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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 becau
by PaulKeeble 3mo ago
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 have access to internet speeds that can exceed 2.5gbit/s.
- collabs 3mo agoI would be grateful and happy to have gigabit Ethernet with cat 6A in every room instead of this single landline phone jack and/or coaxial cable. The most important thing is a good conduit in place when the house is built.
- toast0 3mo agoDepending on when your landline phone jacks were put in, you might be able to reterminate with rj45 and run something-baseT, although you'll need four pair to hit gigE or better. Works better if your house was wired with home runs to somewhere useful, but even daisy chained runs can go room to room with a switch per room.
- collabs 3mo ago> Depending on when your landline phone jacks were put in, you might be able to reterminate with rj45 and run something-baseT, although you'll need four pair to hit gigE or better. Works better if your house was wired with home runs to somewhere useful, but even daisy chained runs can go room to room with a switch per room. This is very useful and actionable information. At the very least I think it will be useful to plug in the mesh WiFi access point thingy if I actually have four pair in there. I will check. Thank you!
- cbdumas 3mo agoThere are probably still a lot of cases where you would want PoE though right? Cameras, WAPs, etc.
- brianwawok 3mo agoWaps are next to power, some even have SFP+ ports
- vlan0 3mo agoBut why...it doesn't solve a problem we currently face. We aren't even anywhere near 10Gbps in RF. And that's assuming you are maxing all three bands.
- zer00eyz 3mo ago> the off ramp is clearly happening for ethernet You should be running both. If you are being smart about it your planning distributed switching (fiber to media boxes with power). From a pure networking stance, fiber is the way to go. But POE continues to have more and more uses (doorbells, cameras, sensors, lighting controls).
- Hasz 3mo agoyou should be putting in conduit -- either smurf tube, emt, sch40, or similar. can pull whatever, and more importantly, if a cable is damaged by an overly zealous gorilla during installation, it can easily be fixed and replaced.
- throwaway85825 3mo agoI wish conduit was a requirement for new construction.
- drnick1 3mo agoWhat for? Ethernet is what you ultimately need, because that is what devices such as PCs and WiFi access points use. I experimented with SFP for a while, but ultimately concluded that it isn't worth the effort to add SFP cards to PCs now that that low-power 10G Ethernet chips like the RTL8127 are available. High-end motherboards already have 10G Ethernet and soon lower-end models will too. 2.5G is practically standard already.
- thefz 3mo agoEver ran a single mode bidi fibre in a conduit? Push a wire puller, cleave and terminate ends, done. Zero effort unlike pulling a jacketed CAT7 cable, zero worries from electrical interference too, future proofing up to 40GBps. I ran double strands in my house so in case one breaks, there's another. The floors where native fibre is not needed have a cheap ethernet media converter from fs.com, everything else (3 floor switches) are interconnected with 10Gbps SFP+ modules and 2.5G ethernet for the hosts. All done thanks to the great https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-home-network/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho... (if you are reading this, I owe you several beers)
- drnick1 3mo agoThe issue with this setup is that you need an extra switch with an SFP+ uplink or media converter in each room or place where Ethernet will be used. And then you still need Ethernet cables anyway for the end devices. I can't justify this complexity for 40Gbps when I can now get 10Gbps inexpensively and conveniently.
- thefz 3mo agoEach floor's fiber terminates in a CRS310-8G+2S+IN except where I mentioned, there's a single 1G media converter.
- navigate8310 3mo agoWell, if you live in a multistorey house, each floor can be interconnected by bidi fiber, then you simply run ethernet to the end points.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tombert 3mo agoI 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 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.
- myrandomcomment 3mo agoWhat standard of cable? When I rewired I ran Cat6a everywhere. My longest 10G run is ~70 meters and works just fine. Anytime I had a link issue it was because I did not do the best job in termination on the keystone jack. To be clear the Cat6a is thicker than Cat6 and harder to work with. It makes termination a bit more tricky.
