The ULTIMATE Guide to Fiber Optic Home Networking

do you have a need to extend your home network around your property does your work from home shed detached garage or office need fast reliable internet well today I'm going to explain how to set up fiber optic networking at home on a budget for the highest bandwidth and lowest latency remote work and gaming experience this little shed has ever seen out here in the gaming shed I like to have a low latency high speed connection to the rest of my home network Wi-Fi doesn't really reach out here even though I have an outdoor access point on my deck so the options I have are a point-to-point wireless setup running an ethernet cable underground running fiber underground and I've chosen fiber fiber is a great choice because of the inherent lightning protection and voltage isolation you get between the two buildings you're connecting and also it's not as expensive as you think you're on fiber and even if you might not need it now fiber can handle extremely high speeds something that might be great as a way to Future proof your network fundamentally to set up a fiber Network we need three things we need the fiber itself we need a media converter a network card or network switch that has a slot for fiber transceiver and we need a fiber transceiver matched to both the typo slot we're using and the type of fiber we're using for this video I'm only going to talk about 1 and 10 gigabit Ethernet over om3 or os2 multi-mode in single mode fiber I'm aware that there are many other options but for a simple home use case one of these is probably what you need in general for home installations there are two types of fiber you should choose om3 multi-mode or os2 single mode om3 multi-mode will usually have a teal jacket with blue connectors and os2 single mode will have a yellow jacket with blue connectors yes I'm aware one of my cables doesn't follow the coloring standard if the coloring standard is followed a blue connector will have a flat polish and a green connector will have an angled polish in general networking fiber all the equipment I've linked uses a flat polish or a UPC that should be a blue connector if it's color coded a green or APC polish would be used in like fiber to the home that tends to use SC connectors all of the stuff I'm linking uses LC connectors tiny little things here historically multi-mode fiber and transceivers were considerably cheaper than single mode so they'd be used at any distance they were capable of however that distance has gone down as speeds have gone up so with modern 25 gig you can only go about 75 meters officially with om3 multi-mode but you can go many tens of kilometers of single mode single mode also has another neat trick wavelength division multiplexing with this technique you can use a single fiber to transmit more than one stream of information by using a different color so to speak so you could use this to transmit a huge amount of bandwidth by splitting all the bandwidth up into different colors or you can send it in both directions by using a different color for each for each Direction This is called by die or bi-directional I have a run in my house that runs from my basement to my upstairs laundry room where I can have networking equipment and stuff and I used a bye dye fiber because it only has one connector so it's very tiny and very easy to pull through very small places looking back I probably could have fit a dual duplex fiber for a different fiber for each Direction but body wasn't very expensive and I did it so if you're trying to pull through an existing conduit or something by die might be a good option for you otherwise you need to run two fibers one fiber for each Direction whether that's multi-motor single mode if you're in the US following the National Electric Code there is an allowance to run completely non-conductive fiber in a conduit with electrical wiring if you're outside of the us obviously check your local laws I don't know what they are but it's important that this is non-conductive there could be no metallic armoring in the fiber so some fibers will have a metallic sheath to prevent them from being bitten or something like that but you can't run that type of fiber through a conduit with power wiring you have to run a purely non-metallic armoring with something like Kevlar or something like that so even if multi-mode sounds great to you because the potentially lower cost another thing to consider is what fibers you can actually buy if you're going Outdoors need an outdoor rated fiber that pretty much only exists in single mode os2 so if you want to do underground stuff or strong Aerials or whatever single Motors are option if you are going Outdoors you should buy an outdoor rated cable even if it's underground this particular unit has a TPU jacket which is not susceptible to UV like PVC as standard PVC jackets this one's also metallically armored so it should be more robust to rodents or things like that you're still going to be able to dig through it and then have to replace it but uh better than nothing right for my gaming house I chose a basic os2 single mode fiber with two pairs one for each Direction I had it custom made to the length I needed I typed in the number of feet a month later I got a package in the mail custom made fiber I didn't have to do any termination and that's great and it didn't cost much not sponsored but links to where I got it below and for protecting your data in your gaming marker maybe you should check out today's sponsor private internet access if you're browsing online for all of those Linux isos everyone from your ISP to the server at the other end can see and log your IP address which can be traced back to you if you're in the US Comcast is probably reading and monetizing your DNS queries and if you're in a particularly sketchy Network the network might even inspect your Sni headers to see what site you're connecting to even if you use https private internet access creates a secure tunnel between you and one of their servers so your traffic masquerades as their server along with all of the traffic from all of the other customers on that server your ISP and the network you're on can't see any hints of your traffic and the websites you connect to can't see your real IP address aside from the potential security advantages for some of your traffic you can also use one of their servers in a different country to browse sites or stream media available only to that country or region maybe you're from the US and jealous that literally everyone else in the world can watch Eurovision tap on the app here pick a country I don't know let's say Finland let's do that and there we go there's the green grape they also support integrating with home routers or your own clients using openvpn so let me know if you want a video in the future on how to configure policy routing for vpns in opensense if you're interested use my link in the description to get 83 percent off the per month rate that's 56 dollars total for two years plus four months free or just over two dollars a month now back to the video next up we need to decide what device we're going to use on the end and this device needs to have an SFP or sfb plus cage now these cages are electrically