I should have put in one for an AP. - 4 ceiling APs instead of just two in the main part of the house. I over-estimated how much coverage I would get from ceiling APs and thus I have some APs hidden under furniture to ensure 100% house coverage. - Lack of multiple circuits in the garage, even better a separate sub-panel with 6 outlets. I took up wood working and with a single circuit and 2 outlets was insufficient. That cost me $1200 for the sub-panel. - Multiple outlets on the back and side of the house - I would have done two at the front on each side and two at the back on side each and one on each side of the house. I have a single outlet at the front and back and that is just not sufficient for lights, decorations and patio devices.
- jmacd 2y ago
  Wow, we recently built a house and this reads just like my regret list! I think because there are less code specifications for the garage, builders just don't bother.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Only a single ethernet port in the basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there. Is it so bad to put in a switch?
  - bhouston 2y ago
    It does sort of suck because I have cabling running along the baseboards. Also I have 10G networking so the switches are costly and hot at least this generation.
    - 2y ago
jmacd 2y ago
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.
- bityard 2y ago
  Yep. Direct-burial ethernet is surprisingly vulnerable to nearby lightning strikes. It's not a matter of IF the cable or devices get damaged, it's a matter of when. Nearby (not even direct) lightning induces ground voltage potentials between buildings to the tune of hundreds of volts or more.
  - c0nsumer 2y ago
    Do you have experience or information on direct burial ethernet for something like a POE camera? I'd like to put one on the back fence to watch the back of the house and yard. Direct burial in the back yard would be a plenty easy thing to do, but the cable is pricey enough that I've held off for now.
    - LgWoodenBadger 2y ago
      Whatever you do make sure you put a fiber media converter between the “ethernet” cable and your network to prevent your entire network getting fried.
- protocolture 2y ago
  I used to consult for an ISP that put direct bury in a region where it snows 1/3rd of the year. It was profit generating. They would offer to put conduit in for an extra fee, the customers always said no, then they would be back to install conduit and cable in the spring after the ice had killed the cable.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > I recently had the primary fibre fail Woah, this is surprising. Do you know the root cause? I could imagine copper cabling is much more sensitive to the outdoors, that is why I am so surprised about your fibre failure.
VoodooJuJu 2y ago
[dead]
zelon88 2y ago
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 devices that needed these runs are now running on WiFi.
- zelon88 2y ago
  To elaborate a little bit; 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.
cheema33 2y ago
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.
- joshuaheard 2y ago
  I thought about multiple drops of cat6 per room in my house, but they charged me per drop. So I just put one drop in each room and added a switch in a room that needs multiple connections. It's usually for Wifi WAP, smart TV, and the Tivo box.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  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.
  - sponaugle 2y ago
    There is no power over fiber.
thefz 2y ago
I was under the impression that once laid, fiber is the most stable and future proof between all mediums (barring physical damage). After all it won't rot, stain or degrade like copper. It's plastic, mostly.
- eqvinox 2y ago
  It is, it's just not immune to physical damage. Rodents and Jackhammers…
  - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
    Backhoes can find fiber from miles away... they hunger for it
- protocolture 2y ago
  Depends on timescale. Like if you are in an area that has frequent natural disasters or just heaps of construction work, you will find that RF is more stable and future proof. Also, you can get issues with cable bends and terminations. Which are simple to fix, but often go undetected by cheap fiber carriers. I manage a couple pair of dark fibre for a customer, and the fibre runs through a couple of suburbs that are under constant development. And they have near monthly half day outages, and quarterly 1 - 2 day fibre outages. Like others have said, backhoes hunger for the glass.
eqvinox 2y ago
