Running Fiber in my house.

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

hagak

Member
Oct 22, 2012
92
4
8
So I am planning to running some fiber in my house to connect a switch in the basement to a switch on the 2nd floor. I have found a suitable path through the house and plan to use pre-terminated multimode fiber. This is the cable i am considering. Fiber Optic Assembly | Pre-terminated Fiber Assembly | PRO-XDP6CC-OM4 with SC connectors on both ends.

I plan to have a termination box at each end of the run so that I then just have a short patch cable between termination box and switch. Both switches have SFP+ ports and plan to run 6 strand fiber so that I have some redundancy in the cabling so do not have to rip walls up again.

Since I have never run fiber before (lots of copper) anything else I should be aware of? I choose OM4 multi mode should I go with OM5? I am not sure I see the benefit of it.
 
Jul 14, 2017
60
16
8
53
IANAFOCE, it seems as if the main difference between the OM4 and OM5 is the number of cables needed to support > 10gbe. OM4 seems to require multiples, where as OM5 if I'm understanding things correctly can do it with 1 cable.

(fiber stuff is not well explained or obvious IME)

So I guess the main question is are you planning on going faster than 10gbe and if so, how fast?

I read (on here somewhere IIRC) that with fiber it's better to push, than pull so fiberglass rods were preferred to the metal "tape" fishes for fiber cables. Not certain about this though. From my (very limited) cable running experiences, neither seemed to have a particular advantage in terms of how easy it was.
 
Last edited:

hagak

Member
Oct 22, 2012
92
4
8
Honestly I do not see a need for anything more than 10Ggbe. That should be more than enough to support a couple of APs and cameras, multimedia devices, with a possible desktop in the mix. Note a good bit of my network is self supported so while my external connection is only 1gbe internal server support is much greater.
 

ArmedAviator

Member
May 16, 2020
91
56
18
Kansas
I've always used fs.com for my custom fiber cable requirements. Solid quality and great price.

I use OM4 in my house, thus far all with LC connectors. My main trunk cable from basement to 2nd story is a 30-meter, 8-fiber (4-pair) cable which gives me 4x 10G links from my rack to an access switch in a closet. I'm only using 2 of the 10G pairs at the moment, but the cost was only a little more and this gives me room for growth or a bad fiber strand in the cable.
 

hagak

Member
Oct 22, 2012
92
4
8
I've always used fs.com for my custom fiber cable requirements. Solid quality and great price.

I use OM4 in my house, thus far all with LC connectors. My main trunk cable from basement to 2nd story is a 30-meter, 8-fiber (4-pair) cable which gives me 4x 10G links from my rack to an access switch in a closet. I'm only using 2 of the 10G pairs at the moment, but the cost was only a little more and this gives me room for growth or a bad fiber strand in the cable.
Did you do all 4-pair in a single pull? If so how big a hole did you need through top plates?
 

ArmedAviator

Member
May 16, 2020
91
56
18
Kansas
All 4 pairs were in a single cable and I had it made with the easy pull attachment which had a metal loop to hook onto to pull and a sheeth around the LC connectors to make it pretty easy to pull.

I ran my cable along the wet wall in an old (130 year old) house to the attic and there was nothing to cut until I dropped it into the closet. I believe that cut was 1 1/2".
 
Jul 19, 2020
51
19
8
@Generic George the thing with multimode fiber is that it suffers from something called modal dispersion. With single mode fiber, the core is very small (9 um, or 0.009 mm), and as such there is only one propagation mode, so the only effects to worry about are loss and chromatic dispersion, which are only a significant factor with long fibers (many km). In multimode fiber, the core is larger (50 um, or 0.05 mm) and as a result there are more ways in which light can propagate down the fiber. Basically, you can think of the light bouncing between the sides of the fiber core, but with different angles. It will still make it to the other end, but depending on the angles, the light can travel a longer or a shorter distance. What happens is you get multiple copies of the signal that effectivley propagate down the fiber at different speeds and then they get mixed together at the receiver, causing intersymbol interference. Bends in the fiber and connectors can also cause modal mixing, where light from one propagation mode ends up in a different propagation mode, so even if you are careful and start out with light in only one mode, you can still end up with light in multiple modes. Anyway, this can be distilled down to a MHz*km factor that basically indicates how many MHz you can send down 1 km of fiber before modal dispersion causes too many bit errors. Higher data rates means shorter bits, which means modal dispersion causes more interference and more bit errors for the same length of fiber. Now, to combat this, the different types of multimode fiber change the design of the core to reduce the number of propagation modes, which means less modal dispersion, which means you can send either more data down the same length of fiber, or the same data down a longer fiber. See Multi-mode optical fiber - Wikipedia . Looks like if you're going less than 70m, OM3, OM4, and OM5 are all perfectly fine, all the way up to 100G SR4 (although for 100G SR4, you would need an 8 fiber MPO cable instead of a 2 fiber LC cable, although if you pull MPO fiber, you can get breakouts to multiple LC on both ends).

