In 2019, I started the process of purchasing a house that was under construction. My home called for a detached garage, which I planned on being my primary computer center. The house itself was built with two insulated attic spaces that do not physically connect. On a Friday, the builder invited my wife and I to check out the home under construction before they started putting in drywall the following Monday. The builder gave me a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" type of statement saying that anything that happened to materialize over the weekend would be ignored. I brought up the idea of how I would connect networking between the detached garage and the house and he mentioned the conduit for the electrical sub-panel in the detached. I immediately knew that I could not run copper through an electrical conduit with 100A of AC power running parallel. I then had an epiphany... fiber optics! Thankfully, there was still an electronics store in town that sold fiber (Fry's Electronics... they were a dying company but no one had stuck a fork in them quite yet.) They only had one option and I didn't have time to research or order anything online. I bought 1000 feet of 62.5/125 zipline. I ran fiber between where I envisioned I'd put my rack, with about 20' slack in the detached garage to the front attic space. I also left around 20' slack in the front attic. I also ran fiber from there to the rear attic, along with a couple lengths of CAT6A. I ran fiber between a few other potential future upgrade locations. That was in December 2019. In April 2020, we finally officially purchased the house. I had time to research things. I learned that 62.5/125 was not the greatest and may be limited to 1 Gbps. I purchased some Aruba network switches that had four SFP+ connectors and 24 PoE ports. I planned to have one in each of the two attic spaces and one in my computer rack. I would later add a fourth identical switch or second for that rack, as 24 ports were not enough there. I also was researching terminating fiber... it took tools, techniques, and experience that I did not have. I searched on NextDoor for someone capable of terminating fiber for a residential need. I thankfully got a response from a guy that owned an IT company. He employed technicians that did this and he had done it himself before becoming more of an administrator, being the owner. He agreed to terminate the fiber for me for less than $100! He only ended up terminating the run between the detached garage and the front attic and suggested I go with the CAT6A (which I could terminate myself) to interconnect the front and rear attic switches. I was hoping I could run 10Gbase-SR. I had estimated the length to be between 30-35 meters, which is on the edge of use for OM1 fiber. Thankfully, I have not had ANY issues and all of the switches are tied to each other with 10 Gbps. My Internet is 1 Gbps and speed tests generally are around 850-900 Mbps download and 900+ Mbps upload.
Just want to say thank you for this video and the guide on your website. I followed your purchase list for the cheap 1G BiDi. I now have highspeed internet in a workshop 130ft from the house. Your guide was clear and easy to follow! Glad to have reliable fast internet for cheaper and better than point to point. Many thanks!
As a fiber Internet installer for the largest telecommunications company in America, I can confirm that everything is RU-vidr has said on this video is 100% accurate! Thank you for the awesome video!
@@apalrdsadventures In what way? I was considering a ~30m run of OM3 for 10gig and that same cable would also be good for any 100 gig link. So are the transceivers more expensive?
Most reasonably-priced MMF 100G transceivers are -SR4, which requires 4 pairs (8 fibers). In SMF you can do CWDM4 with 1 pair (4 wavelengths for the bandwidth). Transceivers for this are under $100 each for both SR4 and CWDM4. The closest thing I could find for MMF over 1 pair uses a mix of BiDi WDM and 50G line rate to squeeze a bidirectional 50G link on two pairs (duplex 100G total), for around $500 per transceiver.
Excellent introduction. I remember being ***very*** cautious the first time I worked with fibre, doing networking for a small business. I didn't want to get the wrong stuff so I did a ton of research and asked a lot of questions to a lot of people. But really once you get used to it, using fibre feels not much different to using regular copper ethernet. And it's easy to forget how scary it may seem to people who have had no prior experience. So thank you for doing god's work.