> Fiber comes in two varieties, single mode and multi-mode. I don't know enough to know if you should make a point of running both[…] Let me fill this in: in 2025 you (and everybody else) should be running SMF. If you need to directly connect to existing MMF you should run that additionally. But do not build MMF-only in 2025. It's akin to installing Cat5 (non-E) or even Cat3. And you pay mostly for the work, not the cable. Do yourself a favour and put SMF in.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Agreed. SMF can handle nearly anything. A single strand can handle 100Gb 10km for OS1 or 100km for OS2 per frequency and you can do multiple frequencies at the same time or go bidirectional, too.
chaz6 2y ago
My business is fiber broadband, and we are laying as much as we can! Fortunately the legislative environment in the UK is conducive to this goal. For now we provide XGS PON (10Gbs minus overhead), with 50G PON becoming available in some locations later this year. Unlike regular point-to-point, it is point-to-multipoint through the use of optical splitters with one head-end port capable of servicing up to 256 clients. With the UK being so far behind most other developed countries, it means it can take advances in all of the R&D from the last twenty years. It has also led to the strange situation where there are some properties that have a choice between 4 or even more fibre network providers. Some fiber networks are tied to a single ISP whereas others are open to wholesale. I am not sure if there are any ISP's that support multiple connections to the same property via different fiber networks - but I think you would generally want to use a different ISP for each network anyway. IPv6 is supposed to make that easier, though in practice there are still no protocols (a la MEF 17 Service OAM) for the ONT to signal to the router that there is a fault condition. This is one circumstance where PPPoE is useful. As the UK has been slow to deploy fiber there are many ISPs still using it. I found this out the hard way when I made the switch. My trusty old Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite (Cavium silicon) is not capable of hardware offload for ipv6+pppoe+vlan at the same time, so anything particularly demanding on IPv6 (e.g. Steam) essentially locks up the router. I will be trying out an Alta Labs Route10 this week to see if it provides any improvement.
interroboink 2y ago
“We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.” — Joseph Bazalgette, on doubling the pipe diameter when building the London sewer system (though I don't have an original source for that quote)
protocolture 2y ago
I recall working in a building that: 1. Was the former HQ for a local telecom company 2. Was now an office building with a couple floors of data. Ages ago, one of the DC providers in the building had run 36 cores to the roof to service a telco. It was a massive undertaking, the building is riddled with asbestos and old plant. Had multiple renovations etc. Anyway, a few years later, every telco in the state wanted to be on that rooftop. And they had the only reliable means to service it with fibre. That 36 core became a massive profit generating asset, one that they could have monetised even further if they had have run 100 core instead. But it was never feasible to drill holes for a new duct (Asbestos regulations getting tighter), and it was never feasible to shut down 12 telcos for a day to use the existing fibre as a draw cable. Getting a single core rented here, and throwing on Bidi's, was like mana from the gods at the time.
ggm 2y ago
Not as a serious other-side but I knew an engineer associated with ARUP and during the time of Canary Wharf being in design, the plenum spaces were re-sized twice as a function of emerging pre-fibre burdens. I believe now, there is probably the equivalent of 3 or more floors of unused space, consumed by oversize plenum in the light of emerging fibre. I do believe fibre probably is a sensible end road for "small enough" and so pulling more of it, for the same radial bend and cable diameter probably makes sense. Also bear in mind "re clocking" by tuning the lambdas and deploying new lasers is a thing. That 100 pair fibre can be re-clocked across it's lifetime and be the equivalent of 1000 pairs in equivalent bandwidth, by the time you're done.
olalonde 2y ago
YAGNI: You Are Gonna Need It.
em3rgent0rdr 2y ago
Had a squirrel chew through the fiber internet cable going to our basement. Fortunately there was enough slack that the unchewed cable could still be pulled and reach the telephone pole and reconnect without having to redig the entire path, which would have cost much more.
DeathArrow 2y ago
At home I have a pair of single mode fiber running in each room, it is future proof enough for me. ATM running at 1Gbps, but I will soon upgrade the router, switches, SFP+ modules to run at 10Gbps since my internet provider will upgrade the offering from 2.3 Gbps to 10 Gbps this year.
Taniwha 2y ago
And if you can't, always pull a string through the conduit .....
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Just always pull a string through the conduit, full stop.