- tombert 3mo agoI use Cat 8. The cables themselves don't get too hot, but the dongles themselves seem to get really hot. I'm assuming that's a known issue given the size of the heatsinks on them.
- andwur 3mo agoUnfortunately that's non-DAC copper cabling life it seems. They build them to work at the rated speed at the maximum rated distance (on the transceiver, not the spec) and none of them appear to link train to reduce the power output over shorter runs. If you use a DAC they usually run cool, and optical is even cooler.
- chadgpt3 3mo agoDAC should be the coolest but it's only for very short distances.
- 3mo ago
- esseph 3mo agoYou still need to power things. Often that will mean running both Cat6A and fiber.
- whalesalad 3mo agoYou cannot do PoE over fiber.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoHold my laser and watch this (with remaining eye)
- tiffanyh 3mo ago> ethernet at 10gbit/s and its really high consumption and heat Do you mean Ethernet cables get hot? Or just the networking equipment pushing that data. I ask because I’ve never heard of Ethernet cables getting hot.
- gerdesj 3mo agoPoE++ can get warm but you wont be doing that with fibre! Before specifying fibre everywhere I suggest you note that a CAT 6 cable can manage 10G and PoE++. Its a lot more resilient to breakage too, especially outside the data centre. If you really want to blow some cash there is CAT6A, which is probably not indicated unless you want cable lengths of more than say 50m.
- keynha 3mo ago[dead]
- AshamedCaptain 3mo agoNo, the transceivers get hot. This is because of plenty of small metal surfaces, so even if they do not consume too much they will immediately get warm to the touch.
- Keyframe 3mo agoI 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 expensive. And then, there's the big one - PoE. That's why I also ran CAT6A next to each duplex to rooms and they're more or less for APs in the house. Overall it's definitely future proof and fantastic, but also a bit expensive if you wanna engage that fiber through the house. Pulling the cable itself isn't much of a cost at all and I recommend it.
- brianwawok 3mo agoI did this and used little $129 Zyxel SFP+ to 2.5G copper switches to get to my access points. Has been running smooth!
- CobaltFire 3mo agoFinishing up the same thing. 2x OS2 pairs with 2x CAT-6A to each drop, all coming together to the network closet. Gives me fiber for bandwidth and copper for PoE. Figured it was smarter to do both than compromise to either one, and surprisingly the fiber was cheaper than the copper to pull.
- fmajid 3mo agoFiber is much slimmer and takes less effort to pull.
- fooblaster 3mo agoSo tell me... how much did you spend? Is fiber doable without insane money.
- cortesoft 3mo agoFiber optic cable itself isn't that expensive. You can easily get it for less than $0.20/foot. It shouldn't be that much different in price to run fiber verse running cat6. The expensive part is the labor, not the cable.
- readingnews 3mo agoTotally agree, I went to fiber years ago, and the decrease in latency makes it _feel_ so much faster than 10G copper, it is not funny. Besides, if you put in the "good stuff" them moving to 40G and beyond is not a problem later on. Like others said, just add a copper line for POE devices, but for systems... its fiber all the way.
- glitchc 3mo agoThat can't be right. The old network must've had a problem somewhere. I'm running 10G copper throughout the house and my latency is ~1ms from the office upstairs to the server in the basement (across three switches). Using moonlight to game for example and it is flawless.
- ahepp 3mo agoI wasn't aware there was a substantial latency difference between fiber and copper. Some googling suggests copper might be .4-.8c and fiber might be a more reliable .6c? But even if there was a huge difference in speed of light through the medium, inside a home aren't the distances so short that it wouldn't matter?
- KeplerBoy 3mo agoThere's no way you could feel even a millisecond in latency difference and that would be a lot.
- throw0101c 3mo ago> 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. How many consumer devices have an ((Q)SFP(+)) optical cage? If you're in their pulling stuff anyway, sure, do some OS2, but for most people, for most devices, Cat 5e/6 is more useful, especially since you can do POE(+(+)) over it as well. 5e/6 gets you 10GbE to 55m, and 6A to 100m.