I really would have liked you to have mentioned that the connectors need to be kept clean. Dirt / oil from fingers can really degrade the connection fast. Don't touch the ends and keep the caps on as much as possible. Most of the vendors that supply cables also have cleaning pads/kits. When in a real pinch using those sealed swipes for glasses (the ones you wear on your face) or the purest of alcohol can help. Also avoid tight bending and strain/pull on the fibers. In general you should limit bends to what you could coil around a larger soda bottle. I would recommend getting LR over LRM as the power budgets are better and LRM compatibility is much less common.
In my experience working in a data center I have only very rarely found dirt to actually degrade a connection. I have also seen plenty of cables whose shielding has been ripped off and the pure fibre barely hanging off the connector work flawlessly for years. Tight bends, strain / pull also didn't seem to be doing much at speeds of up to 32Gb/s. Now this doesn't mean to not take care of the fibres, but it's also not as bad as people like to make it out.
@@MrMarci878 I'm mainly doing longer amplified runs (up to 200km) in which clean fibers are essential. There are a lot of factors that can influence connectivity indeed. Indeed they aren't as fragile as people would make you believe, but it's good practice to treat your fibers properly. Keeping the connectors clean and avoiding bends and strain on them simply helps with the longevity of the cable. If you need something that can withstand more abuse , kevlar and/or coil protected aka armoured fiber is the way to go.
@@djpsychic Even in 10km runs, badly scratched fiber ends have bitten me. Always use cleaning tools on everything. Even on brand new cables fresh out of the bag. FIS sells these cleaning tools for dirt cheap. No reason not to get them. Your fiber will last much longer. I mean especially if we are talking pre-terminated direct bury fiber like what this video is about. If anyone wants to know why this is important, look up "fiber scopes" and you can probably find some glass gore.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 It rather decreases OSNR, very broadly a combination of power loss and dispersion (and some other non linear effects as phase shifting etc etc. aka physics etc ) For short runs (up to 25GB) OSNR is usually not an issue. As long as you have at least 3bB of power budget left 99% works without any issues. In either case do check upon the equipment you will be using and the distance you will need to traverse. I would opt for duplex singlemode fiber where possible. LR 10Gbit from the known whitelabels are really not that expensive anymore. My main argument was that while Cat5/Cat6 can take quite the abuse , you should be more careful with fiber optics. Just treat it with care, don't poke randomly in the module or use air pressure to "get the dust out" or wipe up the connectors with a cloth etc. As long as you keep the covers on all the various items, it should last a lifetime.
Title seems misleading as it lacks details like concerns for bending cables, keeping them clean, suggestions for running cabling through walls and other challenges that soemone starting out may not be familiar with and didn't get into thedetails of testing/troubleshooting and (likely impractical) cable termination. Still a good introduction to a subset of hardware users may begin to run into.
I’m a little confused about one statement you made, especially since a poster below said that, as they were an internet installer, they could “confirm everything” you were saying is 100% accurate. My confusion--at about the 4 minute mark, you said that “if you need an outdoor rated fiber that pretty much only exists in single mode os2…” I recently purchased indoor/outdoor 4 strand multimode from LANshack and this is in the description of this cable: "Our Indoor/Outdoor Pre-Terminated Fiber Optic Cable Assemblies are perfect for connecting the networks of two buildings through the use of an underground conduit, headend termination to a fiber backbone, termination of fiber rack systems, multi-floor deployment where select fibers are used at each floor, or intra-building backbones.” Thanks.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks for the reply. You know a heck of a lot more about this stuff than I do but I’m curious why multi-mode is less used. One of my runs was about 50’ and my other was a little over 125’ and both well within the distance of mult-mode (I have read up to 1800 ft) whereas singlemode is typically used for longer distances. No worries…mine is purchased and will be installing it soon.
Basically duplex multimode is limited to about 25G with current optics, and costs have come down so low that there isn't a huge reason to use MMF any more. 100G multimode uses 8 fibers (4x25G per direction) whereas singlemode can use course wavelength division multiplexing over 2 fibers (4 'colors' of 25G per fiber), so there's a better upgrade path for singlemode fiber.