eemil 2y ago
I'm surprised Chris left out a big reason: cable is cheap, and labor is expensive. And there are a lot of fixed costs that don't depend on the number of cables or their thickness. You might save a little bit going with 4 pairs instead of 24. But that goes out the window as soon as you need to run a single new cable. If you want to be stingy, pull the cables but leave them unterminated.
hadlock 2y ago
King County (Seattle) did this when wiring up the municipal network. Networking World ran at least two cover stories on this in the mid-1990s. They ran 200 ... bundles? Strands? Everywhere. That fiber is still there, under sidewalks, inside bridge structures, everywhere. Whoever bought the rights to that excess fiber from the city is probably subletting it to various FAANG and datacenters making a small fortune. That fiber runs through most of downtown seattle.
runjake 2y ago
If you have the choice, always run single-mode. It’s infinitely more scalable than multimode and the price is on-par. Around here, SMF is currently cheaper. SMF optics are single digit dollars more expensive than MMF optics, if you use third-party modules. And you might as well use them because your SP does. In my experience they’re better built and more reliable (longer lasting and lower failure rate. n=1000s of modules) than first-party Cisco optics.
- traceroute66 2y ago
  > In my experience they’re better built and more reliable (longer lasting and lower failure rate. n=1000s of modules) than first-party Cisco optics And for the typical price of a Cisco optic you can buy two third-party optics. So now you have a spare. :)
  - runjake 2y ago
    From the last quote I got, I could buy almost 10 third-party Fs.com optics for the price of a Cisco OEM optic ($2,500 vs $250). And the FS.com seem to be manufactured more durably. And have a lower failure rate.
    - traceroute66 2y ago
      Personally I prefer Flexoptix for two reasons. First, they are reprogrammable. They will send you a free programming box with your first order if you agree to a public testimonial on their website. Support are also very responsive if you need new codings they'll try to work with you to find something that works (they can push new codes to your coding box). Second, more recently, they have the option to choose "not made in China". They sell both China and what they call "S2 Origin" which is any of Germany, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia. Only downside is if you are buying for personal use you won't be able to buy from Flexoptics. They only sell to companies. (They do have a small number of resellers though, so you might have more luck with indirect sourcing for personal purchases ... you won't get a free programming box tough).
sponaugle 2y ago
In a home buildout, running fiber is surprisingly inexpensive and easy to do. There is one area to watch out for - In most US homes drywall is installed with screws that go into studs so if you have large bundles of wire or fiber be careful how the sit relative to the surface of the studs. Often the drywall screws will be off by a bit an miss the stud. If you wire bundle is large enough and it is a 2x4 wall vs a 2x6 wall you can lose a number of wires with a puncture. A second common problem is the wire installer pulling the fiber around sharp corners, sometimes with staples and zip ties. Fiber is surprisingly resilient, but very sharp bends will cause significant problems. Using armored fiber can help this a bit.
- traceroute66 2y ago
  > Using armored fiber can help this a bit You can also get bend-resilient unarmored fibre. Its what the incumbent telcos use when they send out their monkeys (sorry "engineers") who've been on a 4-hour afternoon course on how to install fibre before being let loose. Old copper "that'll do" install habits die hard in the telco world.
- myself248 2y ago
  Nail plates. Screws should _never_ be able to hit the wiring. If that's possible, someone failed to install nail plates or Smarshield sleeves. As for the sharp corners, IMHO you should always install a raceway of some sort (everyone just uses smurf tube), then pull the fiber in afterward. It takes real effort to fuck up the bend radius of conduit.
  - sponaugle 2y ago
    I was not referring to wiring going thru studs, but along studs. Nail plates are very effective for going thru studs, but often wire is ran along the side of a stud. If it is a large bundle and you don't keep it centered on the side of the stud it will be close to the surface right where a screw could miss. Of course putting some kind of shielding or sleeve could work, but that is very uncommon in house building. Smurf tubes work great, but are not practical in some high density environments, especially a house with steel structure and I-beam joists. I used these for some locations in my house, but not all.

