I am a computer nerd and run quite a few commercial-grade bits of hardware, including several rack-mounted computer servers. I mention this as a precursor, to show why I'm looking at fiber optics.
I am in the process of buying a new house. It is part of a tract-home project, so not a custom-built home. On Friday (01/03/2020), we had a pre-drywall frame walk-through, going over electrical and all the stuff that will be covered up with drywall, so we know what is where when working on home improvement projects down the road. There are a few interesting details to this new home. First, the house is a two-story home, but the second floor makes up only about the middle 1/3rd of the footprint from front-to-rear with a roof that peaks directly above the middle of the second floor, with one facet facing the front and the other facing the rear of the house. This creates a very large attic space in the front and rear of the house; I refer to them as the front and rear attics.
Another interesting detail of the house is that in addition to a 2-car and 1-car attached garages, there is a detached garage that is 15-feet wide by 24-feet deep by 9-foot tall open space, with attic. I do not plan on using this detached garage as a place to park a vehicle, but rather it will be my "computer lab" or "man-cave." I am having this building insulated and will be adding a ductless mini-split for temperature management. This building has an electrical sub-panel and a 2" conduit with a very hefty non-metallic sheathed bundle of electrical wires running from the attached garage to the detached garage. Originally, I was planning on putting in a conduit coming out of the rear attic of the house, down the side of the house, under the ground to the detached and then up and through the wall of the detached garage. The project manager gave me an idea I immediately shot down, which was running CAT6 cable through that 2" conduit running with the electrical wires. I shot it down due to inductive interference running data cables parallel with AC electrical wires.
Overnight, I was thinking more about this and came up with a possible solution... I wanted to have high-bandwidth linking of the two structures and adding my own conduit that runs down the side of the house and holes through the walls were not that appealing. I then realized that if I ran fiber optic lines, I could run that through that 2" conduit before the Monday start to drywalling. The only place open over the weekend that sold bulk fiber optic cabling had ONE box fiber optic cabling. It was 1000 feet of 62.5/125µm, OM1, twin zip line. If time and money were no object, I may have gone with something better, but from my very quick research, it appears I should be able to run 10GBASE-SR, up to 33 meters (~85 feet) over this. I decided to purchase this fiber optic cable and went to the new house to install it. My plan is to put a network switch in the detached garage, and one in each of the attic spaces that have SFP+ ports for linking switches. I ended up running fiber to each of the locations I plan on installing the switches, plus a few additional locations for future needs. The longest runs of fiber are no more than 50 feet.
As I was very limited on timing to placing this fiber, I didn't research exactly how to terminate the fiber, as that will not be needed until we move into the house, in April. Now that it is in, I'm starting the process for figuring out how exactly I will terminate the fiber. I have seen that there are several different ways to terminate them, based on the equipment and experience of the technician. I've seen that there is epoxy/polishing, which appears to be the highest quality if done properly. There is also the pre-polished/no epoxy type connectors. This appears to be easier but more costly and also prone to other issues. I am debating whether I should buy equipment for terminating the fiber and do it myself or to hire someone to come to the house to terminate the fiber.
I am hoping that someone with experience here has any experience in running fiber through a house and whether to purchase the equipment needed to terminate the fiber or find someone that does it all the time to come with their equipment and experience to do the work for me.
I will need two LC-type connectors on each end of the zipline. There is one from the run between the detached garage to the front attic space. Then there is another from the front attic to the rear attic; I ran CAT6A along-side this run. Inside our master bedroom walk-in closet, there is a 30" tall panel (Legrand On-Q ENP3050) where all the CAT5 cable, coax and alarm cable the builder installed is run. The builder ran a couple CAT5e cables between this panel and the demarcation location. I plan on putting a small gigabit network switch in this panel, as well as my router. I also added a run of CAT6A and fiber from this panel and the rear attic location for a network switch. Lastly, I ran fiber from the demarcation location to this panel. This last fiber will likely NOT be needed for quite some time, but easier to add now.
The ISP provides fiber to the house, currently at 1 Gbps. My brother's ISP just announced an option for 6Gbps data, so I may need something better than CAT5e in the future. For my router, it is a home-built router, using a mini-ITX motherboard running pfSense. My current motherboard has four 1Gbps RJ45 ports but Jetway (the maker of my current motherboard) now makes a similar motherboard with four SFP+ ports I could upgrade to, to handle higher speeds in the future. I will likely start by connecting the router to the small switch in the closet via a short patch cable and connect the rear attic switch to this small switch via the CAT6A I just ran yesterday. This will be the primary bottleneck in the system but it should be fine for a while.