Nice video I'm not usually a fan of VPN ads, but I think you did a good job here. I would defo like to see the policy routing using PIA video, I feel like that's useful for... Linux ISO's
This was very informative; although I'm trying to run fiber to my home from an ISP. Still, good to know if I ever need to jack my home network to more than 1Gbps instead of Ethernet / twisted pair .
"Check your local law/code" yeah, last time I tried to check the local code for electronic wiring related stuff, I got to realize all of them are only in a book that costs like 1500€, and is republished every 2 years. Yeah I get that it costs to draft the standards and that for professionals that isn't a lot when its basically a license fee, but at the same time, for normal people who just want to check to make sure what the electricians are proposing is accurate... tbf I might've been able to find it in a library somewhere but still.
At least in the US, the law is not copyrightable, so any code that is incorporated into law can be published as-is (as amended by the law, not in original form) and up.codes does that. Although I assume you aren't from the US based on your use of euros.
@@apalrdsadventures Yeah, I checked the price again and I remembered it wrong. Its "only" 400€ for the latest book. And yeah, them being free is what would make sense, but at the same time the standardization is done by an organisation that gets funded from the sales.. But I think they're mostly just translated international standards so I should probably check those.. ISO and CEN.
The US code books are similarly priced. I can't go out and (legally) download a copy of the 2015 or 2020 International Residential Code ('International' being US + Canada). But, legally they can't stop anyone from publishing the 2015 Michigan Residential Code, as it's a law, and the law loses copyright protection. So, there are websites which host the law as-is which include the Michigan version of the code, including all modifications that Michigan made when they adopted it.
@@apalrdsadventures Yeah, we have similar sites listing all the laws, and actually they do have building codes there too. But the only things I found about electronics were what are the requirements for a license and that you have to be licensed and follow the standards. I still might be missing them though, and they're just hidden somewhere complicated. Don't really need them right now though, as the thing I was originally searching them for got decided already. Anyway, thanks for the video and replies, hope you have a great day!
One thing I think you skipped is that on LR, SFP, single mode? The light levels are important it is possible to overdrive the receive. I want SFP but the transmit from the other when using single mode fiber
That's definitely a concern with high power transceivers (don't buy the 20km or 40km variants at short range), but for the specific transceivers I linked they all have a receiver overload >= the maximum transmitter output, so they can't be overloaded if paired together.
@@Traci_S_Aaron I kinda figured you were given that nobody would ask about light levels if they weren't. But I wanted to drop that reply for the benefit of those reading the comments.
It’s funny to watch this, since I was installing fiber for a hospital’s new infrastructure backbone, 30 years ago. Local Baby Bell fought me (1993/94) to install fiber (WAN) from Central Office to hospital Demarc. At this time FDDI and 10-Base-F were upper LAN bandwidths - and IEEE Fast Ethernet (100 M) arguments delaying. Cost was reason (30 years ago) for Multi-mode over Single-mode and well supported by vendors. ** Times change, and Copper die-hards have retired, some solutions gone (POTS, DSL). Consumer bandwidth and growth forced adoption.
What, no ubiquiti Sector Antenna? There are much better outdoor wifi solutions. I'd still choose fiber as cat cable over long distance really amps the power draw.
I prefer direct cable connection over Wi-Fi as it requires physical access, with Wi-Fi it just seems like a matter of time before for some clever hacker Breaks the Wi-Fi encoding and your forced to buy new gear. As someone who pulled his share of copper wire in the form of coax, cat 5, shielded Multi conductor, zip etc in the past. I like the idea of fibre optics connections between buildings for the sake of lightning protection, but you didn’t mention how durable the fibre cable is when pulling it through underground conduit? I would be very nervous about breaking the glass conductor, has the durability increased over the years for fibre cables?
The 3mm jacketed patch cables (non-armored) are really quite robust - fs specs them for 225N (~50lb) tensile strength and 10mm minimum bend radius, which should pull through a conduit. The more expensive armored fibers (such as the black direct burial TPU one I have in the video) can handle significantly more than this.