230 points by hggh 2y ago

JoshTriplett 2y ago

No mention in the article of making sure to run conduit, so you can always add more cables easily.

paulkon 2y ago
This right here is important. We could be running fiber end to end in the near future. Ethernet would end up obsolete like the phone line.
- fach 2y ago
  How would running fiber make Ethernet obsolete? Physical medium and framing on the wire are fairly orthogonal.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    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.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
      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", and a perfectly usable fiber optic cable is something else!
      - recursive 2y ago
        I've been in software for decades, and it was only right now that I realized that what I'm calling "ethernet cable" is maybe something else. Not that I understand the finer details of what you're saying.
        Symbiote 2y ago
        You can find them all described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet Specifically these: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 (early 1980s) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 (mid 1980s, cheap installations like my high school in the early 1990s).
        mbreese 2y ago
        It is an Ethernet cable. It’s just not the only kind of Ethernet cable.
      - LukeShu 2y ago
        > RJ-45 (really RJ-38 but that's excessively pedantic) connectors If we're being overly pedantic: - the RJ numbers refer to not just the connector but the pinout and such - the RJ (registered jack) numbers refer to just the "jack" side, not the "plug" side So even though an "Ethernet" cable has plugs on it that fit into an RJ38X jack, its wrong as well to call it an RJ38 plug: - different pinout - the plug is the mechanically the same, but pedantically it isn't correct to call any plug a registered jack, because it's a plug not a jack - the jack is mechanically different; an RJ38X jack shorts pin 1 to pin 4 and pin 5 to pin 8 when there's not a cable plugged in to it (this makes it a "series jack" instead of a regular "jack"). Name | Mechanical jack | Mechanical plug 47 CFR part 68 (registered jacks) RJ45S | miniature 8-position keyed jack | miniature 8-position keyed plug RJ38X | miniature 8-position series jack | miniature 8-position plug ANSI/TIA-568 (Ethernet) T568A | miniature 8-position jack | miniature 8-position plug T568B | miniature 8-position jack | miniature 8-position plug I don't believe any registered jack uses a miniature 8-position unkeyed jack (but scanning through 150 pages is a pain and for some reason Ctrl-F isn't working reliably in this PDF). (ANSI/TIA/IEC calls them "modular" jacks/plugs, while the FCC calls them "miniature" jacks/plugs, but same thing. Well, same thing the way that CAT-5 and CAT-5e are the same; same, but with different specified tolerances. And just saying "Ethernet" or "568" isn't specific enough here; CAT-6 requires an IEC 60603-7-4 connector, while CAT-5e only requires an IEC 60603-7-2 connector; even though most people would call those the same, they have different tolerances. I don't care to compare the FCC's 47 CFR part 68 requirements with the IEC 60603-7-{2,4} requirements.)
jedberg 2y ago
It should mention conduit for sure, but sometimes conduit is hard if you want to stick to the rule of no more than 180 degrees of bend in the line (and no more than 90 at one bend). Long conduit runs need junction boxes at some of of the bends, and it's hard to always make those accessible.
- dnemmers 2y ago
  I thought you were allowed 4 90 degree bends, or 360 degrees between boxes.
  - jedberg 2y ago
    Code allows up to 360 degrees, but it gets really hard to pull after 180.
quickthrowman 2y ago
Well, conduit plus multi-cell innerduct to make it easy.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  First I've heard of this! What's the advantage, in your experience?
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    It’s easier to pull new cables in a conduit through an empty cell of innerduct than it is to pull a new cable through a conduit with existing cables already in it. It tends to be used for fiber conduits. Here’s a product I’ve purchased for my electricians to install: https://www.maxcell.us/shared-downloads/cp145_MaxCell_Edge_Data_Sheet.pdf https://www.maxcell.us/shared-downloads/cp145_MaxCell_Edge_D...
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago
      Fascinating! Thanks for the explanation and the example.

js2 2y ago

> Some of the time this fiber failure is (probably) because a raccoon got into your machine room Or into your handhole/vault, along with her babies: https://old.reddit.com/r/FiberOptics/comments/1ji3rrt/its_not_always_backhoes_and_construction/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FiberOptics/comments/1ji3rrt/its_no...

jonhohle 2y ago

As the article says, this is true for just about any cabling, copper, power, etc. I’ve done cabling in two houses and I’ve never had too much. I’m always finding reasons to run more to new places.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

msarrel 2y ago

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!

