4 ms·

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 loc

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 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 4mo ago
I did this and used little $129 Zyxel SFP+ to 2.5G copper switches to get to my access points. Has been running smooth!
CobaltFire 4mo ago
Finishing 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 4mo ago
  Fiber is much slimmer and takes less effort to pull.
fooblaster 4mo ago
So tell me... how much did you spend? Is fiber doable without insane money.
- cortesoft 4mo ago
  Fiber optic cable itself isn't that expensive. You can easily get it for less than $0.20/foot. It shouldn't be that much different in price to run fiber verse running cat6. The expensive part is the labor, not the cable.
  - fooblaster 4mo ago
    I think I was more referring to the switches with sfp and the transceivers themselves. I have never tried to get something "low end".
    - toast0 4mo ago
      At 10g, sfp+ switches are cheaper and more available than 10gbase-T switches. Fiber transceivers seem reasonable, but I could be off; I've only looked a little at fiber prices, I already have cat5 in the wall, so I'm on DAC for nearby stuff and twisted pair for other rooms for the forseable future. I don't really need 10G, but it provides a bit of fun.
      - Keyframe 4mo ago
        for shorter runs you might even get 10G on cat5.
        throw0101a 4mo ago
        802.3an officially gives you 10G on Cat5e (and plain-6) up 55m; 6A gets you to 100m.
        AshamedCaptain 4mo ago
        I am using 10G over an ~15m 4 twisted pair phone cable (PTT, common in France even decades ago for ISDN, but no cat cable at all) and don't remember seeing a frame lost in quite some years.
        toast0 4mo ago
        Yes, I have 10g over cat5. I don't need it, but I have it. Ethernet specs are for cabling in dense conduit. Most people don't have dense conduit in their house. Much cable tests better than the rating on the jacket.
- aix1 4mo ago
  I recently pulled OS2 fibre throughout my aparment and it was surprisingly inexpensive. Four-fibre cable was about US$ 1.5/m (here in Switzerland, I am sure cheaper elsewhere). I picked ONTi JT-S508CL-8S as the main 10G fibre switch (direct from Ali, for about 100 bucks). For wired Ethernet and PoE, I have a couple of KeepLink KP-9000-9XHPML-X switches (I paid about 60 buck for each, they seem to cost around $85 now). I find that they work well and use them for 10/100/1000/2500 GbE switching and to power various devices (other switches, U7-Pro-XGS AP, Zigbee dongle, home automation server, rack fans etc). The main splice box was about 60 bucks, 24 pigtails included. From memory, 10G SFP+ fibre modules were about ten bucks apieces. (DAC cables are cheaper, 10G copper transceivers are more expensive.) Plus various paraphenalia (wall face plates, keystone modules, more pigtails etc), all of which was pretty cheap. Note that I was able to borrow a fusion splicer from a friend. Otherwise they seem to start at around 500 bucks; buying one would have been the single biggest expense. I also run a 25G path from one point in my flat to my ISP. The cabling is exactly the same but 25G switching equipment and optics are considerably more expensive and less available than 10G.
  - fooblaster 4mo ago
    wow! that is way cheaper than what I would have expected. thanks china...
    - aix1 4mo ago
      That, plus the existence of chipsets used in those switches, such as Realtek RTL8372/RTL8373 and RTL9303. Feature rich yet dirt cheap. I particularly like per-pert PoE power monitoring on the RTL837x. I hooked that up to my netdata to get a full history of how much each device in my rack is drawing. Don't need a fancy PDU or separate power bricks for each device -- everything is powered by the $60 switch. (This is a home network and I'm not at all bothered about single points of failure or lack of redundancy/failover.)
- Keyframe 4mo ago