This might be a stupid question. Is it possible to connect two computers having SFP28 NIC directly using fiber optic cable just like how we do it with a copper cable or do I need a switch/router for networking.
FYI, my 10Gbe SFP+ switch auto negotiates down to 1G if I put a 1G transceiver in it. That's how I connected it to the rest of my network, rather than using an expensive 10Gbe RJ45 transceiver.
Please put some table data, I lost when you say that *** names and you compare them to other ** name fast. I try watch with subtitles... and if you put some text tables then will be easier to see diferences then only from speaking > auto translatcion > decode to understand.
Am I the only one who wants 100G and 25G on my network and homelab just to test it and see it working even though I’d have to work really hard to get all my servers to saturate my 10G network? Anyone? I just want it!
Nice Video , my only comment would be to include the actual network configuration part with routing/dns/firewall as well to show a complete end to end story
that fiber drop is not very abrasive may not last very long underground u should look into corning drops theyre alot better have so many layers has a black layer then 2 fiber glass rods then another layer then kevlar then another layer then one more layer then glue then the fiber. i work for Bell Canada and thats all we use
DAC and DAF cables should be purchased for the interface and speed they're being used for. Like SFP28 for 25Gbps with making sure that both slots support SFP28. SFP+ for 10Gbps. SFP for 1Gbps.
Great info. Been running OM3 fiber LC/LC at my place for 2 years and just added two more fiber runs to replace the ethernet cables connecting my switches. I have used 10GTek media converters when I did not have enough SFP ports. Will be nice when I install crown/cove molding to hide the cables and also add some LED lighting.
I want to get fiber optic internet installed through a company and I have a pc for streaming and gaming. How do I simply connect the internet to my pc? I’ve been using an Ethernet cable with my wired internet but I don’t understand how to do it with fiber. I know I can’t just get a router and connect it with an Ethernet so I need to know what I’m getting into and what I need.
In general fiber ISPs will hand off to Ethernet with their ONT (optical network terminal) and you can use that like any other internet connection. Some very high speed fiber ISPs (and especially business connections) will use singlemode fiber like in this video, but most use PON which is completely different.
I mean fiber is good for high capacity link speed, Higher than 10Gigabit ( 40/100 gigabit ), and high distances - singlemode. For basic home use, is still releiable using metalic cable, because, there are many devices which support ethernet ports.
@@apalrdsadventures I have metalic outside, between building 😅. Ok but inside, i mean you dont have devices which is good fór Fiber, mikrotiks .... Have sfp, but ether ports are only gig .... So i mean its very hard build Network on optic, and fór 10gig you Can have cat6a. Yes fór outside is good Fiber, or instead of ptp.
Is it actually possible to use fiber channel hardware (at least for the cables)? Or does it have to be ethernet hardware. Not talking about fiber channel over ethernet here, which seems quite obvious.
Call ATT. They will need to send you an ONT that connects to their headend equipment and provision it, its not like cable or DSL where you can get your own modem. You can use your own router though.
I you can get large diameter hose on a 1KM Reel then you could use that as a conduit and just cut it to the required length just make sure it is buried 6 feet below the surface of your lawn as you don't want your fibre optical cables getting cut by the lawn-more or by nasty pieces of work who don't like you having broadband.
You can get LC UPC duplex (or simplex for BiDi) couplers to connect two premade fibers together. They also make them as Keystone jacks, patch panels, and more.
how many devices can have on fibers optic on one house on one band can u have 35 devices and can yo run the cable on top or same hole of gas line that run thur the neiborhood
As someone who just ran SFP modules through trunking and into a rack (I lost the fibre caps and damaging the SFP would be easier to replace) AOC cables are only really useful when you have a massive amount of space to run the fibre, even then, cable + modules is usually not much more expensive.
you should really take advantage - goto 100g if you are going through all the time and effort and cost to install fiber - don't leave all that network performance on the table - otherwise just use cat6 - it won't degrade like fiber - when fiber gets dusty it is a total pita - dac cable is a good option - cheaper and it doesn't have degradation issues when you get it dirty like fiber does
He can use OM4 fiber and 10 gig ends for years. He'll be set to run 100 gig once it's reasonable and cheap enough to buy and use. Copper cabling have it's limits when installed. CAT6 might be fine for 10 gig but not for higher speeds in the future. Fiber is the way to go for long term.
