Wired Home Networking - FTTR
Discussion
First time home owner and a bit of a tech geek, so naturally, my first big DIY project apart from assembling furniture, has been to set up a wired home network. It's now finally at the point where it can be shown off a little bit.
I convinced myself to use a pair of fibre optic and Cat 6A for the runs. Having obtained a decent quantity of 6A on marketplace:
And lots of fibre cables, keystones, wallboxes, and other assorted goodies from FS:
(Not our cat!)
All the runs congregate in the server cupboard. No, that's not an aspirational name.
OK, our internet is current actually FTTC, not FTTP! But the server has a 10 gigabit NIC, my PC now has a 10 gigabit NIC, and the key was not bottlenecking LAN services.
Plus you could push multi-hundred gigs over OS2 fibre, so future-proof.
I convinced myself to use a pair of fibre optic and Cat 6A for the runs. Having obtained a decent quantity of 6A on marketplace:
And lots of fibre cables, keystones, wallboxes, and other assorted goodies from FS:
(Not our cat!)
All the runs congregate in the server cupboard. No, that's not an aspirational name.
OK, our internet is current actually FTTC, not FTTP! But the server has a 10 gigabit NIC, my PC now has a 10 gigabit NIC, and the key was not bottlenecking LAN services.
Plus you could push multi-hundred gigs over OS2 fibre, so future-proof.
megaphone said:
Top tecing, well ott. Have you had your first electricity bill?
Naturally ott, but fun 
Electricity isn't too bad, although the thirsty server hasn't been brought online yet. Probably 50W for the network hardware over the ISP router, which is about 25p/day.
The R620 server probably idles at 100W, she's a beast. But there is some offset there in reducing the gas bill in winter
I don't know what you are going to use all that bandwidth for but the installation is pretty ugly with all that surface mounted trunking on show. You could have dropped it down in the corner behind the door & then run along at skirting level. It would still be a bit rubbish but at least it would be less visible.
I'm sure you think it's great but we wire 3G SDI video servers & Adobe Premiere NLE workstations in copper so 10G fibre to the desk seems rather superfluous.
I'm sure you think it's great but we wire 3G SDI video servers & Adobe Premiere NLE workstations in copper so 10G fibre to the desk seems rather superfluous.
Mr Pointy said:
I don't know what you are going to use all that bandwidth for but the installation is pretty ugly with all that surface mounted trunking on show. You could have dropped it down in the corner behind the door & then run along at skirting level. It would still be a bit rubbish but at least it would be less visible.
I'm sure you think it's great but we wire 3G SDI video servers & Adobe Premiere NLE workstations in copper so 10G fibre to the desk seems rather superfluous.
You never how many 8k porn streams he's watching I'm sure you think it's great but we wire 3G SDI video servers & Adobe Premiere NLE workstations in copper so 10G fibre to the desk seems rather superfluous.
(He'll now tell us he's on 10mbps ADSL).Not wrong on the install. Would do my head in - chased in or wifi.
Murph7355 said:
You never how many 8k porn streams he's watching (He'll now tell us he's on 10mbps ADSL).
Not wrong on the install. Would do my head in - chased in or wifi.
Nah, and it's a 500 Mbps service currently. (He'll now tell us he's on 10mbps ADSL).Not wrong on the install. Would do my head in - chased in or wifi.
For bandwidth, I want to have my server as a file server, and 100 MB/s transfers would be massively more painful than the 600-700 MB/s I can expect to get from a RAID array of spinning rust.
Wifi, my policy is to minimise devices in the collision domain, and the speeds required would be challenging anyway.
In terms of the install, I honestly find it visually unobtrusive, although would definitely have preferred to install the cables in the walls. But it's a question of knowing my own limits, and definitely wasn't going to pay somone to do it.
I did this when we renovated our house, put just under 2km of top-quality Cat 5e, all behind stud walls or chased into brick before replastering. Looks professional with 4 to 6 sockets in each room, but it took me many weeks to run it all with all the floorboards up. Network is 1Gbps, and short runs can handle 10Gbps with no issues.