cyptus 2y ago
_minimum_ bend?
- zygentoma 2y ago
  minimum bend _radius_ A straight cable has an infinite radius, the more bend the smaller the radius
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Though if it is on or under the surface of the earth, “straight” will be a bend radius of around 6,370km. We don’t make a lot of buildings that deal with this but transcontinental or transoceanic cables certainly do. If someone designed a fiber that required absolutely no bend in order to work you’d have to use it in buildings or dig much deeper holes. There was an encoding mechanism proposed about 10-15 years ago that used spirally polarized light to carry more channels, but it required the surface of the fiber to be polished to a much higher degree than existing cables in order for the light to go around bends properly.
    - jagged-chisel 2y ago
      If you’re using the planet as your “flat surface” then sure. If, however, you’re willing to deal with exiting the atmosphere at each end, you can use Real Straightness. But I don’t know anyone running a single segment for that distance.
      - 2y ago

yetihehe 2y ago

I left one small room in my new home without network cabling, finished just before covid. Guess where my home office ended up being located...

thefz 2y ago
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-home-network/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...

aftbit 2y ago

Regarding single mode vs multi-mode ... other than cost, is there any reason at all to run multi-mode fiber in 2025? I was under the impression that single mode was better in basically every way.

fleventynine 2y ago
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.
- FredFS456 2y ago
  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.
  - fleventynine 2y ago
    Apples to oranges. SR is for short runs inside a building. LR is for sending signals across a city. For short runs inside a building, the transceiver prices are much more comparable. Compare https://www.fs.com/products/251819.html?now_cid=4089 https://www.fs.com/products/251819.html?now_cid=4089 to https://www.fs.com/products/282973.html?now_cid=4089 https://www.fs.com/products/282973.html?now_cid=4089
    - eqvinox 2y ago
      SR is for when you accidentally installed MMF really. Except, no, you can run (single lambda, not muxed) LR transceivers on MMF, it's out if spec but you actually get around +20% range before hitting dispersion limits. I'll also note SR ranges are not in fact long enough for larger buildings. And this gets worse with higher speeds, since modal dispersion is a bandwidth problem, not attenuation. Also, using 800G for comparison is a bit ludicrous ;). 10G is bread&butter, 25G/100G is mainline. (40G is the shunned weirdo uncle.)

timzaman 2y ago

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 basically a structured cable that can have around 12 fibers in them, plenty of future expansion. Though I'll always run a large awg >>cat6 everywhere so it supports PoE++

bananapub 2y ago
what a bizarre reply. the author is a sysadmin, who can definitely change what is plugged in to the switches their employer has chosen to buy, but doesn't have the power to make physical changes between multiple buildings, easily authorise opex spending on cable pullers or retrain as a cable puller. please actually consider what you're replying to before pushing the REPLY button.
hinkley 2y ago
Pull strings don’t give you a way to pull new cables. They give you a backup way to pull new cables. Every cable in a conduit can be used to pull its own replacement or 2. But if anything goes wrong, you have a second chance before you have to go find the fishing rod.
dsr_ 2y ago
> 2. The post cannot apply to fast/large networks - will be prohibitively expensive. The expensive parts of fast/large networks are not the fiber strands. * right of use / lease * trenching and laying and covering * amplifiers on long lines * repair/maintenance * endpoints ... which is why the first thing you upgrade are the endpoints, and the last you do is lay more fiber. Get the most you can afford (often physically) at the beginning.
stronglikedan 2y ago
> And if one "goes bad", you still can't run a new one, unless you have a pullstring. The one that went bad is the pullstring.

j45 2y ago

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.

hinkley 2y ago
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.
- toast0 2y ago
  I've seen some 'in-wall' access points that might be kind of what you're looking for. Designed for hotels, etc, they have an ethernet port on the back with poe-in, and usually two ethernet ports on the front, and also do wifi. I have no experience with them, though.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    There are modular jacks that can expose 6 or 8 different connectors on one outlet. I just figured the hotel ones were a slightly more sophisticated version of that.
- lotharrr 2y ago
  I've been pretty happy with Unifi's "In-Wall" AP (e.g. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-wall/products/u6-iw https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-wall/products/u6-iw): PoE powered, has four downstream RJ45 ports (one with PoE itself), and is a side-firing WiFi AP as well. Like the sibling comment said, they're made for hotel rooms, but I've never been in a hotel fancy enough to use them (possibly because the RJ45 sockets aren't particularly discoverable, being on the bottom). It doesn't live in a power outlet, but it's meant to be mounted at the same height. Worked great for my home office. (I'm not associated with Unifi, just happy with their gear)