@@Darkk6969 While you're not wrong (I have fiber in my home too), 10 gig still isn't "reasonable" for most people, let alone 25 or 40 gig. 100 gig being reasonable for home use is a LONG time away lol. Also, to be fair to copper's future use, if we're going to compare it to fiber we should at least compare it to Cat 8 which can handle 40Gbps. With that said, as fun as fiber in the home is, IMO Cat 6/6a does still make the most sense for the vast majority of home installations, not all, but most. 10Gbps won't be considered slow at a residential level for quite some time. Consumer devices are still getting 2.5Gbps...
WiFi is easy and convenient, sure. But reliable? Not really, depending on what you mean. It only gets worse as our homes get more and more congested with wireless devices. Latency is also significantly worse compared to wired. WiFi has its place but it'll never beat a good hardwired link.
Three things: 1) I read your blog post associated with this video and it is generally well put together. The only thing that I might suggest is for someone who might just be skimming your blog post, if you don't mind adding the speeds at which the components are rated for vs. having to click on each line to find that out. (or maybe put together a table where one column is "here are the parts for 1 G fiber" vs. "here are the parts for 10G fiber".) (And yes, I did read, in the bottom, what you used, but it might be helpful as well, to denote that in the parts list itself.) 2) $20 for a 69 m fiber cable isn't bad at all. And for your 10G set up to your shed, for a total BOM cost of $98 (minus the cost of your switch), that's not bad at all. (ServeTheHome has recently covered some relatively lower cost 2.5GbE switches and 10G switches as well.) 3) re: Mellanox ConnectX 3/ConnectX 4 (from your blog post) YES! Make sure that if you are trying to run upto 10G fiber, using SFP+ ethernet rather than Infiniband, that you pick and find the correct card for that. (There are a lot of other options that WON'T work if that's the implementation that you are planning on deploying.) For ConnectX-4, you can go all the way up to 100 Gbps dual QSFP28 port Infiniband. (That's what I use at home.) The total cost increases, but the $/Gbps for 100 Gbps is actually LESS than the $/Gbps for 10G.
I'm using a mix of Intel X520 SFP+ cards and ConnextX-4 SFP28 cards. No Infiniband, and running all at 10G now, but planning on eventually going 25G for my Proxmox cluster so throwing in those cards in my more major servers makes sense to me. I'll add some notes to the item listings too
@@apalrdsadventures :) Thank you. 1) Yeah, I sort of "accidentally" skipped the entire 10G networking tier, went I went to 100 Gbps IB. (IB isn't too bad. Yes, the switches CAN be expensive, but if you have one of the Mellanox (now Nvidia) VPI cards, you can actually use IB tools to set the ports to run as an ethernet port rather than an IB port. And if that's the case, then you don't need a managed IB switch which runs OpenSM (or an externally managed switch whereby one of the systems connected to the switch, takes on the task and the responsibility of running OpenSM).) And I only "accidentally" skipped it because I deployed 100 Gbps IB for my micro HPC cluster for CFD/FEA workloads, so now using the IB for anything else, is just a fringe benefit. 2) Since I have consolidated my systems/servers down from 5 to 2, my main server now runs everything in a single system, and therefore; inside of Proxmox (since all my systems talk to each other anyways), I just use virtio-fs for the intra-VM and VM host communications, rather than going out through a virtualised NIC, only to loop back in. As a result, both in Windows 10+ and in Linux, the virtualised NIC is recognised by the OSes as a 10 Gbps NIC (Windows 7 thinks that the virtualised NIC is a 100 Gbps NIC - yay!). The benefit that this has is that it allowed me to stay on the path of "skipping" the 10G networking tier whereby I don't have to buy any more hardware (switches, NICs, cables, etc.) And this was consolidation was set up with the intent of cutting my overall power consumption where I have gone from sucking back 1242 W down to just shy of 600 W. But if I were to try and run a system in a "shed" like you have, I probably would do something similar to yours where I would deploy 10G fiber (since 100 Gbps is probably massive overkill, especially, for a system that would be in an outdoor "shed").