But... It turns out we only ever use a handful of wired connections, mainly for home office (crucial to us) plus a few media devices and cameras in other rooms. Looking back I'd probably not bother with anything so extensive again, especially considering just how good WiFi is (and will be with WiFi7) Things I expected to require wired connections are stable on wireless (multi-streaming on different devices). As long as my office is fully Ethernet I'm happy. Internet will always be bottleneck for most, given we live in the countryside and broadband isn't FTTP, utilisation is never going to get anywhere near its theorectial max.
However, the advantage came when we moved our office to a different room a few years ago, and patching in the new sockets was a breeze.
I may add some a further small server/NAS in the plant room at some point - but I've been saying that for ten years, so that means it's unlikely.
But... It turns out we only ever use a handful of wired connections, mainly for home office (crucial to us) plus a few media devices and cameras in other rooms. Looking back I'd probably not bother with anything so extensive again, especially considering just how good WiFi is (and will be with WiFi7) Things I expected to require wired connections are stable on wireless (multi-streaming on different devices). As long as my office is fully Ethernet I'm happy. Internet will always be bottleneck for most, given we live in the countryside and broadband isn't FTTP, utilisation is never going to get anywhere near its theorectial max.
However, the advantage came when we moved our office to a different room a few years ago, and patching in the new sockets was a breeze.
I may add some a further small server/NAS in the plant room at some point - but I've been saying that for ten years, so that means it's unlikely.
x404 said:
I did this when we renovated our house, put just under 2km of top-quality Cat 5e, all behind stud walls or chased into brick before replastering. Looks professional with 4 to 6 sockets in each room, but it took me many weeks to run it all with all the floorboards up. Network is 1Gbps, and short runs can handle 10Gbps with no issues.
But... It turns out we only ever use a handful of wired connections, mainly for home office (crucial to us) plus a few media devices and cameras in other rooms. Looking back I'd probably not bother with anything so extensive again, especially considering just how good WiFi is (and will be with WiFi7) Things I expected to require wired connections are stable on wireless (multi-streaming on different devices). As long as my office is fully Ethernet I'm happy. Internet will always be bottleneck for most, given we live in the countryside and broadband isn't FTTP, utilisation is never going to get anywhere near its theorectial max.
However, the advantage came when we moved our office to a different room a few years ago, and patching in the new sockets was a breeze.
I may add some a further small server/NAS in the plant room at some point - but I've been saying that for ten years, so that means it's unlikely.
with WiFi 7 i dont think i would even bother hard wiring the access points any more let alone anything else But... It turns out we only ever use a handful of wired connections, mainly for home office (crucial to us) plus a few media devices and cameras in other rooms. Looking back I'd probably not bother with anything so extensive again, especially considering just how good WiFi is (and will be with WiFi7) Things I expected to require wired connections are stable on wireless (multi-streaming on different devices). As long as my office is fully Ethernet I'm happy. Internet will always be bottleneck for most, given we live in the countryside and broadband isn't FTTP, utilisation is never going to get anywhere near its theorectial max.
However, the advantage came when we moved our office to a different room a few years ago, and patching in the new sockets was a breeze.
I may add some a further small server/NAS in the plant room at some point - but I've been saying that for ten years, so that means it's unlikely.
Did something similar a bit ago when I moved my networking stuff to Ubiquiti.
I've got a 1gig VM service (which is soon to be FTTP via another provider) into a Cloud Gateway Fiber, then there's a 10G SFP link between the gateway and a switch, which has another 10G SFP link to my HP microserver, and a 10G cat6 to the wireless access point.
Did all that to ensure that streaming media to the TV from the microserver using Jellyfin wouldn't ever drop out, only then noticed that the TV ethernet port is only capable of a max of 100mbit...
Yeah, not even gigabit.
C'est la vie... as they say!
I've got a 1gig VM service (which is soon to be FTTP via another provider) into a Cloud Gateway Fiber, then there's a 10G SFP link between the gateway and a switch, which has another 10G SFP link to my HP microserver, and a 10G cat6 to the wireless access point.
Did all that to ensure that streaming media to the TV from the microserver using Jellyfin wouldn't ever drop out, only then noticed that the TV ethernet port is only capable of a max of 100mbit...
Yeah, not even gigabit.
C'est la vie... as they say!
