HN Explorer

Ask HN: Fiber connection with gigabit LAN, what switches to use?

4 points by jhoelzel ↗ HN
Hey guys, Im planning to wire my house with cat 8 cable, so I am futureproofing it as much as I can.

I havae a conundrum: The wire in the wall seem to be the simplest part of the installation.

All I can find around are Gigabit switches, so is there even a real way to use the cat 8 cable right now?

My Fiber comes with 2.5 gbit and I have a nice home cluster setup, but now I want to connect it with the quickest possible "switch". I really dont want to run multiple cables through the walls with a load balancer, especially sincy my router only has a single 2.5 gbit ethernet port.

I found a couple of switches that can do 2.5 gbit, but I am now left wondering, if there is something better I should use?

My Fallback Idea is a Gigabit switch with OpenWRT so it does support load balancing and two wires comming up from the router.

On a related note, the Network Cards that I can find around also seem to only support 1gbit or go for multiple connections?

thanks for your help!

9 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] thread
stop50
the best way for the usage is fiber. Ethernet requires much more power for the transfered data. There are also only a few server in the internet capable to give you the requested data in the speed you have.
jhoelzel
you raise a good point, maybe I am overthinking this entirely. I mean one can only stream so many 4k videos at a time and kubernetes only downloads x images in parralell
Nextgrid
I would recommend running fiber for the main "data plane", with cheap Cat 5 alongside it for a separate, low-bandwidth network if it ever becomes needed (home automation, surveillance cameras, etc) where using media converters would be otherwise impractical.

You can then use any switch with SFP+ ports and upgrade down the line without having to ever replace the fiber itself.

jhoelzel
So basically all a line of fiber switches in the middle of the house and then cat cable to the end consumer wall box?

hmm I did play with the thought of a PCIE fiber cards for the tower, they are expensive but it seems like its the only thing that will for sure work with the least power consumption.

Thanks!

Nextgrid
Nope, fibre all the way to the wall boxes, with cheap Cat 5 alongside it.

Places with high-bandwidth stuff or multiple devices have a switch with an SFP+ port to have the fibre come in and then whatever flavor of Ethernet as outputs (whether 10Gbit over copper, more SFP+ for fibre, or 1Gbit ports if individual devices don't need more than 1Gbit).

FYI you can get cheap server-grade 10Gbit cards on eBay, they work fine and have an SFP+ port. 10Gbit SFPs are ~20 bucks on Amazon.

Places with low-bandwidth needs can just use the "backup" Cat 5 directly or with cheap Gigabit Ethernet switches, to reduce costs where 1Gbit+ speeds aren't needed (plus you can also reuse the cable for non-Ethernet applications, think alarm sensors, home automation, etc).

__d
I'd suggest using 10 Gbps Ethernet over Cat6a or Cat7 twisted pair cabling for wiring the house, and DAC cables in the server closet.

You then have a choice of domestic or professional quality switches. A decent second-hand professional 10GbE switch -- Arista is good, and 7124 is often under $200 now will be noisy, hot, and use a bunch of power, but will also be a reliable and feature-rich switch.

Alternatively, just get a Linksys or Netgear or whatever.

Then use second-hand Solarflare 7000-series or Mellanox Connect/X 10GbE cards.

jhoelzel
thanks for the tip of the Solarflare 7000-series cards, they seem to be super cheap on ebay and do exactly what I want!

Now i need to solve the hot and noisy part :D

toastix
You can find 10gb compatible switches pretty cheap these days(ruckus, unifi, used cisco). There is no need for anything over cat6. If you pick up a switch with SFP+ ports you can run fiber to the server NIC. Otherwise cat6 will still be plenty. If you have a fiber WAN that's at 1gbs that will be your bottleneck for incoming and outgoing traffic. You will never pull that full gig on domestic fiber. If you are running additional to LAN ports to your switch from your router you still only have one point of failure on your router and switch so the redundancy doesn't gain you anything. Without a second wan connection there is no need for load balancing your outbound/inbound. If your ports on the switch don't need POE turn it off. If you forget to turn it off you wont notice any impact as most modern switches autodetect.
runjake
Network engineer here.

- Don't install Cat8. Install high-quality Cat6, or Cat6a, if you must. If you insist on 6a/7/8, be sure you have the conduit space allocated, those are typically thicker. I'd just install Cat6.

- Cat6 will do 10G over approx 180 feet or so. A lot of people don't know this. By the time Cat6 is truly obsolete, so will the Cat7/8 flavors.

- Don't sweat the switches. It's an ever-changing, ever-cheapening game.

- If you want 10G port switches, buy used switches from Ebay or a used switch vendor. Enterprises are offloading tons of switches due to upgrading to 100G and whatnot. Look for well-known names like Brocade, Ruckus, perhaps even Cisco, etc).

- You could potentially run singlemode fiber (SMF) to key spots around the house. Do not install multimode fiber (MMF) -- even OM4, it's obsolete. SMF is far more scalable and these days is about the same in cost. SMF fiber is usually a bit cheaper, the modules are a tiny bit more $. Buy from fs.com -- they're cheap, well-made, and that's what your upstream providers probably use.

- Terminate all wiring to patch panels in a wall-mount rack somewhere out of the way.