Should I use MOCA or fiber for a 400 run?

[gemniii]

I've workshops joined together about 300 to 400 feet from my house which I would like to get GOOD net access to from the house. Due to lots of trees in between wireless does not work well.

I'm having a ditch dug this summer to replace a waterline to the house and was thinking of putting in an extra conduit and running either fiber or RG6 for net access. I've been told on other forums that RG6 will work well at that distance, but CAT6 doesn't run that far.

Fiber seems more expensive, but also a lot faster.

Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[coxhaus]

I think you got it. When you use fiber you will want to use multimode not single mode as it will be cheaper. Find your transceivers and that is the plug and light wave forum you want to use. In the old days Allied Telesis made some good cheap media converters.

I have not kept up with the speeds you reach now with coax. I think in the old days we were running Arcnet which would go 10,000 feet but Arcnet was 75 ohm not 50. I think you got around 2.5 meg. But this was 30 years ago so I could easily be wrong on some it.

We switched miles and miles of coax to fiber. Coax would go bad with lightening, water, you name it. It had to be replaced a lot. If you buy fiber buy glass as it will run fine under water. We have had conduits full of water with the fiber running fine. The other thing is lightening strikes close will not effect fiber when it is in the ground. It pretty much becomes maintenance free except for back hoes and shovels.

 

[CaptainSTX]

I've workshops joined together about 300 to 400 feet from my house which I would like to get GOOD net access to from the house. Due to lots of trees in between wireless does not work well.

I'm having a ditch dug this summer to replace a waterline to the house and was thinking of putting in an extra conduit and running either fiber or RG6 for net access. I've been told on other forums that RG6 will work well at that distance, but CAT6 doesn't run that far.

Fiber seems more expensive, but also a lot faster.

Any advice will be appreciated.

While the spec says that the maximum length for a Cat 6 run is 100 meters or 328 feet including jumpers you might be able to streach the distance to what you need by using an unmanaged switch at both ends of the run to serve as an amplifier.

It might be worth experimenting. A 500' spool of direct burial Cat 6 cable costs less than $100 and the gigabit switches shouldn't cost you more than $20 each and probably could be returned if the experiment didn't work and you didn't have a need for the switches.

If you can't get the speed you need with copper then go with the fiber.

What ever type of cable you end up installing and if you decide to use conduit be sure to install some intermeadiate pull boxes. You can't pull very hard on communications cables without risking damage.

 

[Samir]

Unless you have gigabit Internet access, you really don't need the fastest connection between the two points. You can run fibre, which would be ideal because it takes care of potential grounding issues as well as being fast enough even for the future with 10G, etc.

However, if you just want to run a cable and have 100Mb through it, I know the netsys-direct ethernet extender products can do the job for sure over just regular cat5 cable. And they'd do it reliably too.

 

[degrub]

you don't need to bury the cable or fiber very deep. 1 ft is plenty and just lay it in. Just place brick/tile/steel over top to shield and also mark the path. Otherwise use plastic conduit 1.5 or 2 inch minimum. Be sure to leave a pull chord/wire in the conduit for next time. Use long radius els for changes in direction. Fiber does not like to be pulled around corners and does not like to be pulled on. You could also do an aerial fiber run using trees if you leave enough slack for tree movement. There should be a cable version with a pull wire embedded if you go the conduit route. You also need to use the puller attachment device rather than just taping over unless you plan to cut and re=polish the ends. Let a pro do it if you go the pulling route.

 

[sfx2000]

Just as an aside - with two building that far apart - watch out for grounds, and ground potential - esp. if they're served with different panels...

The results there could be "shocking"...

 

[degrub]

good point. Another reason for fiber. We replaced all of the token ring network cable in our facility (2km x 1km) with fiber back in the late '80s because we were burning up interfaces.

 

[System Error Message]

consider SFP with fiber modules. A lot of switches and routers have SFP, even SFP NICs, and you can get SFP+ in an affordable way too. With SFP you can pick the modules you like that support the distance you want and use the right cable. Fiber optics are much more reliable in bandwidth than MOCA and MOCA hardware may not be standard not to mention the range limitations are even greater than with fibero ptics.

Dont burry your cables too deep, you still need to be able to access them too so you can wire them through drains or poles if they are gonna be kilometers long or at least have access panels in the middle.