Just moved into our new home - where we’ll be living long term (next 40yrs…). The plan is for me to use the room above our garage as an office (and creative space). This is about 50m (150ft) from the router in the main house. The cable will run around an outside wall and through an underground conduit.
Thinking about the future, should I do this in Cat 6 or in fibre? I will do 2 cable runs for redundancy.
I’m also looking at cable drops for the ethernet drops within the house. In the UK, this isn’t straightforward - walls have to be chiselled out. Looking to do this once in our lifetime, would people continue to do that in Cat 6 or should I use fibre?
Pull fiber and at least one Cat 6e, pull 2 or three.
Pulling through existing conduit with cables in it is harder and can damage ( low chance ) whats in there. Plus it’s cheaper cost and time wise to do it all at once.
And even if you never use the fiber, it make a good pull string later.
I know that you and I have discussed the merits of Fibre in the home.
For everyone else, the reason why I am pulling fibre is because my home has no existing infrastructure and my wife wants a smart home. Whether we live in this house in the long term are not, we intend to at least keep it and rent it out until retirement (if we move away) since we are young. Fiber will be the future proof option and as second hand enterprise fiber gets cheaper as time goes on, it makes more sense then living on the bleeding edge of copper to get the same gains. We also are hosting a lot of media locally so throughput and latency are also important to us.
Fibre is not for everyone and some people may not have a need for it, but what ever you are running, always have redundant runs and pathways. Even if you run fibre, it may be a good idea to run un-terminated CAT 6 or 7 as a backup just in case. If you ever plan on selling the house in the future and you take the fibre equipment with you, have the traditional copper in the house is still a selling point for the un-initiated.
I’d recommend copper (cat6 if you can or at least 5e) so that you can do PoE.
Fibre is good for short and very long dedicated runs but UTP cables are really easy to flood the house with cheaply and can be used for all sorts of activities, like security cameras, switches, hdbaseT etc.
I am using fibre to POE switches for the cameras. One switch for upstairs and one for down stairs. The cameras use PoE over CAT 6e. A little more pricey than using a pure Cat 6 solution, but, eventually I will replace the 1080P cameras with 4K cameras and that is going to need a lot of bandwidth.
This has been really helpful - thank you. I’m glad I wasn’t crazy to be thinking of fibre. I’m liking the idea of running both fibre and Cat 6e to the important areas. I can leave the fibre untouched for the moment (I don’t have appropriate switches etc) and simply terminate the copper. Hadn’t thought of that. Thank you.
