Surge protection for ethernet?

[jarvis82]

Hi all.

I have Zzoomm full fibre, FTTP. Last night my area suffered a power cut. At some stage in the subsequent return of power to the area, a surge fried both the ethernet cable connecting my main TP Link Deco X60 (the main node, acting as my router) to the inside wall fibre connection box (Adtran optical network terminal), and also the 10gb port on the ONT that the cable was connected to.

Zzoomm were brilliant and after reporting the issue at 09:15, they had an engineer with me by 1:30pm, and changed over the ONT for a new one.

My Deco X60(s) came away unscathed, so that was a bonus!

So my question is, would anyone be able to recommend some form of surge protection - and where exactly would it be connected? I've never heard of just an ethernet port and/or cable being zapped by a surge.

I work from home quite often, and if this sort of thing happened when I was working or due to work, it could be a rather large pain the rear.

Thanks for any input!

Cheers.

 

[Rainmaker]

Put the surge protection upstream. If you have a decent surge protector extension to plug in your router, switch (and modem if applicable) then any Ethernet devices plugged in to *those* devices are likewise protected. Most modern motherboards also have onboard surge protection already, such as Asrock Full Spike Protection, Asus LANGuard etc etc.

 

[Caged]

Do you still have a copper phone line coming into your property anywhere? Is this connected to anything? I can't really see how a surge managed to fry an ONT port that is the other side of a switching power supply - are you sure it wasn't a nearby lightning strike? If it was lightning then there's more or less nothing you can do. For power surges you can have surge protection installed at the point where your electricity cable enters your house. I wouldn't bother with ethernet surge protectors because I can't see what they'd be protecting you against - the cables don't go outside, and you don't have a phone line that comes in after being draped across overhead poles for two miles.