One question Iāve always had with regard to overhead fibre is its maintenance cost and effectiveness. Patching twisted pair copper telephone cables when a tree comes down on the line, or a pole gets knocked over during a storm, is technically relatively easy. Also, copper cabling stretches and can sag to quite a significant degree without breaking and/or degrading the carrier too much.
Weāve had two such incidences in our hamlet in the past 2 years (neighbourās apple tree blown over and sectioned telephone cable, and a snapped telephone pole caused by storm winds). Both of them were resolved quickly, as copper cabling telephone wiring is easy to repair temporarily until a more permanent fix can be applied.
I donāt think the same can be said for fibre, which is why most deployments of fibre (at least in urban corridors) are made using underground channels. Obviously, in a country like France, underground fibre deployment to rural areas is pretty much a no-go, given the cost of having to dig channels, sort out land access issues, etc.
If we do get fibre, and if it is overhead cable distribution, which it almost certainly will be, I canāt see it being as reliable as the current copper twisted pair infrastructure.
Donāt you just love the way that Orange graciously say that they will supply a guide to help ME install it. They want to change it, so THEY can install it in my view.
The diagram seems to show the new little box connected to the livebox by an ethernet cable, so presumably it would either mean relocating the livebox to where the phone line comes into the house (thus no doubt messing up the wi-fi situation), or connecting the two boxes with an ethernet cable that would need to be about 18 metres long.
I do wish they would just leave things alone that already work perfectly well.
An 18 metre piece of RJ45 shouldnāt be problem providing you can run it behind/under something unless youāre talking data speeds of above 3-400mbps.
Cat6 ethernet cable throughput is up to 10Gbps, but at those speeds is limited to around 55 metres (approx 164 feet), at longer distances the spped drops back to 1Gbps.
Cat 5 is actually good for 1Gbps up to 100m, Cat 5e up to 2.5Gbps @ 100m, Cat 6 up to 5Gbps/100m and Cat 6A 10Gbps/100m
Cat 6 can do 10Gbps up to 55m
10Gbps is currently overkill for a domestic network - but if you like to future proof your wiring Cat 6 or 6A is probably the way to go (itās a bit of a pain to handle though because of the internal separator).
Iām just about getting to grips with 2.5Gbps stuff between some of my faster machines.
Not domestically - you are into the territory where you wonāt get the bandwidth if things are not terminated properly so itās a bit of a waste of money.
What need do you have for > 1Gbps moving around your home network?
I want better than 1Gbps because the file server can deliver data faster than that so the network is the bottleneck at the moment, 2.5Gbps is about the sweet spot just now but I canāt see myself building a large file server with enough bandwidth to need more than 10Gbps any time soon.
Once you get > 1Gbps then switches and routers that can handle the speed get expensive, fast. The Zyxel XGS-1210 that I bought cost Ā£280 with two 10G SFP adapters, that was the cheapest solution and it gives me 4 10Gbps ports out of 12, the āidealā switch for my needs - the XS1930-12HP is nearly a grand.
Layer-3 routers/firewalls that can handle > 1Gbps likewise are not cheap.
Weāre just getting 1Gbps Internet connections - Iāve recently had fibre installed chez moi in the UK at 500Mbps and there is a bit of an āOK, what do I use this for?ā question to be answered. For now it isnāt even accessible from all my machines as it is still running in parallel with the old VDSL copper connection (50Mbps) but my lad is very pleased with how fast his multi gigabit game downloads are running - but beyond that, what? even 8k TV streams are āonlyā 50Mbps - I can have 10 of them simultaneously on the new connection and, the last time I counted, I donāt have 10 TVs.
As I said 6/6A is good enough today, will run to 25Gbps (for 6A) for any distance most people will need domestically and I can still make my own leads up.
I suspect that 6/6A will also be good enough in 10, possibly even 20 years or even longer.
The idea of sharing a 10Mbps connection between at least 10 machines seems crazy now - especially as it was actually difficult to achieve the theoretical maximum throughput if everyone hit the network hard because of packet collisions.
1] and occasionally all the machines would lose the network as one end became unterminated, but nornally things limped along well enough to find the fault location.
Your just a whippersnapper then I can remember the original cables, but a lot of our systems used either the Token ring with the pain in the backside IBM hermaphroditic connector or ARCnet systems.
Oh <deity>, I certainly used one or two systems on token ring, never again!
There were even slower and more unreliable networks as well - I remember using a lab of Apricot F2ās (a truly awful machine) - canāt recall the network stack for file sharing, not the Microsoft stuff and definitely not TCP/IP but it ran at sub 1Mbps speeds and clearly viewed actually transferring files as a purely optional feature.
Might have been one of those. My main recollection is that it was slow and unreliable. But, then, most network systems of the day were slow and unreliable so that might not be all that useful as a distinguishing feature.
I can remember the original cables, but a lot of our systems used either the Token ring with the pain in the backside IBM hermaphroditic connector or ARCnet systems.