bhouston 2y ago

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 basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there. - No ethernet ports in the garage, I should have put in one for an AP. - 4 ceiling APs instead of just two in the main part of the house. I over-estimated how much coverage I would get from ceiling APs and thus I have some APs hidden under furniture to ensure 100% house coverage. - Lack of multiple circuits in the garage, even better a separate sub-panel with 6 outlets. I took up wood working and with a single circuit and 2 outlets was insufficient. That cost me $1200 for the sub-panel. - Multiple outlets on the back and side of the house - I would have done two at the front on each side and two at the back on side each and one on each side of the house. I have a single outlet at the front and back and that is just not sufficient for lights, decorations and patio devices.

jmacd 2y ago
Wow, we recently built a house and this reads just like my regret list! I think because there are less code specifications for the garage, builders just don't bother.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Only a single ethernet port in the basement. Then the kid wanted a gaming station and we moved where the TV was. I should have put like 4 down there. Is it so bad to put in a switch?
- bhouston 2y ago
  It does sort of suck because I have cabling running along the baseboards. Also I have 10G networking so the switches are costly and hot at least this generation.
  - 2y ago

jmacd 2y ago

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.

bityard 2y ago
Yep. Direct-burial ethernet is surprisingly vulnerable to nearby lightning strikes. It's not a matter of IF the cable or devices get damaged, it's a matter of when. Nearby (not even direct) lightning induces ground voltage potentials between buildings to the tune of hundreds of volts or more.
- c0nsumer 2y ago
  Do you have experience or information on direct burial ethernet for something like a POE camera? I'd like to put one on the back fence to watch the back of the house and yard. Direct burial in the back yard would be a plenty easy thing to do, but the cable is pricey enough that I've held off for now.
  - LgWoodenBadger 2y ago
    Whatever you do make sure you put a fiber media converter between the “ethernet” cable and your network to prevent your entire network getting fried.
protocolture 2y ago
I used to consult for an ISP that put direct bury in a region where it snows 1/3rd of the year. It was profit generating. They would offer to put conduit in for an extra fee, the customers always said no, then they would be back to install conduit and cable in the spring after the ice had killed the cable.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> I recently had the primary fibre fail Woah, this is surprising. Do you know the root cause? I could imagine copper cabling is much more sensitive to the outdoors, that is why I am so surprised about your fibre failure.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

[dead]

zelon88 2y ago

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 devices that needed these runs are now running on WiFi.

zelon88 2y ago
To elaborate a little bit; 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.

cheema33 2y ago

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.

joshuaheard 2y ago
I thought about multiple drops of cat6 per room in my house, but they charged me per drop. So I just put one drop in each room and added a switch in a room that needs multiple connections. It's usually for Wifi WAP, smart TV, and the Tivo box.
throwaway2037 2y ago
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.
- sponaugle 2y ago
  There is no power over fiber.

thefz 2y ago

I was under the impression that once laid, fiber is the most stable and future proof between all mediums (barring physical damage). After all it won't rot, stain or degrade like copper. It's plastic, mostly.

eqvinox 2y ago
It is, it's just not immune to physical damage. Rodents and Jackhammers…
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Backhoes can find fiber from miles away... they hunger for it
protocolture 2y ago
Depends on timescale. Like if you are in an area that has frequent natural disasters or just heaps of construction work, you will find that RF is more stable and future proof. Also, you can get issues with cable bends and terminations. Which are simple to fix, but often go undetected by cheap fiber carriers. I manage a couple pair of dark fibre for a customer, and the fibre runs through a couple of suburbs that are under constant development. And they have near monthly half day outages, and quarterly 1 - 2 day fibre outages. Like others have said, backhoes hunger for the glass.

