The ULTIMATE Guide to Fiber Optic Home Networking

Do you have a need to extend your home network around your property? Maybe you want reliable internet in the shed you turned into a work-from-home office, or your garage or workshop? Today I'm going to explain what you need to run fiber optic newtorking around your home and property on a budget, for high bandwidth and low latency networking. Fiber doesn't have any issues with lightning or electrical potential changes between buildings, and can handle much higher bandwidth with higher reliability than wifi mesh or point to point systems.

It's not as expensive as you think to run fiber in your network!

Since the list of parts to buy was way too long for the description, see my blog post for the buying guide:

Feel free to chat with me more on my Discord server:

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
01:26 - Choosing the Fiber
06:29 - Media Converters
09:05 - Transceivers
11:18 - Other Options

Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.
#networking #homelab #piavpn

[cliffx]

As a fiber Internet installer for the largest telecommunications company in America, I can confirm that everything is YouTuber has said on this video is 100% accurate! Thank you for the awesome video!

[BigRonRN]

In 2019, I started the process of purchasing a house that was under construction. My home called for a detached garage, which I planned on being my primary computer center. The house itself was built with two insulated attic spaces that do not physically connect. On a Friday, the builder invited my wife and I to check out the home under construction before they started putting in drywall the following Monday. The builder gave me a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" type of statement saying that anything that happened to materialize over the weekend would be ignored. I brought up the idea of how I would connect networking between the detached garage and the house and he mentioned the conduit for the electrical sub-panel in the detached. I immediately knew that I could not run copper through an electrical conduit with 100A of AC power running parallel. I then had an epiphany... fiber optics! Thankfully, there was still an electronics store in town that sold fiber (Fry's Electronics... they were a dying company but no one had stuck a fork in them quite yet.) They only had one option and I didn't have time to research or order anything online. I bought 1000 feet of 62.5/125 zipline. I ran fiber between where I envisioned I'd put my rack, with about 20' slack in the detached garage to the front attic space. I also left around 20' slack in the front attic. I also ran fiber from there to the rear attic, along with a couple lengths of CAT6A. I ran fiber between a few other potential future upgrade locations. That was in December 2019. In April 2020, we finally officially purchased the house. I had time to research things. I learned that 62.5/125 was not the greatest and may be limited to 1 Gbps. I purchased some Aruba network switches that had four SFP+ connectors and 24 PoE ports. I planned to have one in each of the two attic spaces and one in my computer rack. I would later add a fourth identical switch or second for that rack, as 24 ports were not enough there. I also was researching terminating fiber... it took tools, techniques, and experience that I did not have. I searched on NextDoor for someone capable of terminating fiber for a residential need. I thankfully got a response from a guy that owned an IT company. He employed technicians that did this and he had done it himself before becoming more of an administrator, being the owner. He agreed to terminate the fiber for me for less than $100! He only ended up terminating the run between the detached garage and the front attic and suggested I go with the CAT6A (which I could terminate myself) to interconnect the front and rear attic switches. I was hoping I could run 10Gbase-SR. I had estimated the length to be between 30-35 meters, which is on the edge of use for OM1 fiber. Thankfully, I have not had ANY issues and all of the switches are tied to each other with 10 Gbps. My Internet is 1 Gbps and speed tests generally are around 850-900 Mbps download and 900+ Mbps upload.

[scheimong]

Excellent introduction.

I remember being ***very*** cautious the first time I worked with fibre, doing networking for a small business. I didn't want to get the wrong stuff so I did a ton of research and asked a lot of questions to a lot of people.

But really once you get used to it, using fibre feels not much different to using regular copper ethernet. And it's easy to forget how scary it may seem to people who have had no prior experience. So thank you for doing god's work.

