[ale] Home fiber network?

[David W. Millians]

On Fri, August 28, 2009 9:03 am, Scott Denlinger wrote:
> I have an old house which I'm remodeling, and I am considering running
> fiber
> instead of cat. 6, since I think fiber won't become as obsolete as quickly
> as
> cat. 6 will. Does this make any sense to consider? I've run cables before,
> and
> could do the termination of copper myself, but would I be out of my league
> trying to run fiber? I would have to bring someone in to terminate
> everything
> and test it, but I'm reasonably confident I could design the network, and
> run
> the fiber myself, so I'm sure I could save on a lot of the labor costs,
> even if
> I need someone to terminate all the connections.

I don't know if there are any resources, but I'll tell you where I fell on
this subject- especially since I too have an old house.

My take was to put cat6 everywhere. Gigabit allows you to transmit full
HD- and apparently, quadHD- without any issues. I honestly can't see, if I
was on a switched network, running into any limitations along that front
any time soon. Plus, fiber requires VERY expensive cards everywhere, and I
didn't want to invest in fiber-to-copper converters for all the pc's, the
laptops, the blu-ray player, the xbox, the squeezeboxes, etc. Buying a
nice gigabit switch is expensive enough- with fiber it's downright
ridiculous.

However.

Even thought I don't see cat6 expiring for at least 5-10 years, I wanted
to be able to run fiber if I needed to. So... I ran conduit. You can buy
the conduit in fairly large quantities. It's easy to connect. And I ran
that nylon pullcord so if/when I need fiber to the bedroom, I can pull it
fairly easily.

Here's the other things I learned.

Do you have plaster/concrete walls? I have concrete over sheetrock, and it
is MUCH easier to punch out (well, excavate) a 2 gang hole and use an old
work box than it is to try to do it with a 1 gang/old work. Especially
when then there are cross-bracings that you can't see easily. And you have
to drill through 14" beams to run the conduit.
If you have sheetrock, pffft, easy peasy.

3/4" conduit is generous to run fiber, copper, rg-quad-shield, and
speakers all through. HOWEVER I don't know enough to know if all cat6 is
structured- i.e., has a nylon stiffener in the middle- but it really adds
up if you run several of them.

There is no space generous big enough for a main line conduit, however. We
have an extension that connects to the old house via a bridge; under that
I bored out a 2" hole and ran 3 conduit through it. Hahahahaha! Foolish
planner! The rg-quad alone swamps that. I'm now either going to back-run a
2" sheath, or run a fiber connector for the old house ethernet. (But then
I'll have to find space for a rack over there.

In the new bits, I ran conduit for speakers, phones, net, and cable. That
was a lot easier, since it was upstairs; the downstairs will have drop
ceilings everywhere to allow access in the future.

Of course, I had a cellar, so it made running conduit a lot easier. I
still think the costs of running conduit and the future flexibility make
it worth it, so that when fiber becomes more common, it'll be cost
effective. I.E., copper+conduit+(later fiber infrastructure) < current
fiber infrastructure.

Given that I hear cat6 may carry 10gig, too, one would of course want to
follow all the requirements to allow that. (cat6 shielded is a chunk, but
still less than fiber, I think.) My fingers were REALLY sore after doing
all the miniscule unpairing and punchdowns. Need to teach the 3 year old-
he's got tiny fingers...

And hey, if you have the funds to do fiber, more power to you, of course. :)