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Posted by alienchow 16 hours ago

My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated(alienchow.dev)
184 points | 165 commentspage 2
mkj 12 hours ago|
Fs.com are a well regarded company. The OP should contact them and see if there's a recall on those cables or something. Sounds similar to what happened with some mains power cables sold by a hardware store in Australia.
nubinetwork 11 hours ago|
I don't regard them very well personally... I bought a bunch of DAC cables from them, only to have them start emailing me under the guise of assigning me a "account manager"... I blocked their domain from my mail server and told them to never contact me again.
sschueller 10 hours ago||
They offer to provide you with personalized service and you block them? What do you do when you walk into a high end watch or clothing store?

FS provides account managers and they are very useful if you are working on a project as they can guide you and help you.

nubinetwork 9 hours ago|||
Is it too much to ask to just be able to buy things without being chased around by someone?

I have a Newegg business account (and maybe a few more for other pc stores, I'd have to check), but I literally never have them trying to get me to buy things. /shrug

jeffrallen 8 hours ago|||
Right, but sometimes your account manager's job is to manage a giant RMA as a result of their manufacturing department f'ing up. So while I am greatful she did a good job, I would have preferred to not need an account manager at all...
rhplus 15 hours ago||
Buried under cement/concrete. A good reminder of the benefits of planning to install some conduit.
glitchc 14 hours ago||
The article mentions PVC trunking, which I take to mean conduit.
danw1979 11 hours ago||
Then why the drama in the article ? Just pull another one through.
dbetteridge 14 hours ago|||
Came to the thread to see if anyone else had mentioned conduit.

It's cheap as chips and saves you a lot of future brick cutting or concrete breaking

alienchow 14 hours ago||
I do have PVC conduits under the flooring. You can see the photos here: https://alienchow.dev/post/homelab1/

In theory I can pull a new cable through. But practically it might be tough due to the number of bends (shelter -> wall -> vent -> ceiling -> wall -> floor -> room). In the worst case scenario I can give it a try, but it's probably going to destroy the new fibre cable when I pull it through. For now the connection still works, so I am hoping it doesn't get to the point where I have to give that a try.

duk3luk3 13 hours ago|||
you can always try the plastic bag + vacuum cleaner trick - take a thin flexible rope, tie it to a small plastic bag, stuff the small plastic bag into the conduit, use a vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck the plastic bag & rope through. You can then use the rope to pull through new cable. If you make the rope twice the length of the conduit, you can keep it in there indefinitely to pull through new cable whenever you want.
barryvan 12 hours ago||
This is an unreasonably effective way of running cables. The first time I used it it felt like magic with how quick and painless it was.
dbetteridge 14 hours ago||||
Fair enough! I had a cursory search in the post for mention of conduit and couldn't see anything obvious so wasn't sure.

AFAIK fibre cable should be pretty flexible, though not a massive fan of tension.

From memory bends shouldn't be less than 5cm radius or thereabouts so it depends on your conduit size!

Nice post btw, appreciate the detailed planning involved.

angry_octet 8 hours ago||||
That's why they invented cable lube. That number of turns is no obstacle, even with existing cables. But you should also have a pull cord spool.
sgarland 7 hours ago||
To anyone reading this and assuming it applies equally to electrical conduit, it does not, which is why the NEC specs a maximum of four 90 degree bends between pull points. You could probably manage five, as was described, but it is technically disallowed (again, for electrical wiring - the NEC doesn’t care about networking).
hvb2 13 hours ago||||
I've seen dummy wires being put in when the conduit goes in.