- protocolture 3mo agoPersonally, if I was building a house, anywhere I want significant non wifi hardware would have a switch anyway.
- toast0 3mo agoIn my house, I've got a switch at tvs with multiple devices. One place with two desktops has a switch, although when I finish up some stuff, I'm going to reterminate the phone line that's there as rj45 so both desktops can get 2.5G to my 2.5G switch. Could be sfp+, but they're mini-itx. The kitchen desktop has its own 2.5G port; the printer next to it is on wifi because I don't want to buy a 2.5g capable switch for them to share. Mini-itx again My work desktop has 10g-baseT. Fiber would work for all of that, I guess. But then I have a tv with just one device on 100base-TX. And the access points don't have spf, and aren't near other equipment.
- throwaway85825 3mo agoFiber makes a lot of sense for data but you still need a lot of copper for PoE and iot devices.
- rayiner 3mo agoI don’t think we’ll ever see fiber ports in consumer devices. If we ever get beyond 10g connections in consumer devices, we’ll figure out how to run it over cat5e. I’ve got 10g running just fine over an 80 foot run of 20 year old cat5e that goes from my bedroom, up to the attic, across the house, down three floors to the basement, and across the house in the other direction. I bet you could get 25G over cat5e at these distances using FEC and some superhero-level codings that’ll be feasible by the time we need it.
- petterroea 3mo agoI just don't see the average consumer ever needing more than 10gbit. In fact, I can tell you right away most consumers wouldn't notice if they were running 500mbit vs 1gbit. 4G has been enough for a decade, 5G was mostly just an infrastructure and capacity improvement and most consumers could never tell you they notice a difference between the two. The human eye can only see so much resolution, we don't need 8k video. I don't think consumers will need more than what they already have. At least until some new novel media format that gulps down bandwidth comes around. This isn't necessarily all bad news. There is still a push for higher bandwidth for datacenters etc, which will keep pushing technology forward, hopefully making consumer and ISP grade equipment cheaper. If I built a house I'd probably run ethernet. Maybe play around with a 10gbe core network. But it wouldn't really give me any benefit, it's not like disks are that fast anyways.
- sschueller 3mo agoThat is what I did[1] and also I used single-mode, not multi-mode. [1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/ https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
- AshamedCaptain 3mo ago"High power consumption" is debatable, since even these hot transceivers are consuming about 3W, and the replacement ones are closer to 1W. At 1W per port, the switch you'll put them in likely has higher overhead... It is difficult, but possible, to find a SFP+-capable switch where idle consumption scales at around 1W/port, but less than that I have not found.
- ExoticPearTree 3mo agoYes, definitely you should run fiber through the walls. And leave more in the walls in case you need to route it somewhere else in the future. The upside of this is that you can increase bandwidth as the technology evolves without needing to rerun cables anytime a new specification is created for high-speed copper. OM5 fiber can do up to 400Gbps for short distances. Maybe in the future you can bundle a few pairs up and have a remote GPU sitting somewhere. The downside is that you may need MCs, but they are small and can be hidden in wall outlets.
- nly 3mo agoI'd settle for 1 Gbps with a real IP address (UK)
- subscribed 3mo agoI believe BT Fibre (FTTP) provides a real address (as in not CGNAT).
- ksec 3mo agoFor may be specific professionals? For Prosumers I don't see the need even if I have access to 25Gbps Internet. For majority of home usage it will all be WiFi. WiFi 7 has gotten to the point where prosumers are happy with its performance. WiFi 8 and 9 will further improve in that direction for reliability and speed. With PoE, router and everything else Ethernet is still clearly the easiest choice. And as mentioned we now have sub 2W 10Gbps Ethernet. What will likely happen is that 10Gbps becomes like 1Gbps Ethernet, it will stay here for 10-20 years until something happen in the future that needs extra bandwidth. May be in 10 years time 10Gbps could be done under 1W.
- deepsun 3mo agoPoE is extremely useful though. You can stick PoE wifi access points straight to the wall, no wires visible.