  You can check out FS (.com) it's quite cheap. For distribution from my attic (where all conduits converge to) to rooms I ran OS2 LC UPC duplex patch cables together with CAT6A. There I have a small rack with a patch panel and a PoE switch (to run APs) and from there I have a 48-strand trunk going to my basement where I have a bit of a larger rack with equipment. That way my APs are connected to main network via PoE switch which is connected via fiber and all the wall outlets with fibers are connected directly to main rack with equipment. Furthermore, I also ran another trunk from basement to garage where eventually I'll run everything from (with full height racks.. yeah, overkill) - with a wall patch panel I can just rewire trunk to trunk, close the panel and that's it. If we're not accounting for switches, we're talking maybe few hundred euros at most including cables and outlets both for fiber and CAT6A, maybe 400-500 total or so where majority was CAT6A since I opted for the more _industrial one_, includes 150 I paid for help to run the cables through conduits. Fiber was all patch from distribution to walls, and trunk mainlines are _industrial_ fibers where in a single small diameter cable you have 48 strands of single mode. Actually in one I have 72 strands since guys didn't have 48 at the time and diameter is the same and price difference was small. This is for a three story house + basement and a run to the garage. I did the crimping myself, you do NOT "crimp" fiber yourself.. you get pre-made cables or for trunks you ask for pros with equipment to splice/fuse it for you. Network equipment is a range of course. I opted for dream machine gateway for net and then the backbone is Switch pro XG Aggregation where most equipment is at with Switch Pro XG 10 PoE for APs (has dual 10GBit uplink), and a few smaller switches on the edges like Flex 2.5G for cameras etc. Yeah, I went full ubiquiti on that one and my mainline is basically 25Gb network, but it doesn't matter and that's the beauty of this setup - I could've easily gone full 1Gbit, 10, 25, 100, 400, even Nvidia/Mellanox 800Gbit OSFP with appropriate transcievers if one wants to go way overboard. Idea was to run this through to be future-proof cable-wise for another 10+ years (probably more), and for network setup to be for next 10 years (probably more) with 10/25G.
oofabz 4mo ago
Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.
- mittensc 4mo ago
  single mode are pretty cheap too (12e for 10gbit/s bidi for example)
- CaliforniaKarl 4mo ago
  Yes, 100G multimode transceivers are cheaper, but they don't use the same fiber. 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.
- throwawaysoxjje 4mo ago
  If you just want to use LC connectors everywhere, they’re the same price. Plus single mode fiber has the advantage that there’s only two kinds and we really only use one of them. The math worked out just to move to single mode a decade ago
- throw0101a 4mo ago
  > Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above. OS2 transceivers are not that expensive anymore with the rise in third-party modules: sure, first-party, OEM SKUs are pricey, but a home user is not going to go that route. Standard /r/networking advice is to go single-mode basically everywhere due to price drops over the last 10+ years.
- xxpor 4mo ago
throw0101c 4mo ago
> OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. What do you mean by "trunk which is available in three locations"? Usually cabling is home-run to a single, central patch panel. A cable (fibre, copper) would usually have one end in a room's wall outlet, with the other end at a patch panel: how would you have a cable one end at three locations? Do you have three patch panels? I.e., three hubs, with the room cables going to one hub and then you can have hub-to-hub runs?
- Keyframe 4mo ago
  that's exactly what I have. I have a hub in the attic with a small rack where all the wall runs end up at both rooms' fiber and CAT6A, there's a small 10G switch with PoE there for CAT6A (for APs and RJ45 outlets). There's also a fiber patch panel there where those rooms' ones connect to. Trunk starts there as well, in a fiber rack shelf which goes to the basement. In the attic I patch trunk to walls and the switch. In the basement trunk ends up in another patch panel (a cabinet on the wall) from which I run fibers to the rack with all the equipment. Thing is, that patch panel cabinet on the wall is also hosting another trunk which goes to the garage, where there's a third patch panel (in a cabinet on the wall) from which I'll soon connect to rack(s) there. Eventually, in the basement i'll just patch trunk to trunk so that way i'll just hoist all the network equipment to racks in the garage. By having three hubs like this though, I can do whatever. In principle it sounds simple, but in practice I got lost in my own way too many times. Just glad that it's over, hahah.
- hubbahubbahubba 3mo ago
  Please avoid the use of the term “hub” here as it already was defined elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub A switch differs from a hub, a patch panel differs from a hub. Hopefully you haven’t touched one since affordable fast Ethernet switches hit the consumer market.
chadgpt3 3mo ago
Why can't you plug and unplug duplexes?

