Run some fibre

[ey143]

I have some fibre cable that was given to me by a friend who had some left over after he finished working for BT Openreach.

I'm renovating a home and running cables galore from and to a small comms room. Before we close up the ceilings etc, should I consider running some of this black fibre cable to my main TV wall room and tuck it behind the cabinets for future use?

I'm not really sure what I am doing here but because my TV room is in the rear and middle of te house, if I dont run this cable with the opportunity I have now, I will not be able to hide the cable later.

 

[Lucid]

If you have the cable, and the voids are already open, then sure, run it.

The question though is what you expect to run over it. Copper Cat5e will support 1000Mbps (A.K.A. Gigabit). Watching streamed 4K UHD with HDR and Dolby Atmos currently takes a max of about 40Mbps. This is for BT Sports UHD service. Netflix / Amazon Prime / Apple TV require less bandwidth than live sport. 40Mbps is 4% of the speed that Cat5e supports. Not everyone in the UK has an Internet connection fast enough to stream 40Mbps.

Cat6 will support 10 Gigabit speeds (10,000 Mbps). BT Sports would use 0.4% of the theoretical maximum speed.

Currently there isn't much in the way of 8K material to stream, but if there was then you'd need an ISP that could supply a service of 200~300Mbps. This still isn't maxing out Cat5e capacity, let alone Cat6.

History shows us that compression algorithms develop to overcome national infrastructure limitations. This is driven by the commercial incentive of the content distributors such as Netflix. In short, if they can't find a way to deliver their films and shows over the internet then they don't have a sustainable business proposition. If/when 8K does become mainstream then there's a good chance that new algorithms will be available to run at a fraction of what's required to stream it today. At the same time, ISPs will be able to run faster connections thanks to the expansion of the fibre national network.

The value in fibre for a home network is in moving data that can't easily be compressed, or supporting lots of simultaneous users, but since you're unlikely to have 50+ people all accessing the Internet in your home at the same time then really the value comes in moving data. For someone doing high resolution photo or video editing then a fibre connection between a work station and a NAS would make sense, but only if both were equipped with fibre connections.

There is one other benefit. It's that the ancillaries for going 10-Gigabit are cheaper with in fibre products than in copper.

 

[Kistelek]

Unless you've got the gear to terminate it properly, as @Lucid says, what are you going to use it for? I've got one run in my forthcoming project that might, just might, possibly benefit from a fibre run connecting the home server in the bungalow loft to the garage roof space where its twin will live. It would be split into vlans to provide multiple virtual runs between house and garage. Will copper do it? Yes. Is copper easier to install and terminate? Yes. So even an uber geek like I am will probably stick to copper.

Plus you'd need media adapters for most domestic uses.

 

[plugwash]

Fibre is cheap, fibre termination not so much. Regular fiber connectors need to have the cable expoxied into place and then have the termination face polished. Field fit connectors and mechanical splices do exist, but for the most part fiber (especially single mode fibre) is either pre-terminated into connectors or spliced with a machine called a fusion splicer.

BT openreach seem to be trending towards "connectorised" stuff where one end of the cable is already terminated into a connector, reducing the need for splicing (and particularly reducing the need for splicing in awkward locations) but presumably also resulting in a bunch of offcuts of fibre cable.

Also I don't know what the specific cable you have is, but my understanding is that the current openreach fiber dropwires only have a single fibre inside, a lot of fibre equipment uses a seperate fiber for each direction so would not be compatible with such cable.