Installing Fibre at home – Stage 1 – Learning & Testing

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Initial research and first purchases

The photograph below shows the initial purchases Ian made to start testing and learning about using fibre optics in the home.

The initial purchases Ian made to test out fibre for home

The following is a list of the components purchased, all from Amazon.co.uk as Ian likes their returns policies:

Ian will try to explain why he made the purchases he did:

Ian chose the TP-Link media converters because he already has a number of other TP-Link products and knows their warranty service is first rate. The decision to choose a gigabit converter was simple. Sandra and Ian cabled the rest of their home, mainly for Gigabit, as well as their hubs and switches. TP-Link also represents good value for money. If we upgraded hub and switches beyond 1 gigabit, then it is not a significant loss to just replace the 2 media converters.

It is Ian’s intention to run the optical cable through either 20mm or 25mm plastic conduit to the shed and another length to their sitting room, which is where the heaviest demand for data is, either streaming video or music. Due to the intention to run the fibre through conduit, LC (Lucent Connectors) were chosen, as these seem to be generally better for smaller spaces.

The decision to use duplex LC connectors then sets some constraints on the SFP Transceivers, as Ian likes to dabble with technology, he chose 10Gtek 10GBase-SR, which have a range of up to 300m, a data rate of 10Gbps and use Dual LC OM3/OM4 multi-mode fibre. These devices also have a wide compatibility, so will work fine in the TP-Link media converters.

We chose the optical patch cable basically due to length and cost for testing purposes, whilst Ian works out the lengths required to reach the shed and sitting room from the study, which is where all the comms / switches are located.

Explanations on Wikipedia of the various types of Optical Fibre connectors:

Explanations on Wikipedia of Single-mode optical fibre and Multi-mode optical fibre:

Explanations on Wikipedia of the codes LW, SR, SW etc.

Testing

Awaiting content

Continued – Installing Fibre at home – Stage 2 – Thoughts about installation

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