[djpsychic]

I really would have liked you to have mentioned that the connectors need to be kept clean. Dirt / oil from fingers can really degrade the connection fast. Don't touch the ends and keep the caps on as much as possible.
Most of the vendors that supply cables also have cleaning pads/kits. When in a real pinch using those sealed swipes for glasses (the ones you wear on your face) or the purest of alcohol can help.
Also avoid tight bending and strain/pull on the fibers. In general you should limit bends to what you could coil around a larger soda bottle.
I would recommend getting LR over LRM as the power budgets are better and LRM compatibility is much less common.

[ArronLorenz]

Video quality has stepped up. Thanks bud.

[pjaz]

I'm literally sitting on a fiber install for a restaurant when this video came out.

[jordanlee]

I love PIA, always reliable and safe. Had em for 6+ years.

[NetBandit]

Don't buy multimode unless you are already using it.

[GeoffSeeley]

Your gaming "shed" is nicer than my work cubicle (i.e. no windows) but thankfully I only visit it virtually now.

[andymok]

Great info. Been running OM3 fiber LC/LC at my place for 2 years and just added two more fiber runs to replace the ethernet cables connecting my switches. I have used 10GTek media converters when I did not have enough SFP ports. Will be nice when I install crown/cove molding to hide the cables and also add some LED lighting.

[flognort]

I would love a pfsense openvpn vid! This intro cracked me up haha!! Thanks for all the great vids

[DiscountLowVoltage]

During the pandemic, I moved a ton of single-mode direct burial cable going from the home to the small office.

[connclissmann]

Thanks for this introduction, which I found useful.

[gordslater]

that walk in the garden sequence reminds me of Carl Sagan, all you need now is a sports jacket and rollneck and gaze at the sky every now and again

[ewenchan]

Three things:
1) I read your blog post associated with this video and it is generally well put together.
The only thing that I might suggest is for someone who might just be skimming your blog post, if you don't mind adding the speeds at which the components are rated for vs. having to click on each line to find that out.

(or maybe put together a table where one column is "here are the parts for 1 G fiber" vs. "here are the parts for 10G fiber".)

(And yes, I did read, in the bottom, what you used, but it might be helpful as well, to denote that in the parts list itself.)

2) $20 for a 69 m fiber cable isn't bad at all. And for your 10G set up to your shed, for a total BOM cost of $98 (minus the cost of your switch), that's not bad at all. (ServeTheHome has recently covered some relatively lower cost 2.5GbE switches and 10G switches as well.)

3) re: Mellanox ConnectX 3/ConnectX 4 (from your blog post)
YES! Make sure that if you are trying to run upto 10G fiber, using SFP+ ethernet rather than Infiniband, that you pick and find the correct card for that. (There are a lot of other options that WON'T work if that's the implementation that you are planning on deploying.)

For ConnectX-4, you can go all the way up to 100 Gbps dual QSFP28 port Infiniband. (That's what I use at home.)

The total cost increases, but the $/Gbps for 100 Gbps is actually LESS than the $/Gbps for 10G.

[jamesmcmasters]

A young Eli the Computer Guy great video

[simonpinkney]

Nice Video, my only comment would be to include the actual network configuration part with routing/dns/firewall as well to show a complete end to end story

[HANISH]

Thanks Nick Jonas, you are Fantastic. !! :)

[mm-]

Due to the distance and chances of having a single fiber strand break, I'm going with MTP f/f both ends, OS2, 6 strands.

[steinbierz]

I’m a little confused about one statement you made, especially since a poster below said that, as they were an internet installer, they could “confirm everything” you were saying is 100% accurate. My confusion--at about the 4 minute mark, you said that “if you need an outdoor rated fiber that pretty much only exists in single mode os2…” I recently purchased indoor/outdoor 4 strand multimode from LANshack and this is in the description of this cable: "Our Indoor/Outdoor Pre-Terminated Fiber Optic Cable Assemblies are perfect for connecting the networks of two buildings through the use of an underground conduit, headend termination to a fiber backbone, termination of fiber rack systems, multi-floor deployment where select fibers are used at each floor, or intra-building backbones.” Thanks.