Wired Home Networking - FTTR

[Solocle]

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.

[megaphone]

Top tecing, well ott. Have you had your first electricity bill?

[Solocle]

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

[Mr Pointy]

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.

[Murph7355]

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 (He'll now tell us he's on 10mbps ADSL).

Not wrong on the install. Would do my head in - chased in or wifi.

[simon_harris]

we had a full re-wire at our last house so I was able to do flood network wiring at the same time at the cost of just a bit more "making good" even then I only went with Cat5e because the capacity in that was always going to outweigh what I could get from a broadband supplier.

[Solocle]

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.

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.

[x404]

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.

[paulrockliffe]

I'm fully in favour of this sort of silliness, but you're not saturating a 1Gb network with data coming off spinny disks!

[Dave Hedgehog]

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

[snuffy]

Solocle said:

Nah, and it's a 500 Mbps service currently.

Did you not say you were on FTTC ?

[Joseph Ducreux]

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!

[Condi]

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!!

[Solocle]

snuffy said:

Solocle said:

Nah, and it's a 500 Mbps service currently.

Did you not say you were on FTTC ?

Yep, Virgin superfast 500. Comes into the house on coax. But when I do go full fibre, I have the one SC/APC run specifically for putting the ISP hardware in the cupboard too.