brianwawok 4mo ago

I did this and used little $129 Zyxel SFP+ to 2.5G copper switches to get to my access points. Has been running smooth!

CobaltFire 4mo ago

Finishing 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 4mo ago
Fiber is much slimmer and takes less effort to pull.

fooblaster 4mo ago

So tell me... how much did you spend? Is fiber doable without insane money.

cortesoft 4mo ago
Fiber optic cable itself isn't that expensive. You can easily get it for less than $0.20/foot. It shouldn't be that much different in price to run fiber verse running cat6. The expensive part is the labor, not the cable.
- fooblaster 4mo ago
  I think I was more referring to the switches with sfp and the transceivers themselves. I have never tried to get something "low end".
  - toast0 4mo ago
    At 10g, sfp+ switches are cheaper and more available than 10gbase-T switches. Fiber transceivers seem reasonable, but I could be off; I've only looked a little at fiber prices, I already have cat5 in the wall, so I'm on DAC for nearby stuff and twisted pair for other rooms for the forseable future. I don't really need 10G, but it provides a bit of fun.
    - Keyframe 4mo ago
      for shorter runs you might even get 10G on cat5.
      - throw0101a 4mo ago
        802.3an officially gives you 10G on Cat5e (and plain-6) up 55m; 6A gets you to 100m.
      - AshamedCaptain 4mo ago
        I am using 10G over an ~15m 4 twisted pair phone cable (PTT, common in France even decades ago for ISDN, but no cat cable at all) and don't remember seeing a frame lost in quite some years.
      - toast0 4mo ago
        Yes, I have 10g over cat5. I don't need it, but I have it. Ethernet specs are for cabling in dense conduit. Most people don't have dense conduit in their house. Much cable tests better than the rating on the jacket.
aix1 4mo ago
I recently pulled OS2 fibre throughout my aparment and it was surprisingly inexpensive. Four-fibre cable was about US$ 1.5/m (here in Switzerland, I am sure cheaper elsewhere). I picked ONTi JT-S508CL-8S as the main 10G fibre switch (direct from Ali, for about 100 bucks). For wired Ethernet and PoE, I have a couple of KeepLink KP-9000-9XHPML-X switches (I paid about 60 buck for each, they seem to cost around $85 now). I find that they work well and use them for 10/100/1000/2500 GbE switching and to power various devices (other switches, U7-Pro-XGS AP, Zigbee dongle, home automation server, rack fans etc). The main splice box was about 60 bucks, 24 pigtails included. From memory, 10G SFP+ fibre modules were about ten bucks apieces. (DAC cables are cheaper, 10G copper transceivers are more expensive.) Plus various paraphenalia (wall face plates, keystone modules, more pigtails etc), all of which was pretty cheap. Note that I was able to borrow a fusion splicer from a friend. Otherwise they seem to start at around 500 bucks; buying one would have been the single biggest expense. I also run a 25G path from one point in my flat to my ISP. The cabling is exactly the same but 25G switching equipment and optics are considerably more expensive and less available than 10G.
- fooblaster 4mo ago
  wow! that is way cheaper than what I would have expected. thanks china...
  - aix1 4mo ago
    That, plus the existence of chipsets used in those switches, such as Realtek RTL8372/RTL8373 and RTL9303. Feature rich yet dirt cheap. I particularly like per-pert PoE power monitoring on the RTL837x. I hooked that up to my netdata to get a full history of how much each device in my rack is drawing. Don't need a fancy PDU or separate power bricks for each device -- everything is powered by the $60 switch. (This is a home network and I'm not at all bothered about single points of failure or lack of redundancy/failover.)
Keyframe 4mo ago
You can check out FS (.com) it's quite cheap. For distribution from my attic (where all conduits converge to) to rooms I ran OS2 LC UPC duplex patch cables together with CAT6A. There I have a small rack with a patch panel and a PoE switch (to run APs) and from there I have a 48-strand trunk going to my basement where I have a bit of a larger rack with equipment. That way my APs are connected to main network via PoE switch which is connected via fiber and all the wall outlets with fibers are connected directly to main rack with equipment. Furthermore, I also ran another trunk from basement to garage where eventually I'll run everything from (with full height racks.. yeah, overkill) - with a wall patch panel I can just rewire trunk to trunk, close the panel and that's it. If we're not accounting for switches, we're talking maybe few hundred euros at most including cables and outlets both for fiber and CAT6A, maybe 400-500 total or so where majority was CAT6A since I opted for the more _industrial one_, includes 150 I paid for help to run the cables through conduits. Fiber was all patch from distribution to walls, and trunk mainlines are _industrial_ fibers where in a single small diameter cable you have 48 strands of single mode. Actually in one I have 72 strands since guys didn't have 48 at the time and diameter is the same and price difference was small. This is for a three story house + basement and a run to the garage. I did the crimping myself, you do NOT "crimp" fiber yourself.. you get pre-made cables or for trunks you ask for pros with equipment to splice/fuse it for you. Network equipment is a range of course. I opted for dream machine gateway for net and then the backbone is Switch pro XG Aggregation where most equipment is at with Switch Pro XG 10 PoE for APs (has dual 10GBit uplink), and a few smaller switches on the edges like Flex 2.5G for cameras etc. Yeah, I went full ubiquiti on that one and my mainline is basically 25Gb network, but it doesn't matter and that's the beauty of this setup - I could've easily gone full 1Gbit, 10, 25, 100, 400, even Nvidia/Mellanox 800Gbit OSFP with appropriate transcievers if one wants to go way overboard. Idea was to run this through to be future-proof cable-wise for another 10+ years (probably more), and for network setup to be for next 10 years (probably more) with 10/25G.

oofabz 4mo ago

Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above.

mittensc 4mo ago
single mode are pretty cheap too (12e for 10gbit/s bidi for example)
CaliforniaKarl 4mo ago
Yes, 100G multimode transceivers are cheaper, but they don't use the same fiber. 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.
throwawaysoxjje 4mo ago
If you just want to use LC connectors everywhere, they’re the same price. Plus single mode fiber has the advantage that there’s only two kinds and we really only use one of them. The math worked out just to move to single mode a decade ago
throw0101a 4mo ago
> Why not multi-mode? The transceivers are a lot cheaper, especially for 100G and above. OS2 transceivers are not that expensive anymore with the rise in third-party modules: sure, first-party, OEM SKUs are pricey, but a home user is not going to go that route. Standard /r/networking advice is to go single-mode basically everywhere due to price drops over the last 10+ years.
xxpor 4mo ago

throw0101c 4mo ago

> OS2 single mode duplex throughout the house, all converging to a trunk which is available in three locations for equipment. What do you mean by "trunk which is available in three locations"? Usually cabling is home-run to a single, central patch panel. A cable (fibre, copper) would usually have one end in a room's wall outlet, with the other end at a patch panel: how would you have a cable one end at three locations? Do you have three patch panels? I.e., three hubs, with the room cables going to one hub and then you can have hub-to-hub runs?

Keyframe 4mo ago
that's exactly what I have. I have a hub in the attic with a small rack where all the wall runs end up at both rooms' fiber and CAT6A, there's a small 10G switch with PoE there for CAT6A (for APs and RJ45 outlets). There's also a fiber patch panel there where those rooms' ones connect to. Trunk starts there as well, in a fiber rack shelf which goes to the basement. In the attic I patch trunk to walls and the switch. In the basement trunk ends up in another patch panel (a cabinet on the wall) from which I run fibers to the rack with all the equipment. Thing is, that patch panel cabinet on the wall is also hosting another trunk which goes to the garage, where there's a third patch panel (in a cabinet on the wall) from which I'll soon connect to rack(s) there. Eventually, in the basement i'll just patch trunk to trunk so that way i'll just hoist all the network equipment to racks in the garage. By having three hubs like this though, I can do whatever. In principle it sounds simple, but in practice I got lost in my own way too many times. Just glad that it's over, hahah.
hubbahubbahubba 3mo ago
Please avoid the use of the term “hub” here as it already was defined elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub A switch differs from a hub, a patch panel differs from a hub. Hopefully you haven’t touched one since affordable fast Ethernet switches hit the consumer market.

chadgpt3 3mo ago

Why can't you plug and unplug duplexes?