eqvinox 2y ago

> Fiber comes in two varieties, single mode and multi-mode. I don't know enough to know if you should make a point of running both[…] Let me fill this in: in 2025 you (and everybody else) should be running SMF. If you need to directly connect to existing MMF you should run that additionally. But do not build MMF-only in 2025. It's akin to installing Cat5 (non-E) or even Cat3. And you pay mostly for the work, not the cable. Do yourself a favour and put SMF in.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Agreed. SMF can handle nearly anything. A single strand can handle 100Gb 10km for OS1 or 100km for OS2 per frequency and you can do multiple frequencies at the same time or go bidirectional, too.

chaz6 2y ago

My business is fiber broadband, and we are laying as much as we can! Fortunately the legislative environment in the UK is conducive to this goal. For now we provide XGS PON (10Gbs minus overhead), with 50G PON becoming available in some locations later this year. Unlike regular point-to-point, it is point-to-multipoint through the use of optical splitters with one head-end port capable of servicing up to 256 clients. With the UK being so far behind most other developed countries, it means it can take advances in all of the R&D from the last twenty years. It has also led to the strange situation where there are some properties that have a choice between 4 or even more fibre network providers. Some fiber networks are tied to a single ISP whereas others are open to wholesale. I am not sure if there are any ISP's that support multiple connections to the same property via different fiber networks - but I think you would generally want to use a different ISP for each network anyway. IPv6 is supposed to make that easier, though in practice there are still no protocols (a la MEF 17 Service OAM) for the ONT to signal to the router that there is a fault condition. This is one circumstance where PPPoE is useful. As the UK has been slow to deploy fiber there are many ISPs still using it. I found this out the hard way when I made the switch. My trusty old Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite (Cavium silicon) is not capable of hardware offload for ipv6+pppoe+vlan at the same time, so anything particularly demanding on IPv6 (e.g. Steam) essentially locks up the router. I will be trying out an Alta Labs Route10 this week to see if it provides any improvement.

interroboink 2y ago

“We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.” — Joseph Bazalgette, on doubling the pipe diameter when building the London sewer system (though I don't have an original source for that quote)

protocolture 2y ago

I recall working in a building that: 1. Was the former HQ for a local telecom company 2. Was now an office building with a couple floors of data. Ages ago, one of the DC providers in the building had run 36 cores to the roof to service a telco. It was a massive undertaking, the building is riddled with asbestos and old plant. Had multiple renovations etc. Anyway, a few years later, every telco in the state wanted to be on that rooftop. And they had the only reliable means to service it with fibre. That 36 core became a massive profit generating asset, one that they could have monetised even further if they had have run 100 core instead. But it was never feasible to drill holes for a new duct (Asbestos regulations getting tighter), and it was never feasible to shut down 12 telcos for a day to use the existing fibre as a draw cable. Getting a single core rented here, and throwing on Bidi's, was like mana from the gods at the time.

ggm 2y ago

Not as a serious other-side but I knew an engineer associated with ARUP and during the time of Canary Wharf being in design, the plenum spaces were re-sized twice as a function of emerging pre-fibre burdens. I believe now, there is probably the equivalent of 3 or more floors of unused space, consumed by oversize plenum in the light of emerging fibre. I do believe fibre probably is a sensible end road for "small enough" and so pulling more of it, for the same radial bend and cable diameter probably makes sense. Also bear in mind "re clocking" by tuning the lambdas and deploying new lasers is a thing. That 100 pair fibre can be re-clocked across it's lifetime and be the equivalent of 1000 pairs in equivalent bandwidth, by the time you're done.

olalonde 2y ago

YAGNI: You Are Gonna Need It.

em3rgent0rdr 2y ago

Had a squirrel chew through the fiber internet cable going to our basement. Fortunately there was enough slack that the unchewed cable could still be pulled and reach the telephone pole and reconnect without having to redig the entire path, which would have cost much more.

DeathArrow 2y ago

At home I have a pair of single mode fiber running in each room, it is future proof enough for me. ATM running at 1Gbps, but I will soon upgrade the router, switches, SFP+ modules to run at 10Gbps since my internet provider will upgrade the offering from 2.3 Gbps to 10 Gbps this year.

