Fiber install between Buildings

Scream

Scream

Scream

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
4,657
Location
The Darkside
A friend of mine wants to connect two buildings together around 85m a part and is wanting a Fiber connection instead of cat 6 because of safety issues like lightning strike and all that.

Use of connection at site two is for indoor/outdoor wifi and for CCTV.

Never touched Fiber so this is a first as I'm used to copper networks so I was wondering what all is needed. I'm reading up on it but a lot of posts are a number of years old so hard to tell if things have changed recently.

Thanks
 
I'd say this is going to be more of a headache than you'd imagine, are you going to trench/duct or are you going to run overhead cabling? is your kit in both sites already compatible to terminate the fiber?
Bear in mind you will not be able to integrate your own fiber network into an existing ISP fiber setup if you've got a leased line for instance, this might vary with your provider though.

Are there any other concerns aside from lightning strikes as to why copper wouldn't be sufficient for the Wifi and CCTV, at 85m you could use just heavy duty shielded Cat6?
 
Aslong as line of sight isn't too blocked (even if its not great) should get decent performance if you can mount the end points fairly high up.
 
If you have line-of-sight then get a couple of Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 Loco's and enjoy ~150Mb/s of real terms throughput. This will cost you around £50 per-end excluding mounting hardware and cabling.
 
There is duct underground which was put in for this very job. Wireless would do but he wants reliability.

I would stick cat 6 in but he is one of those guys that reads too much and wants it done his way. He has showed me posts on various forums which have many users stating that connections underground should only be done with fiber these days even if it's under 50m. Lightning lightning lightning. That's all I read and apparently it costs a tad more than cat5/6 so more reason to get fibre.

I have nothing yet decided for site 2 but at site 1, he has infinity broadband and a Poe Netgear switch which I could have used one of the ports to feed a cat cable to site 2.

Not sure what is needed at both sites for connecting fiber.
 
Last edited:
Sounds like a great idea to get your friend to invest in a fusion splicer so you can play with a one of the coolest toys/tools in the world!

If the ducting is there then why not? You could always have both cat6 and fibre pulled through for future proofing but fibre is a sensible option.
 
There is the possibility that you could get issues caused by differing electrical grounds at the two sites, so being cautious around the idea that you could suffer electrical issues isn't totally unheard of.

How big is the duct? Pulling a pre-terminated fibre cable is going to be the cheapest way to do this, but it needs large holes to go through.
 
You should be OK then, providing there are no tight bends. A 4 core OM3 fibre (you need a pair per link to do transmit and receive, ignoring bidirectional SFPs) at 100m will cost you around £200, preterminated with LC connectors.
 
Thanks for that. What is needed at each end for connection? Do you need a media converter or can you get a switch that takes it the Fiber cables?
 
You can do either, if you wanted to do it in the switch then you'd need switches with SFP slots and then an SFP module for each end.
 
IEEE regs prescribe electrical isolation between buildings, so these links should be done in fibre.

Fibre cable and termination kit is not massively more expensive than copper these days, its usually the switches and transceivers that bump the costs up.

Netgear do a gigabit SFP switch for under £150, you'll need one at each end plus 2x SFP SR LC transceivers. Sometimes transceivers are called GBICS and there's a .com site that sells guaranteed compatible transceivers at good prices.

Is there a draw rope in the duct to pull the cables? If not you'll need a Cobra rodding system or similar to install the cables.
 
Cool

i would suggest useing sfp fibre links as they are fast ,straight forward and expencive with distance i belive not being a massive problem and from memroy ithink this could be a good solution but look into it.
 
If you mean SFP direct attach then that's copper so wouldn't give the electrical isolation required in this situation, and has a distance limitation of 10m.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom