Fibre between buildings

tribz

tribz

tribz

Soldato
Joined
4 Mar 2008
Posts
2,648
Looking at cabling to a building one one of my sites which is 300m away and fibre has been suggested which a 3rd party would lay.

What would this connect into at each end, a switch with a fibre port?
 
Cheapest / most reliable for anything above 100Mb.

You could either get a pair of switches with a SPF ports and the appropriate SPF or a pair of media convertors
 
Gigabit fibre ethernet media converters are less than £100 each. That said you can get netgear prosafe switches with 2 fibre ports for even less.

Outdoor fibre isn't expensive, and the switches aren't much more than regular ones - it's the labour that costs.
 
So the way for me to think of this is its big long network cable that will either plug into a fibre port on a switch or a cat5 converter.

Will the installer have to put an end on each side? Presume this is specialist.

Edit, theyre also talking about putting the phones down it. Would they have to be data phones (voip) and be compatible with the phone system?

Thanks!
 
Some sort of LoS based wireless system would surely be far easier to install. With such a short distance you'll get decent, reliable throughput too!
 
Personally, I'd always take a fibre connection over wireless (budget, feasibility etc allowing).

Install OM4 spec' fibre and start with Gigabit GBICs / SFPs but you have a straight forward upgrade path to 10Gb by changing the switches / SFPs. IIRC, OM3 fibre could deliver 10Gb but 300m is about the limit for it.

My preference is also for switches with the SFPs rather than media convertors. It's one less bit of kit to look after. Set VLANs up on the switches to segment the data and VOIP traffic (also gives you QoS options if the link becomes busy).
 
#Chri5# said:
Personally, I'd always take a fibre connection over wireless (budget, feasibility etc allowing).

Install OM4 spec' fibre and start with Gigabit GBICs / SFPs but you have a straight forward upgrade path to 10Gb by changing the switches / SFPs. IIRC, OM3 fibre could deliver 10Gb but 300m is about the limit for it.

My preference is also for switches with the SFPs rather than media convertors. It's one less bit of kit to look after. Set VLANs up on the switches to segment the data and VOIP traffic (also gives you QoS options if the link becomes busy).
Click to expand...
All correct, but you're assuming they use VOIP. I also heavily agree with avoiding media convertors.
 
MilanoChris said:
All correct, but you're assuming they use VOIP.
Click to expand...

Indeed. One option is pull to a multi-pair cable through with the fibre to run the handsets. That will add obviously cost. Overall chouce might depend on the cost of adding VOIP functionlity to an existing PBX (eg additional cards / licenses if nothing is already there) vs putting in a 50 pair cable (as an example) and running TDM handsets at the "remote" site.
 
I did something similar a few months ago. I got 8 core fibre laid with a fibre patch panel at each end. I then got some mini-gbic fibre sfp converters (google TL-SM311LM SFP for reference of the type of thing I mean) for our switches (which have mini-gbic sfp ports) and patched them to the panel with some fibre patch leads. You need 2 cores for each mini-gbic.

We use a hybrid phone system. VOIP internally to ISDN for external communication. To make sure bandwidth wasn't an issue the phones are run on separate switches from other network traffic.

We only needed 4 cores (2 for phones, 2 for other) but for the minimal extra cost the extra cores provide redundancy. It has worked a treat.
 
Last edited:
A have a similar setup and have a few questions! Heres the scenario;

Two separate buildings, 4 core Fibre cable being installed to link the two buildings, terminated to an LC Fibre patch panel at each end. Questions;

We have workstations and IP phones running on the network, as we have four cores in the cable I assume I can install a switch with a couple of SFP ports, a couple of SFP modules (TL-SM311LM) and plug both sets of cores into my switch?

Would the above double the available bandwidth between the two sites?

If the above is feasible, how will traffic route down each cable?

Or am I talking rubbish and this wouldn't work, I need to use 2 Cores and one cable to link to the switch and if I ever need the separate set of cores for something else they will be available?

Thanks!
 
Increased bandwidth would depend on your switch and if you can configure it to do some form of link aggregation/load balancing. But it would use all 4 cores. Don't plug them both in without configuring your switch as you could cause broadcast loops that could crash your network. What model switch do you have?

The cores are independent of each other so you can use 2 for one switch and 2 for another or set up 2 and just have the other 2 unused so they are available for future projects.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom