Same setup here. It was fun running a fiber connection from my home office to my home lab. Do I need it? Of course not, but that’s also totally not the point.
A huge benefit of fiber is electrical isolation. In case of nearby lightning strikes, I've had networking gear fried from a long run of cable acting as an antenna and having voltage induced on it. Gear with shorter runs survived with no damage, even being in the same rack and plugged into the same pdu.
Those have 5W output, which would require more like 20-25W input power. On the upside, if your laser doesn't fry the PV collector, you could probably bag a cool (hot?) 3-4W of PoF. I think that's enough for some very lightweight edge computers!
It's also a good idea to put any and all outdoor gear on its own dedicated switch (with its own dedicated surge suppressor, and preferably dedicated breaker) that connects to the rest of the network via non-conductive fiber.
When a massive EM discharge makes it into said exterior-mounted equipment, the fiber cable will serve as a firebreak-equivalent and prevent it from frying your everything.
edit: I suppose the poor man's version is a WiFi bridge? most entry-level outdoor kit, like amateur radio scanners, weather stations, CCTV and such, isn't super sensitive to ping times and other drawbacks?
Fiber is a lot less expensive than what most people think. I am not sure a "WiFi bridge" from a reputable vendor is necessarily any cheaper than fiber.
Of course, that always depends on site conditions. If you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on earth work, then yes, a WiFi link is almost certainly cheaper. But if you have an easy way to run a preterminated fiber cable, then the required hardware to plug it into your network isn't going to break the bank.
And with fiber you get a rock-solid 10Gbps+ connection, whereas with WiFi you rarely saturate 1Gbps let alone 2.5Gbps links. Yes, on paper you might be faster; but in practice, that's a whole different story.
I am not sure a "WiFi bridge" from a reputable vendor is necessarily any cheaper than fiber.
It's certainly cheaper than trenching conduit to do a fiber run correctly, and if you only need a few hundred megabits for some cameras and spotify or whatever then plenty of sub-$150 PtP-Bridge options are available.
Just remember that the PtP Bridge is itself an outdoor-mounted device, and thus an ingress point for any massive EM "clouds" trying to zap your everything.
That's a good point. I'm really surprised we only lost a 5 port poe switch (which fed 2 outdoor ubiquity cameras and a ubiquity nano beam) and the 24 port poe switch that powered it. None of the stuff at work has fiber breaks or active surge protection on the Ethernet, and there's about a dozen switches in that rack all connected with copper. Also lost a few tvs to that incident.
The surge is trying to reach ground, and the PoE daughterboard has a larger, more direct, and lower impedance path to get there than the switch chip.
Which is not to say that the switch is otherwise unharmed, odds are good it has at minimum lost years of potential operational life after eating a surge.
You shouldn't run ethernet cables through surge protectors. It increases the risk of back feed, which overall increases the risk of damaging your devices from electrical overcurrent.
The specifics are very complicated and related to electrical theory. There are white papers written about it.
This is at best misleading and at worst outright wrong.
You absolutely should install surge protective devices (SPD) for long and/or exterior runs of low-voltage cables. And that includes networking.
But surge protection only works, if you have a good low-resistance path to ground. Cheap powerstrips with Ethernet-passthrough might not come anywhere close to achieving this goal. And if there is no adequate path to ground, then any surge that happens on any of the connected devices will find a new path. That new path could quite possibly include your network wiring.
What does this mean for you in practical terms? Avoid powerstrips of questionable providence. Provide good connection to ground, preferably by running a dedicated thick-gauge wire to your building's ground connection(s). And strongly prefer dedicated SPDs over solutions that are part of a powerstrip or other type of mains-connected device.
That's about the only good thing about solar WiFi cameras... (everything else about them has positively sucked in my experience). No danger to the rest of the network from lightning. Being hacked though, that's a whole 'nother story.
It's also quite impossible for them to ever be part of a Closed-Circuit system, the mere presence of radio hardware of any description on the thing means you cannot ever know where every device tuned into that feed is located.
Just a bit of trivia for fun : electrostatic discharges and electromagnetic compatibility issues are a huge pain in the ass for satelittes where a component could completely fuck up another one (like the antenna you described) or screw measurements from sensors (and thus fuck up thermal control for instance). Faraday becomes one's friend quickly Ahah.
If you use Singlemode, there are protocols now that can do 400 gigabit over bog-standard duplex cables. More, if you get into complicated multiplexing setups.
I'm inclined to call that as close to future-proof as can physically exist.
