1. Home
  2. Fiber Optics
  3. Wiring a house

Wiring a house

Hello!

We are renovating a just-bought (old) house, and I'd like to run as many wires through the walls now as I can, so as to not have ugly "rat-nests" later...

The basement is likely to house the "heavy" computer equipment (like storage -- eBay has plenty of slightly used equipment) with those on the living floors having (mostly?) light -- possibly diskless -- desktops.

Assuming I want to do this with fibre (rather than plain old Ethernet), what cables do I want, and what, in general, is there to watch out for?

Will I be able to use this same cable for some other purpose -- like transmitting digital audio to one of the rooms, or propagating Verizon's FiOS, or an (optical) FireWire-link from one of the rooms to the server in the basement -- or are those all completly different and incompatible kinds of "fiber"?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

-mi

Reply to
Mikhail Teterin
Loading thread data ...

You need to know that with Verizon FiOS, the fiber terminates at an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) box, that is installed either outside or inside the home (mine's in the basement). The ONT provides two outlets, for ethernet cable, and for coax. Most recent installs use the coax only, with a MoCa (Media over Cable) router from ActionTec. The router provides ethernet jacks for your existing network wiring and/or computer. The set-top box (STB) used for FiOS TV is MoCa enabled, and uses the coax for delivery of the video, and to connect to the router for the channel guide and on-demand ordering. As near as I can tell, there is no provision to connect more fiber to the ONT.

Verizon used to provide a Network Interface Module from Motorola (the NIM100) that would allow a non-MoCa router to use the coax backbone. These are now pretty scarce, but do show up on Ebay. In Q3 of 2008, D- Link is supposed to be launching their own NIM/MoCa router for around $100. The speed attainable over coax using a couple of these approaches gigabit ethernet rates.

For Verizon, it's just simpler to use the existing coax backbone (likely installed by the incumbent cable company) with some smart boxes rather than run fiber through the walls.

--Gene

Reply to
Gene S. Berkowitz

Thanks, Gene, for the overview of Verizon-related options, but my question was mostly about in-house fiber in general. One "big idea" is to have a small-scale SAN-box in the basement and no (noisy and heat-generating) disk-drives on the living floors.

Also, what about using some of the same cables for, say, digital audio -- I've never been exposed to the practice of fiber-cabling -- do they differ drastically depending on application (like, say, serial vs. Ethernet), or are the cables the same?

-mi

Reply to
Mikhail Teterin

If you REALLY want to use fibre, I suggest you consider 50/125 multimode cable, that should suffice even if you wish to run 10Gb in your house.

Use minimum 4 cores to each location, preferable "ruggedised" cable because you can terminate that directly without too many hassels.

Yes you will be able to run access control, CCTV and possibly PLC signals accross the same fibre type.

Regards

Reply to
Badnitz

Thank you very much for the pointers. Would one of these (to every location) be sufficient:

formatting link
Or did you mean, I need four of these to each location?

Cool! Are the connectors and sockets standardized, though? Thanks again!

Yours,

-mi

Reply to
Mikhail Teterin

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.