Is there a reason to hardwire anything these days? I used to think so, and in previous houses had it all hardwired or ethernet adaptors on sockets, but Wi-Fi is so good now any bottlenecks are never the Wi-Fi speed. Most devices are wireless anyway, and even things like streaming TV in 4k takes relatively little bandwidth.
That cable trunking would absolutely do my nut. It looks like an office install from 1995. As would those wires hanging down from the TV - if you're going to run trunking everywhere, at least use it to tidy up what wires you can't avoid having!!
That cable trunking would absolutely do my nut. It looks like an office install from 1995. As would those wires hanging down from the TV - if you're going to run trunking everywhere, at least use it to tidy up what wires you can't avoid having!!
snuffy said:
Solocle said:
Nah, and it's a 500 Mbps service currently.
Did you not say you were on FTTC ?paulrockliffe said:
I'm fully in favour of this sort of silliness, but you're not saturating a 1Gb network with data coming off spinny disks!
One of the big ongoing projects that is a prime candidate for offloading is storage of several 100 GBs of video footage I have (VCR transcodes, all sorts). So quite linear workloads.One 7200 rpm SAS drive can conservatively probably transfer 100 MB/s, so is nearly at 1 Gbps already. I have 8 of them in a software RAID array.
5 Gbit would probably be sufficient, but 10 is a nice number.
Condi said:
Is there a reason to hardwire anything these days? I used to think so, and in previous houses had it all hardwired or ethernet adaptors on sockets, but Wi-Fi is so good now any bottlenecks are never the Wi-Fi speed. Most devices are wireless anyway, and even things like streaming TV in 4k takes relatively little bandwidth.
That cable trunking would absolutely do my nut. It looks like an office install from 1995. As would those wires hanging down from the TV - if you're going to run trunking everywhere, at least use it to tidy up what wires you can't avoid having!!
It is still a work in progress, I will have a look at using my spare trunking for the TV cables, I already shortened the ethernet one.That cable trunking would absolutely do my nut. It looks like an office install from 1995. As would those wires hanging down from the TV - if you're going to run trunking everywhere, at least use it to tidy up what wires you can't avoid having!!
Edited by Solocle on Wednesday 10th June 17:40
Solocle said:
snuffy said:
Solocle said:
Nah, and it's a 500 Mbps service currently.
Did you not say you were on FTTC ?Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
snuffy said:
Ah, I see.
Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
I fancied 900mbps initially, but realised I wouldn't touch the sides so went 600.Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
I'm now on 300. It very, very occasionally gets close for a very brief time - I think when my kids are updating games....but could probably scale it back even further. Which will be handy when they put prices up again.
I only have WiFi6, but since spending some time tuning that it's another where I don't touch the sides of its capability.
snuffy said:
Ah, I see.
Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
I'm in the same boat, I have 900/900 but can get 2.5 gig - but what't the point? Even when I download big games which are over 100 gig in size it doesn't matter - the xbox has a 1 gig network card - I used to have a 10G network in the house (back in 2019) with 3 servers running vSAN on SSDs (and fibre connecting them back to the switches and firewall) but I gave up, it was fun for a while, but the cost of running it out stripped the enjoyment. Sold the servers, RAM and NICs, the disks are about here somewhere.Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
Suspicious_user said:
snuffy said:
Ah, I see.
Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
I'm in the same boat, I have 900/900 but can get 2.5 gig - but what't the point? Even when I download big games which are over 100 gig in size it doesn't matter - the xbox has a 1 gig network card - I used to have a 10G network in the house (back in 2019) with 3 servers running vSAN on SSDs (and fibre connecting them back to the switches and firewall) but I gave up, it was fun for a while, but the cost of running it out stripped the enjoyment. Sold the servers, RAM and NICs, the disks are about here somewhere.Not the normal OR FTTC, which is a maximum of 80meg.
I have 1Gig on FTTP, I can now go to 1.6Gig, but it doesn't seem worth it. In reality, I don't need 1Gig, it's just that I like the idea of it !
I did manage to nab one of the very few unmanaged 24 port 2.5GB switches produced for about £200 off ebay so that replaced a standard 24 port 1GB unmanaged switch.
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