identical the plus just denotes the maximum speed the cage can handle 10 gig for SFP plus one gig for SFP at least with ethernet now these slots are intercompatible you can put an SFP transceiver in an SFP plus slot however they don't Auto negotiate speed so you need to be able to configure your device if you want to change the speed if you have a device that has no web UI is purely an electrical converter it'll be limited to whatever speed it says of advice if you have a 10 gig inverter it has to run at 10 gigs if you have a switch or something you can log into the web ui4 or a computer with a network card you can configure you can reduce the speed from 10 gig to 1 gig and use 10 gig equipment with 1 gig transceivers and one gig on the other end so here are some examples of media converters that I use personally in my home there's a lot of other options check the description for some things I recommend nothing is sponsored down there except Pia that sponsor this video this this is a tp-link mc220l it's got an SFP slot for single gigabit pop transceiver in super easy it's going to be a bit copper you can plug this into whatever you want this is purely passive there's no way to configure this there's no way to force a certain speed it's very cheap currently selling for about 20 bucks great choice if you want to run fiber for long distance not necessarily for 10 gig speeds this is a microtic hex s which is an Ethernet router so it's a router without Wi-Fi it has an SFP Port which you can use for your Wan or you can use it as another switch port again this is one gigabit SFP transceiver goes in super easy I use this all the time for testing stuff it's great because you can ping it you can talk to it you can configure it if you just need a switch with one SFP port and some switch ports they have a cheaper version of this called the rb260 that's usually on sale for less than 40 bucks which is a great deal for an ethernet switch with SFP Uplink and if you're going to a computer you can use an Ethernet card in the computer this particular model is a 25 gig card but they look similar so sami's other ones transceiver Pops in this particular one's a dual Port there are other single port options the example I used in my test is an Intel x520da the da Model signifies that it has these slots instead of RJ45 which is what we need for SFP transceivers that's a 10 gig card but it's a frequently available on eBay for about 30 to 40 bucks and of course I also have my big switch in the other room which is what I used for this test 10 gig if you're a fan of like ubiquity or Microtech most of their switches are available with SFP or SFP plus depending on what model they are and that works perfectly fine for this as well now that we know what speed we want to operate which is determined by our endpoints the SFP or SFP plus slots we have the fiber type we want now we need to pick transceivers that match they pretty much all look like this they're real tiny they fit into the slotting equipment snap in pretty easy plug your fiber in good to go but these come in all sorts of different models whatever configurations you need if you've been following along and you're using duplex fiber you'll need either a 10g base Sr transceiver for multi-mode fiber or an LR or lrm transceiver for single mode fiber the m is just a shorter range two kilometer version the LR is the standard 10 kilometer version but you're probably not going 10 kilometers are you you need the same transceiver on both ends so an Sr transceiver or an LR transceiver it's matched to the fiber it's also matched to the speed you're going at you can take a 10 gig transceiver and run it at one gig that does work if you're doing buy die fiber you need a matched pair so one will transmit on one for on one frequency and receive on the other and that will receive on the frequency a and transmitter frequency B um I have links to those in the description if you want to use those these are the parts that I used in my own house I'm not sponsored or anything if you're buying a lot of used Enterprise hardware for this especially like Cisco or the big names you're going to have to be concerned with vendor lock-in most of these companies will reject transceivers if they're not coded as their own brand it's very easy to get around and most sites will sell you a transceiver coded for any vendor you just have to tell them ahead of time what vendor you want it coded for but be aware of that if you're using something like ubiquity or micro tick neither of them care about vendor lock-in they're not going to care if you put in a Cisco transceiver or a Cisco coded transceiver so if you have equipment in your lab your home that needs a certain code you can just get all that code so in my case I buy all Intel Intel network cards a little bit frustrating in that they're Intel coded you can disable it on the Linux side through a kernel module but it's just easier to buy all Intel coded stuff for me so for my setup because I'm going relatively short distances relatively in networking terms I chose the two kilometer lrm transceivers which were three dollars cheaper than the lrs and they worked perfectly fine so if you click on this video because you want to go really fast but I don't actually care about the distance part of fiber you might like a direct detached copper cable or a Dap cable this cable here suspiciously looks like it has transceivers built in and it kind of does but there's no transceiver involved at all there's just a coaxial kale or a twin ax cable between each of these transceiver ends so I can take this and plug it in just as I would a transceiver and I get a direct cable to connect to the other end whether that's a network switch or a computer or whatever you can get these up to a few meters if you're running within a network Rack or the same room this can be an excellent option for you they don't cost very much for like 20 bucks and you get all the advantages of high-speed fiber without the actual fiber itself downside of course is you have these massive connectors so you're not going to go that far with them and they are limited to about five meters or so before you do actually have to use real fiber so hopefully this video helped you with your first fiber networking setup at home or at least gave you the confidence that fiber isn't as expensive or difficult as it seems by buying pre-made cables and sticking to reasonable speeds like gigabit or 10 gig we can keep Goss down and make this affordable and easy to use for home livers or diy-ers if you're building your own setup I have a guide Down Below on my blog post with a whole bunch of product recommendations things that I've used in the past or things that are similar none of that is sponsored but you're free to check it out if it has a good example set up for you also be sure to check out the sponsor of this video private internet access link down below again if you want to follow more of my stuff you can subscribe I always like that you can check out my Discord Channel link down below as well and I'll see you on the next adventure

Channel: apalrd's adventures

Views: 70,097

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Id: d20roxFfU0A

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023