I'm trying to go from Proxmox 'dev' + Proxmox 'prod' + TrueNAS + Workstation, to 3xProxmox cluster with the workstation virtualized. Hoping to build out hardware for this (eventually) that's reasonably low power, or at least lower than what I have now doing those same things. So in the end, either fiber will be running up to the workstation so it can be a productive cluster member OR DisplayPort and USB3 will be running down to the basement, which is nicer for noise and heat but also harder to manage.
@@apalrdsadventures Depending on the GPU that you're using for your workstation, that is totally doable, maybe with a few minor "exception" in regards to trying to have both Proxmox 'dev' and Proxmox 'prod' (if I read your comment correctly), running on the same system and/or the same cluster of systems. (Not sure if you're going to end up with stuff running into each other between 'dev' and 'prod'.) But besides that, everything else should work just fine. Also depends on what you are using TrueNAS for. (My Proxmox system hosts SMB, NFS, and iSCSI directly on the native, Debian-based host that runs Proxmox itself. I think fellow tech RU-vidr ElectronicsWizardry I think, used the turnkey Linux fileserver to manage those aspects, but I ended up just doing that all directly on the host itself.) So, lots of ways to do things. Again, for me, because the data that lives on the host is utilized by both the host and the VMs can see each other's data (which also tends to reside on the centralised host), so virtio-fs worked really well for that (for Windows 10, Ubuntu, and CentOS. Didn't work for Windows 7 nor SLES12SP4 (which I didn't update the kernel. Although I suspect that if I subscribed to SLES, I can get the updates. But that wasn't critical to me.)) Clustering is pretty easy. Trying to remove a node from a cluster, the one time that I was playing around with it, was more difficult. re: accessing your workstation Depending on the apps that you are planning on running on your workstation, if you need a reasonably high framerate/quick refresh, then Windows Remote Desktop (if you're using Windows) and/or VNC may or may not work for you. I just have a mini PC that connects to my Proxmox system over GbE as there really isn't THAT much traffic over remote management/remote desktop, which means that I don't need anything much faster than that. Linus, though, I think at his house, he uses like a fiber/Thunderbolt 3 dock (basically), so that the connection between the two end points runs over fiber, but splits out to TB3 at the ends. Not sure if you'd want to do something quite that crazy, but GbE works (fiber or ethernet cable). (And since my workstation is also hosted on my Proxmox server, therefore; the need for high speed data transfer to my remote system (mini PC) is negligible, given that I have relatively direct access to the Proxmox host data, again, via virtio-fs. So, I was able to completely remove a hardware based 10G networking layer, and have it run, WITHOUT even really needing a virtualised 10 Gbps NIC. Again - one of the pros of virtio-fs.) I looked at deploying 10G networking. But the consolidation helped completely eliminate that layer of networking needed. And since everything else basically just runs on the "management" layer, I just have my Netgear GS-116 v2 (which uses 7 W of power), for 16 ports, down from the 48 port Netgear GbE switch that I was running previously when I had segregated systems running. And with the consolidated system, the number of VMs that I can run is limited only by the amount of RAM (256 GB) and amount of processing power my system can handle (dual Xeon E5-2697A v4 (16-core/32-thread per socket, 32-core/64-threads in total)). Windows remote desktop sucks for high(er) frame rate gaming, but I can still play Anno 1800 on it, which isn't terrible (on a RTX A2000 6 GB). So it really depends on what you want to do.