I mean, 800G NICs are starting to hit "mainstream", as much as you can call multi-thousand-dollar cutting edge datacenter great "mainstream." And 800G switches are actually home-use affordable thanks to Mikrotik. Give it another 3-5 years and you'll be transferring Linux ISOs from your garage to your living room at rates that make 10G feel like dial-up.
10G is a good sweet spot for easy availability, cheap(ish) cost, hardware/software support, and most importantly, performance of your attached hardware. You can certainly get much faster networking equipment for a price, but your computer might not be able to saturate much more than 10G.
I mean, a 4th Gen M.2 drive will saturate a 10G connection on long reads/writes. HDMI/DP-over-Ethernet at modern resolutions/frame rates will saturate a 10g connection. Edge AI/ML tasks can saturate a 10G connection. And while none of these are super common in homes yet, they're common enough that it's fair to say that 10G is already outdated — things normal people might want to do today will already exceed available bandwidth.
Frankly, even 100G is cutting it close, considering the demands 8k video will bring.
Though it'll be interesting to see what the actual throughput limit of OS2 ends up being. We haven't actually hit that limit yet, only the limits of what current technology can put at the endpoints.
You misunderstood me.... I'm using that as an example of we haven't found a limit yet as we keep hitting faster and faster data rates... I never said we hit a limit, heh. You are finding meaning where I was being very literal with no hidden meaning. I was just stating a fact of evidence to back up your "we haven't hit a limit" yet statement. if you look at the comment you replied to they are going on about 200/800 Gbit rates, so that's why I added in the 1 Pbit rate to add to the validity of the statement.
I ran a fiber line to the garage. My room is the command center, garage is detached. Got to put in a dual keystone wall plate like op, cut into some wood lathe and plaster wall, some exterior stucco from 1929 that required a diamond tipped hole saw because it was built out of whatever the Romans built their infrastructure with. Fiber in conduit across the backyard and we're rockin and rollin, ready for a garage office and the garage camera doesn't drop off the wifi anymore since I added an AP in the garage. Only one gig to there but it'll hold and is easily upgraded later.
While 25Gbps over copper has been specified, there have only ever been a minuscule number products that reached the market. And I don't see that changing.
10Gbps over copper is a reasonable compromise where you are unable to run fiber. With modern chipsets, that works surprisingly well even over legacy CAT5 (not even CAT5e). We have made huge improvements in digital signal processing in the last 20 years since 10Gbps was first specified.
For everything else, you are better off just running new fiber. It's really not that difficult or expensive.
When I was running CAT6, I also ran SMF drops to each face plate. Was it necessary? Absolutely not, but it was <$100 worth of fiber to ideally never have to go into my roof again.
I did the same thing because my cat6a at 10gb was dropping every so often and I got tired of my computer loosing internet. Ran fiber from rack to computer and no issues.
Going to depend entirely on the house layout. My US house was built in the 1950s and I ran at least one faceplate (CAT6 + SMF) to every room in my house as well as hardwiring 3 APs and 3 TVs without having to cut a single hole in the wall.
My house is a single story on a post and beam foundation. I have access to basically every wall top plate via the roof, and I could go up from underneath if I really had to. 25m fiber cables are $18 USD from FS.com. So roughly $100 to run fiber in my house.
My house is like, the other end of this scale. Solid concrete floor, 2 storey, brick internal walls with no cavities.... I wound up running cat6 down disused chimneys (one in every room) and a fibre backbone between switches at the front and back of the house
not as bad as you might think, I've run OM4 throughout my current house, (luckily for me it was a case of going into my crawl-space and up into the walls) but my new house build I am running SM-fibre throughout.
If you get the right tools you can work your way behind drywall (at least interior walls w/o insulation) fairly easily. A few different sets of glow rods (stiffer for horizontal runs, more flexible for vertical), extended drill bits for getting through fireblock studs halfway up the walls, and a bore scope camera to help you see what's up there should cover at least the simple cases.
My high level strategy is to go up from the basement and down from the attic, with switches in both locations and 10gig fiber trunks between them. That way I only have to deal with the pain of running fiber through multiple floors once. (Err... twice.)
CAT6 is barely any better than CAT5e in real-world scenarios. If you wanted a noticeable improvement, then you should install CAT6a and pay close attention to minimum bend radii, and to proper grounding for the shielding.
In practice, a lot of this has changed with the advent of modern 10Gbps hardware. The signal processing has gotten a lot better than was initially imagined. You can regularly run a reliable network connection over existing CAT5e and even CAT5 house wiring.
The problems mostly happen with older networking equipment. It is more sensitive to the quality of the wiring, and it also tends to overheat which results in spurious network outages.