I am in the process of buying a new house. It is part of a tract-home project, so not a custom-built home. On Friday (01/03/2020), we had a pre-drywall frame walk-through, going over electrical and all the stuff that will be covered up with drywall, so we know what is where when working on home improvement projects down the road. There are a few interesting details to this new home. First, the house is a two-story home, but the second floor makes up only about the middle 1/3rd of the footprint from front-to-rear with a roof that peaks directly above the middle of the second floor, with one facet facing the front and the other facing the rear of the house. This creates a very large attic space in the front and rear of the house; I refer to them as the front and rear attics.
Another interesting detail of the house is that in addition to a 2-car and 1-car attached garages, there is a detached garage that is 15-feet wide by 24-feet deep by 9-foot tall open space, with attic. I do not plan on using this detached garage as a place to park a vehicle, but rather it will be my "computer lab" or "man-cave." I am having this building insulated and will be adding a ductless mini-split for temperature management. This building has an electrical sub-panel and a 2" conduit with a very hefty non-metallic sheathed bundle of electrical wires running from the attached garage to the detached garage. Originally, I was planning on putting in a conduit coming out of the rear attic of the house, down the side of the house, under the ground to the detached and then up and through the wall of the detached garage. The project manager gave me an idea I immediately shot down, which was running CAT6 cable through that 2" conduit running with the electrical wires. I shot it down due to inductive interference running data cables parallel with AC electrical wires.
Overnight, I was thinking more about this and came up with a possible solution... I wanted to have high-bandwidth linking of the two structures and adding my own conduit that runs down the side of the house and holes through the walls were not that appealing. I then realized that if I ran fiber optic lines, I could run that through that 2" conduit before the Monday start to drywalling. The only place open over the weekend that sold bulk fiber optic cabling had ONE box fiber optic cabling. It was 1000 feet of 62.5/125µm, OM1, twin zip line. If time and money were no object, I may have gone with something better, but from my very quick research, it appears I should be able to run 10GBASE-SR, up to 33 meters (~85 feet) over this. I decided to purchase this fiber optic cable and went to the new house to install it. My plan is to put a network switch in the detached garage, and one in each of the attic spaces that have SFP+ ports for linking switches. I ended up running fiber to each of the locations I plan on installing the switches, plus a few additional locations for future needs. The longest runs of fiber are no more than 50 feet.
As I was very limited on timing to placing this fiber, I didn't research exactly how to terminate the fiber, as that will not be needed until we move into the house, in April. Now that it is in, I'm starting the process for figuring out how exactly I will terminate the fiber. I have seen that there are several different ways to terminate them, based on the equipment and experience of the technician. I've seen that there is epoxy/polishing, which appears to be the highest quality if done properly. There is also the pre-polished/no epoxy type connectors. This appears to be easier but more costly and also prone to other issues. I am debating whether I should buy equipment for terminating the fiber and do it myself or to hire someone to come to the house to terminate the fiber.
I am hoping that someone with experience here has any experience in running fiber through a house and whether to purchase the equipment needed to terminate the fiber or find someone that does it all the time to come with their equipment and experience to do the work for me.
I will need two LC-type connectors on each end of the zipline. There is one from the run between the detached garage to the front attic space. Then there is another from the front attic to the rear attic; I ran CAT6A along-side this run. Inside our master bedroom walk-in closet, there is a 30" tall panel (Legrand On-Q ENP3050) where all the CAT5 cable, coax and alarm cable the builder installed is run. The builder ran a couple CAT5e cables between this panel and the demarcation location. I plan on putting a small gigabit network switch in this panel, as well as my router. I also added a run of CAT6A and fiber from this panel and the rear attic location for a network switch. Lastly, I ran fiber from the demarcation location to this panel. This last fiber will likely NOT be needed for quite some time, but easier to add now.
The ISP provides fiber to the house, currently at 1 Gbps. My brother's ISP just announced an option for 6Gbps data, so I may need something better than CAT5e in the future. For my router, it is a home-built router, using a mini-ITX motherboard running pfSense. My current motherboard has four 1Gbps RJ45 ports but Jetway (the maker of my current motherboard) now makes a similar motherboard with four SFP+ ports I could upgrade to, to handle higher speeds in the future. I will likely start by connecting the router to the small switch in the closet via a short patch cable and connect the rear attic switch to this small switch via the CAT6A I just ran yesterday. This will be the primary bottleneck in the system but it should be fine for a while.
