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Ask HN: Would it be feasible to install dark fiber while building a home?
5 points by jevinskie on Aug 8, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
With Google rolling out 1 Gbps connections to Kansas City, SSDs easily saturating 1 Gbps LANs (~500 MB/s vs 125 MB/s), and 4k/8k video on the way would it be prudent to outfit a new home with a bunch of dark fiber to all of the rooms? Equipment for 10 GbE is still pricey but falling fast. You could always wait for the non-fiber equipment cost to go down before you switch from, say, using CAT6/1 GbE. Any idea what the dark fiber alone would cost? I would assume that multi-mode would be sufficient but would single-mode fiber offer better upgrade paths?


Conventional wisdom would be to install conduit in the walls and leave installing the actual fiber until you are planning on using it.


In my opinion, Nope. Speed-wise, for short distances like in the home, copper kicks fiber's butt (when you talk price/speed). Spend the extra money on Cat6e, and running multiple runs (as many as possible) to each room/jack - this leaves you with the possibility of link aggregation in the future (you can get switches capable of link aggregation cheap on ebay).


Not sure it's worth it. I was just talking to someone who spent good time and money wiring their new house with CAT5 10 years ago and now laughs about it. Everything is going wireless.




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