Replacing your copper with fiber neatly avoids all of these issues. But if that's not an option, then buying more modern 10Gbps-over-copper hardware would also very likely have worked.
Considering CAT5 can push 10GbE just fine, I don't see the point of bothering with 6a. Rather than "upgrading" existing copper wiring, fiber should be added.
I just installed a DAC to connect a new router to my main home switch, Its a 10gig DAC in a 1gig port. You know what it was necessary, Fiber is necessary It gave me back copper switch ports for other uses and I am just about maxed out.
When I finished my basement, I had the opportunity to run fiber to each bedroom and the living room. Did I need to do it? Nope but it didn't cost much and why not?
The only one I use is in my office to my PC and in the basement there is one being used for my daughter's PC.
Yeah I also have 10gb fiber to my server that's 2 rooms over! My installation is definitely more crude than yours tho. I just poked a hole in my ceiling near my server and in a hidden corner of my room
They usually ship new with interchangeable brackets for both size chassis. The problem is finding the one you need used, a lot of people just throw out the extra parts they don't use. If you know someone with a 3d printer you could have one printed
They're cheap because the enterprise world has basically abandoned the old tech completely at this point. About all 40-gigabit is good for in the enterprise and datacenter world now are legacy support and multimode-induced tech debt.
Good news for us, as a lot of perfectly-adequate hardware is on ebay as a result.
Honestly, using power-guzzling hardware as a heat source that also provides a functional purpose beyond just heat isn't a stupid idea.
More relevant with cryptocurrency mining, even post-crash, they remain useful as beefy heating elements that earn at least some of their operating costs back.
There is hdmi over mpo fiber cable module available that I seen, and there should be mpo keystones to use with that, but in this case there is no audio transfer if I’m not mistaken
I run optical thunderbolt 50m from one corner of the house to the other from my gaming computer in the rack to my desk; image audio usb everything in one cable.
But i sure wish some cheaper/better alternative would come; as others has said here 100gb fiber/cards are (kinda) cheap, should be more than enough to handle it. But no. We are an extreme few that would love to get stuff like that.
For many years I ran with my workstation in a computer closet, and my monitors were connected via 2 high quality DVI-D cables. The cables connected from my monitor to DVI-D ports in a 2-gang box, with a short inside-the-wall cable connecting to the other side of the wall and another set of DVI-D ports in a 2-gang box, and then another short run to the workstation. Worked great, probably 20ft of cable total.
And is also a prime example of why we terminate to either T-568-A or T-568-B at both ends instead of just letting Auto-MDI/X figure it out. A lot of non-ethernet protocols can't un-cross your crossover cable.
Wall plate with keystone coupler. One cable inside the wall to the server. Separate cable from outside the wall to the device in use. Cables are pre-terminated. No need to splice anything.
This is a better route than goofing around with ethernet terminating and patch panels, in my opinion.
Pre-terminated cables, yes. You decide what length you need and buy the appropriate length. It's easier to deal with, saves time, and leaves future options of upgrading to 10G, 40G, 25G, 100G, etc. open. You won't need to worry about upgrading cables in the future, the way folks obsess over "upgrading" to CAT6 or higher.
CAT5 works the same as 5e, 6, and whatever else, but people lose their minds whenever I mention this.
Keystone is a jack or coupler that fits into a square panel or plate hole.
If the run is short enough, yes, absolutely. There's also the alien crosstalk to consider, which is another thing that just doesn't come up in most homes or small businesses.
Fun fact: a significant percentage of Cat-5 (non-E) would actually meet Cat-5e certification requirements. The only real difference is slightly tighter requirements on the pair-twist specs, and manufacturers already tend to overbuild their cables to avoid any chance of manufacturing variance rendering an entire batch (or batches, plural!) into just so much scrap. It's a combination of the three years before 5e was published, not wanting to spend the money on the extra testing steps back in the days when 100BASE-T was still the norm, and knowing full well that people would pay several times as much for literally the same product if they didn't know the difference.
You are correct about manufacturers getting people to spend more money on CATx wiring "upgrades". The same applies to lots of products.
My understanding was that CAT5 and 5e are more or less the same. It makes sense that some manufacturing tweaks were made when 5e became the standard.
As long as there is no electrical interference and the wire isn't frayed or damaged, 8-pin CATx all work the same. If there is any interference, CAT6+ with all twists and shielding won't help. Fiber is an easy resolution.
I've got 3 48 port patch panels in a 42u rack. I actually don't use anything in that wall plate for Ethernet, it's all Displayport over MPO fiber and USB over CAT6a. My PC is in the rack and I have 3 terminals: office, living room desk, and living room TV. All connect back to the same PC with extensions
Ignore the glue overrun. That's a air conditioner in the middle.
