new construction, "future proof" with fiber?

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Thuleman

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So I am looking into putting fiber optics cable into the wall along with Cat 6. I figure that the cost of the cable/terminators is going to be negligible in comparison to running that cable after the house is done.

Is 1000BASE-SX the way to go on this? Seems like the most common "standard" is 62.5/125 now though I see that the 50/150 supports higher bandwidth. This is thinking 10Gb Ethernet as 40Gb Ethernet is probably too far out to worry about it now, not that there is cable for that today, or is there?
 
Cat6a will do 10gb. I think residental is 30 years out from needing fiber. Or at least way to far out to even think about it now.
 
Fiber would be cool, but i think total overkill unless you plan to have some MASSIVE I/O systems serving data.
 
k1pp3r said:
Cat6a will do 10gb. I think residental is 30 years out from needing fiber. Or at least way to far out to even think about it now.
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Quoting Bill Gates here: "I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."

I don't think it will take long at all till we see residential fiber. Sure, it will depend on location and such but there is a lot of dark fiber out there that was provisioned during the dot.com bubble and at some point it will be lit up. Any new projects are likely to go in as fiber just because there's no real sense to lay any other kind of cable.

Overall this is really a matter of spending a few extra dollars now to put the cables in the wall and then, whenever, fiber comes the house is ready.
 
If you're willing to spend the money, then it can't hurt.

I do think it's gonna be quite some time before residential fiber is in use though. I think within the next decade or so, it may become available, but as mentioned by k1pp3r, it's gonna be quite some time before it's a common occurrence. The majority of people are just fine with 100Mbit as it is; the average household has no better than this. The occasional person that is running a Gigabit network is generally more than happy with it's performance, and the majority of people won't be able to saturate the network. With 10Gbit already available, and essentially not in use, I don't see ANY need for faster options.

I realize this is a bit of a ramble (sorry about that :) ), but I'm just trying to show that Gigabit isn't even the defacto standard, and we have technology far surpassing it. It'll be some time :)
 
I'd say it's more for bragging rights right now anyway....when fiber comes you'll be ready.
 
fibre is for long distances ... no.

if you build your conduits etc properly you will be ready to expand with new cabling (of whatever kind) if required.
 
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Fiber inside the house? I could see fiber to the house, but inside? I don't think it is needed. But if you really want it, I guess it could be a backbone between floors.
 
I personally would not use fiber in a house. Sure it's cool, but you need very specialized tools to crimp and splice, and even if you do have those tools, there are some serious safety concerns (glass shards) that a pro splicer will know about.

Copper is way to go in the house. I would go cat6 or cat6a. If you later on setup a SAN or something then that's where you could look at using fiber as you can just buy the premade patch cords.
 
i worked for a DoD contractor a few years ago. One of the clients was on a secure floor, and they all had fiber to each workstation. That was nuts. That actually might have been 5 years ago.
 
if you need a seriously large pipe between floors of your house, just run a few parallel cat6 cables and trunk em. the most i would do is run a fiber cable from your network room (if you have one) to where the service hookups in your house come in from the street, so that you could have all the equipment in one room. there is no need for fiber between rooms, i highly doubt there ever would be in the foreseeable future.

i just installed 1000 feet and 30 something drops in our house using cat6. for the devices that can saturate a single 1gigE line, they have dual connections. problem solved. i dont have any equipment that can saturate two 1gigabit connections (unfortunately / for now :)).
 
As p3n said, run your conduits, then you don't ever have to worry about the medium or whether its "future proof" or not.
 
I'd say conduits too! Then you don't have to worry about what you might want to run //whevever// down the road.

O2Flow said:
Can't eavesdrop nearly as easily on fiber. Just sayin.
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Worried about eavesdroppin in a home? //sheesh
 
Look here is the deal, most major residential interconnects are copper today, that is not to say fiber will not catch on but there is a long way to go. I mean look at the new audio video spec floating around to replace hdmi with Ethernet , basically video networking and audio can be caried over cat5e.

So, from a cost analysis, assuming you are running to 5 rooms in your house you will probably need a couple hundred meter of fiber cable, all of the wall plate adapters, the nic's for your computers (these are not to cheap if you are looking for 10 gigabit, and the cables from the wall to your computer. You are probably looking at a significant investment in all of this.

Now on the converse you can get cat 6a and rg6 coax relatively cheap, and could terminate the whole house including the wall plate adapters fairly cheap and still get 10gbps connections speed.

I would say go for it if your up for the cost, and the potential that fiber will not really pickup in the residence.
 
fiber in the house? most houses cant even get fiber to the house.

just seems like major over kill to me. by the time it is ready to use (fiber in the home), it will be cheaper and faster.
 
Put conduit in the walls from your central hub to the outlets. Leave pull-ropes in the conduit next to your Cat-6a cable. It will give you exactly the same construction cost advantages as pre-placing the fiber. It will cost less now and you are guarenteed that when the next technology comes along you can pull the appropriate cable - no matter if it is fiber or the next generation of copper. Remember - the fiber you want in 10 years might be quite different in characteristic from the fiber you buy today.
 
Another thing, don't put drywall on your basement ceiling. Put drop ceiling. That way you can easily run wire. I recently ran a 20 amp electrical outlet to my office without having to go through too much hassle since my basement is unfinished. When I do finish it, it will be all drop ceiling. There's a lot of other places in my house I will eventually run drops, but I can do it anytime as I make sure the floor is always accessible.

Guess this is harder on multi story houses though. Drop ceiling in a non basement area would probably look out of place. Though, they do make some that looks pretty nice now, and less like an office.
 
tricky0502 said:
fiber in the house? most houses cant even get fiber to the house.

just seems like major over kill to me. by the time it is ready to use (fiber in the home), it will be cheaper and faster.
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I think the point is LAN speed. For internet, you could have everything go through a 10mbps hub and not see a difference. The internet will always be a bottleneck, unless you're one of those lucky people to get a 50mbps connection or something. Even then, I doubt you can easily get a 1gbps connection at home so cat6 is more then good enough.
 
My friends parents just built a new home and have only fiber and power lines in the house. They are using fiber for automation, surround sound, intercom, phone, LAN, whole house video/music, security cameras. Its fucking nutz.

They hired some contractor and he had baluns for everything under the sun (HDMI, Cat6, Phone, coax, RCA audio/video, display port, etc.) For the servers and backend they are using fiber NICs to serve everything out.

Makes changing things relatively simple tho. HDMI is obsolete and XXXXX replaces it they can just change out Baluns and be ready to go. You can literally put any type of device anywhere they ran fiber.

Totally overkill, but definitely the coolest house i have ever been inside.
 
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