Tell me about: Armoured outdoor fibre cable

Soldato
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I'm considering doing a small outdoor fibre run at home, nothing major, just one or two links between my office and an outbuilding. My lab has grown too big to keep in the house, so I'm planning on moving it outside, but the issue I've got is getting a single FC and Ethernet link between the two. Kit at each end will probably be a couple of HP Procurve 1810s at each end for the networking, and the FC is just a point-to-point between a couple of Emulex LP1000 cards.

The current plan I have is to buy a couple of 100m runs that are pre-terminated with LC connectors, drill holes in the relevant places and then just thread through and fill afterwards.

The only thing I'm not sure about is what sort of cable I need. Looking around, there appear to be a lot of options as to what sort of cable I could choose, with varying prices. Specifically, there's choice as to number of strands down the cable, OM1/2/3 etc and I'm a little lost.

Any advice?

*edit* just got a quote for 100m of 4 strands OM3 armoured LC-terminated cable for £330. Is this the right ballpark, or way out?
 
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Sounds stupidly expensive compared to getting some external cat for Gigabit @ 100m. ~£80 for a 300m box

Each fibre link will use 2 cores (strands) Tx/Rx OM3 is the higher grade fibre isnt it? capable of 10Gig over short distances?

Price is probably about right.
 
Well terminated, unshielded Cat5e will work at 100m. Much simpler to work with than fibre.

100m is the general rule of thumb limit for distance but I've seen long runs marginally over this work fine when installed properly with quality components (maybe consider shielded cables and termination if risk of EMI is high).
 
Interested in what you would be running in your set-up that would utilise the bandwidth that fibre offers?
 
100m 4 Core OM3 (ARMOURED) for £330 doesn't sound tooo bad..

As everyone says you could go Cat 5e but you would need to look at the same costings.. don't have an uptodate price sheet on copper buut a google search shows that armoured C5e is around £1.50-£2.50 a metre.

So if you factor in everything

£330 for 2 links (one for redundancy or loadbalancing) with speeds of upto 10GbE (depending on the kit switches/converters).

or

£150-£250x2 for Cat 5e links with speeds of 1GbE.

To give you an idea (and I don't get involved with too much purchasing these days), I think we pay around about 80p - £1 per meter for 4 Core OM3 Armoured. But havn't bought pre-termed in about 4 or 5 years so no help on that front.

Obviously the converters for the fibre are going to be more expensive etc but should see you right for a while..
 
Thanks for the replies. Cat5/6 is an obvious choice just for networking, but I'm talking about running some 4G FC connections as well. I could do FCoE, but already have all the right networking and FC kit to do fibre runs, so it be a case of replacing a bunch of fibre patch cables with a longer run.

On the networking front, there's also the future-proofing - If I start to work with 10GBit, then I don't want to have to replace the cable, I'd rather spend the money now and have piece of mind.

The price looks about right. The site I was looking at was charging about £180 for the first metre, and then £1.50 for every metre after that. I might see if I can haggle them down a bit.
 
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