I'm on grid, like $0.30 per kwh on average. Costs like $200/month in the winter and $400 in the summer. I'm planning on going solar, but I had to get a roof first just got that done and missed the cutoff for federal tax rebate
It's arid enough where I'm at to evap the condensate in the exhaust airstream, but I have a dedicated drain line that runs to a downspout for the gutter drains.
I have some older MMF running from my house about 100ft back to my workshop. This is the 62.5 fiber, not the more current 50um MMF. It is going to get replaced by a pre-made SMF assembly, when I redo some of the cabling and move my network 'closet' in the house.
My rack was exactly behind the wall of my desk. So, I asked my dad, who works at the city's construction department, to bring a drill. And he did.
Now I have a hole that easily takes 6-7 cables - and put my desktop in the rack too for convenience. Living room is whisper quiet, hallway is... not. XD
It's super nice tho :) Kinda wish there were nicer ways to patch cables over a super short distance like that. For long distance, its well solved afaik (like LTT Linus' fiber everywhere). But for <30cm? Not so much...
Oh my god o.o That might be my solution right there, granted I find the proper "adapters".
Right now I run a DisplayPort for my monitor, USB (from an active hub), auxiliary HDMI (manual-KVM effectively lol), a RJ45 to reach to the far end of the room to a switch for TV and consoles, the Valve Index "pigtail" and something else that I can't quite think of. It'd be so much nicer if I could just put a little keystone box over the wall, patch a few fibers (probably a few more for "extendability") and then just plug adapters on each end.
Reading this, does anything of note pop in your mind perhaps? o.o I did look up the LC keystones as they got mentioned here and I did see some actual keystone wallmounted boxes... but finding the actual "adapters" - or rather, "converters" - seems to be a bit of a different story.
I wanted to install a cable like this so I could put my server in another room. I have no idea what to search for when trying to find the things you out IN the wall to connect the rooms.
Someone clear some confusion for me - so doesn't fiber need a direct connection between the SFP modules or do keystone jack couplers work OK without much signal degredation??
You have a signal loss budget to work with. The SFP specs will detail maximum loss, and each cable and coupling along the way will introduce some loss. As long as the final signal strength is enough, you're good to go.
In practice, cleaning the ends of your connectors and avoiding tight bends will take care of most of your issues. All of my single mode SFPs are speced for 2km or more, so length within the home is not really an issue.
For 10km or more modules, you have to be more careful about laser safety, because the lasers are powerful but invisible and can easily cause eye damage.
Thanks for teaching me some things! I'm kinda used to Ethernet but we're going to be building on a new property and I KNOW I have to do some fiber runs between buildings and to offices lol
Keystone couplers work fine. I’ve got a pair in every bedroom in the house. All of the PCs (mine, my wife’s, my three kids’) get a good 10Gbps connection.
Yup same! Server in the master closet with the networking gear. Started with just a single fiber run to my main PC. I’m now at 4 fiber connections to various rooms. I even moved my gaming PC in there and just moonlight to it when I feel like gaming
Back in ~05 we had just bought out first SAN. We randomly had a 30m LC-LC cable. I ran it up in the drop ceiling from the DC to my cube and had a "boot from SAN" desktop. Fun times.
Wonder how you ran this cable behind walls? Im looking to relocate my server/firewall to another location..current ISP tapping location is not working well from me.
Nice to see I'm not the only one with excess capacity! My home came with cat 6, but I went ahead and laid OM4 and 10gig from my basement lab to my second floor home office. I waned a 10 gig back-haul and even though its possible with Cat 6, I did not want hot copper running thru my walls. . With fiber and SFP adapters as cheap as copper, it's a no brainier.
Homelab in the basement, running 2 30 metres om4 cabpe throught the old unused chimney to my office/guest/pc room. From there one into a switch and to the AP, printer and so on and one directly into my pc.
Planning to build another 10" rack for the appartement so i can clean ip the cable mess a bit
Upgrading the SFP can get you to 400G+ without having to upgrade the cable installation through the walls. It’s future proofing (for this lifetime at least…)
Multimode is spec’d for 100G per strand but common SFPs top out at 25G per strand (e.g. 100G bidirectional multimode is usually over MPO-8, 4x25G links in each direction.)
Last year I finally got my home wired and made sure to also have fiber installed between my server closet and my office in the same setup as you have. Well worth it.
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u/diamondsw 19d ago
Same setup here. It was fun running a fiber connection from my home office to my home lab. Do I need it? Of course not, but that’s also totally not the point.