Taniwha 2y ago

And if you can't, always pull a string through the conduit .....

arghwhat 2y ago
Just always pull a string through the conduit, full stop.

eemil 2y ago

I'm surprised Chris left out a big reason: cable is cheap, and labor is expensive. And there are a lot of fixed costs that don't depend on the number of cables or their thickness. You might save a little bit going with 4 pairs instead of 24. But that goes out the window as soon as you need to run a single new cable. If you want to be stingy, pull the cables but leave them unterminated.

hadlock 2y ago

King County (Seattle) did this when wiring up the municipal network. Networking World ran at least two cover stories on this in the mid-1990s. They ran 200 ... bundles? Strands? Everywhere. That fiber is still there, under sidewalks, inside bridge structures, everywhere. Whoever bought the rights to that excess fiber from the city is probably subletting it to various FAANG and datacenters making a small fortune. That fiber runs through most of downtown seattle.

runjake 2y ago

If you have the choice, always run single-mode. It’s infinitely more scalable than multimode and the price is on-par. Around here, SMF is currently cheaper. SMF optics are single digit dollars more expensive than MMF optics, if you use third-party modules. And you might as well use them because your SP does. In my experience they’re better built and more reliable (longer lasting and lower failure rate. n=1000s of modules) than first-party Cisco optics.

traceroute66 2y ago
> In my experience they’re better built and more reliable (longer lasting and lower failure rate. n=1000s of modules) than first-party Cisco optics And for the typical price of a Cisco optic you can buy two third-party optics. So now you have a spare. :)
- runjake 2y ago
  From the last quote I got, I could buy almost 10 third-party Fs.com optics for the price of a Cisco OEM optic ($2,500 vs $250). And the FS.com seem to be manufactured more durably. And have a lower failure rate.
  - traceroute66 2y ago
    Personally I prefer Flexoptix for two reasons. First, they are reprogrammable. They will send you a free programming box with your first order if you agree to a public testimonial on their website. Support are also very responsive if you need new codings they'll try to work with you to find something that works (they can push new codes to your coding box). Second, more recently, they have the option to choose "not made in China". They sell both China and what they call "S2 Origin" which is any of Germany, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia. Only downside is if you are buying for personal use you won't be able to buy from Flexoptics. They only sell to companies. (They do have a small number of resellers though, so you might have more luck with indirect sourcing for personal purchases ... you won't get a free programming box tough).

sponaugle 2y ago

In a home buildout, running fiber is surprisingly inexpensive and easy to do. There is one area to watch out for - In most US homes drywall is installed with screws that go into studs so if you have large bundles of wire or fiber be careful how the sit relative to the surface of the studs. Often the drywall screws will be off by a bit an miss the stud. If you wire bundle is large enough and it is a 2x4 wall vs a 2x6 wall you can lose a number of wires with a puncture. A second common problem is the wire installer pulling the fiber around sharp corners, sometimes with staples and zip ties. Fiber is surprisingly resilient, but very sharp bends will cause significant problems. Using armored fiber can help this a bit.

traceroute66 2y ago
> Using armored fiber can help this a bit You can also get bend-resilient unarmored fibre. Its what the incumbent telcos use when they send out their monkeys (sorry "engineers") who've been on a 4-hour afternoon course on how to install fibre before being let loose. Old copper "that'll do" install habits die hard in the telco world.
myself248 2y ago
Nail plates. Screws should _never_ be able to hit the wiring. If that's possible, someone failed to install nail plates or Smarshield sleeves. As for the sharp corners, IMHO you should always install a raceway of some sort (everyone just uses smurf tube), then pull the fiber in afterward. It takes real effort to fuck up the bend radius of conduit.
- sponaugle 2y ago
  I was not referring to wiring going thru studs, but along studs. Nail plates are very effective for going thru studs, but often wire is ran along the side of a stud. If it is a large bundle and you don't keep it centered on the side of the stud it will be close to the surface right where a screw could miss. Of course putting some kind of shielding or sleeve could work, but that is very uncommon in house building. Smurf tubes work great, but are not practical in some high density environments, especially a house with steel structure and I-beam joists. I used these for some locations in my house, but not all.