Your Guide to Fiber Optics at Home in 2024!

In this week’s video, Ben Hamlitsch and Dave Harris discuss the benefits of fiber over copper Ethernet, answer some frequently asked questions, describe FTTx variations, tell which types of cables you'd want to use in your home, and much more!

If you find this video helpful let us know in the comments and subscribe for more!

Video Time Codes:
[0:00-0:40] - Intro & Overview
[0:41-1:13] - Advantages of Fiber Optic Over Ethernet
[1:14-2:08] - What is FTTH?
[2:09-2:49] - The TIA Standard
[2:50-4:08] - Benefits of Fiber Optic
[4:09-4:46] - Fiber Optic Cable To Use In-Home
[4:47-5:24] - Outro

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[rjtumble]

I'm going to be building a house (breaking ground in a couple weeks) and I have a building around 100-150' away. How easy/hard would it be for me to run my own fiber from the new house to the other building? Can I put connectors on the cable myself or would it be too expensive to acquire the tools and bits for a one-time use?

[ChrisWard]

As far as I know, all FTTx are converted to copper once they reach their destination. We could be years or decades away when that might change. Putting in dark fiber might make sense if it's a new construction, but it depends on how long you plan to be there. If you expect a provider to have fiber without a copper conversion, I don't see that happening anytime soon. It might make sense if you plan to have your own 4k/8k streaming inside your home, but that's a very small portion of the population. Cat 8 supports up to 40 gigabits, and cable and equipment will likely end up being cheaper and more mainstream than fiber.

[BrownR]

I'm curious what your take is on the future of fiber with respect to PoE. A lot of devices around the house can now run on PoE (APs, small switches, cameras, doorbells, thermostats, etc), which means 1 cable for network and power at the same time. Fiber is a step backward from this perspective from what I can see.

[BrownR]

What the heck video are you watching at 10Gbit/s??!? Most 4k content these days is in the tens of megabytes per second max. The largest 4k movie I have is ~50 gigabytes on disk, and is ~2 hours long. I guarantee you I can copy that file to my nas over 1gbps in far less than 2 hours.