Now, you might wonder, why do we bother with multimode fiber if single mode fiber doesn't have this modal dispersion problem? Not only does multimode fiber cost more, but the length is limited! The answer is transceiver cost. Since the core of a multimode fiber is larger, it requires less precision in the connectors and the optical transceivers in terms of alignment, which can significantly reduce the cost of the transceivers. Multimode fiber is also a bit less sensitive to dust and contamination at the ends of the fiber due to the larger core.
 

Mithril

Active Member
Sep 13, 2019
354
106
43
Also, besides transceiver cost, multi mode is more "forgiving". Heck, you *can* even run 10GB over OM1 which is totally the wrong core diameter! You also don't have to worry about the angle/polish on the connector, just keep it clean (again, more forgiving due to size)

I don't know about 100G, but I know there are 40G "BiDi" transceivers that can use a single pair of MM with LC connectors. And IIRC the official specs on at least one even show compatibility with OM3 and OM4.
 

hagak

Member
Oct 22, 2012
92
4
8
Just to follow up I finished the pull of fiber from my basement to the attic. This was basically 3 stories of pull which required that I cut a small hole on the first and second floor walls in order to drill the hole between floors. I was able to use the boiler flue chase for this, since for some reason the chase was way oversized of the flue I was able to run the cables over 12" from the triple insulated flue. And of course I fire caulked all my holes.

I will say working with pre-terminated fiber with pull baskets is much much easier than CAT6 cable. This was a very easy cable run and would highly recommend this for switch to switch runs overs CAT6. I did do CAT6 drops into the bedrooms cause my end user gear of course is not fiber but those a very short and easy drops.
 

Mithril

Active Member
Sep 13, 2019
354
106
43
Just to follow up I finished the pull of fiber from my basement to the attic. This was basically 3 stories of pull which required that I cut a small hole on the first and second floor walls in order to drill the hole between floors. I was able to use the boiler flue chase for this, since for some reason the chase was way oversized of the flue I was able to run the cables over 12" from the triple insulated flue. And of course I fire caulked all my holes.

I will say working with pre-terminated fiber with pull baskets is much much easier than CAT6 cable. This was a very easy cable run and would highly recommend this for switch to switch runs overs CAT6. I did do CAT6 drops into the bedrooms cause my end user gear of course is not fiber but those a very short and easy drops.

Awesome, glad it all worked out well for you! Which fiber did you end up going with? Did you end up needing/using any specialty tools? I haven't done fiber between floors in a house so I'm curious :) All my runs so far have been same floor, or required going outside which is usually easier assuming you don't mind conduit outside (honestly, paint it and it's basically invisible).
 

lizardking009

Member
Oct 16, 2013
38
10
8
Just to tack on my experience with doing similar - I pulled fiber from my garage patch panel to my office on the other side of the house. This involved going from a garage attic to the 2nd floor attic then down through the center wall to the office on floor 1. Luckily the wall on the 2nd floor for the chase is in a closet, so I just cut a big square hole and used a spring loaded plastic panel to cover.

I currently just have the 1 duplex LC armored fiber from fs.com since I was using BiDi optics for 10gb. Since I moved into using Brocade ICX 6610's, I'm pulling a 2nd identical fiber in whenever it arrives for the redundant 40gb trunking. I do the armored since its more durable and I don't have to worry about conduit.

The best thing I've done in terms of wire pulls is to put in a pull rope. I have one path I use for network (copper/fiber) that goes through a very awkward part of the attic junctions. I got a 100ft rope from Home Depot, pulled that through the path then tied it to a joist in the upper attic. Now if I need to pull, I just attach to the rope and pull the rope one direction or the other.
 

hagak

Member
Oct 22, 2012
92
4
8
I went with the OM4 Lanshack pre-terminated LC sets. Very well done cables, the pull baskets do a great job protecting the cables/connectors while still being very slim.

The chase I used required I cut a hole at each floor to drill a hole through the fire block (filled said hole after pulling cable). Nice part was both holes were in closets so even if I did not do a good job patching it would go unseen. Now that I write this I probably should just just put an access panel at each one course would have to look up fire code on that since it is a flue chase access panels may not be allowed.