Say initially you need 2 wires from A to B. That probably means there's plenty of room left. So you just put 4 more other wires in there. When the time comes you need to pull a new one, you pull in the new by pulling out the old

oakwhiz 10 hours ago|||
Bends ideally need pull boxes, but given the lack of pull boxes, you might be able to use fish tape where where fish rods / glow rods don't work, if you cannot get a pullstring / pull cable going.
ta988 12 hours ago||
and always install extra guide wire
voxlax 7 hours ago||
I believe, he might have stored some solvent in the vicinity of the cable. Anyway it won't affect the optical performance of the cables. It's just the loss of mechanical protection. The disintegrating sheathing could be repaired by shrink tubing, which is more convenient than by wrapping it up in tape.
nevi-me 14 hours ago||
I sympathise with burying cables that you think are for life, only to need to replace them later.

We ran fibre cables in the ceiling when constructing our house. I requested the electrician to shield the cables with some tubing, but he probably thought I was being extreme. We have 9 cables, 2 of them don't work, likely from being bent by mistake or something.

The wiring is intermixed with electrical and ethernet (for cameras) cables, making the process a bit tricky. At least for us we might only have to cut the ceiling boards in a few places to help guide the replacement cables.

madaxe_again 12 hours ago|
9/10 times the problem is at the terminator - they can get yanked out of position if they are pulled rather than the sleeve. Snip off the pulled end of the suspect line with Kevlar shears and shine an OFF down the other end - and you’ll probably see laser. It’s then a surprisingly simple job to re-terminate with mechanical connectors.
overtone1000 14 hours ago||
Upvote for posting about a failure. We should all be more vocal about our failures.
jmward01 14 hours ago||
Anyone in the US military that has bought 'military grade' Bates shoes and pulled them out of a locker after a year just to see the soles disintegrate can likely tell you the value of 'military grade'.
askvictor 13 hours ago|
Shoes need to be used, or the rubber and/or glue holding the sole on will deteriorate.
zdragnar 13 hours ago|||
There's gotta be more to it than that. I've got a pair of dress shoes I wear maybe thee times a year at most, and I've had them for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, perhaps longer.

The soles (rubber because winter) are in perfect condition, and the leather isn't too bad either, though I've not really conditioned it enough and it's starting to show.

gleenn 13 hours ago||
Both can be true. I have specifically heard that shoe glue needs to be repeatedly compressed to be maintained or it will disintegrate. Anecdotally as well, I had a pair of quality, lightly used, but old, hiking boots that had the sole completely separate after a day of heavy use. The runber sole completely detached from the leather shell inner shoe. The crazy thing was that BOTH boots failed within 20 minutes of each other.
lostlogin 12 hours ago|||
And because they are military grade they need to be used for some military stuff.
isoprophlex 14 hours ago||
This is why you always bury a rugged, big diameter tube, and run the cables inside of that.
gleenn 13 hours ago||
My friend also always runs multiple string lines through during construction. Later if a wire breaks or you want an additional cable or upgrade, you attach your new wire to a string and pull the string from the other end all the way through. If they had done this, they could have simply dragged a new fiber optic cable through.
aarmot 12 hours ago||
You can pull the wire and second string together so you have always a single string in conduit.
timzaman 13 hours ago||
Pvc also dries out and cracks. But yes.
sfeng 13 hours ago|||
If it’s underground (meaning not in the sun) the lifespan of PVC is 100+ years. It seems unlikely it will be his problem if it ever cracks.
fulafel 12 hours ago||
PVC used in water pipes had some surprises, the lifespan there turned out to be less than optimistically expected when PVC pipes came to the market. 100 years might be hard to test for...
isoprophlex 12 hours ago|||
You can always splurge on some military grade pvc conduits :^)
Bedlow 15 hours ago||
Is it a humidity problem? in our climate in the Med all kinds of plastic, pu and rubberised materials will just start cracking and flaking after a year or two.
rhplus 15 hours ago||
About page on OPs blog says Singapore, so yeah.
userbinator 14 hours ago||
PU is especially vulnerable to degradation via hydrolysis.
simonjgreen 10 hours ago||
I’d be acquiring or borrowing a fusion splicer and splice protectors then getting them into a fixed enclosure on the wall with socket outlets.

It seems like wizardry when you first see it, but actually fusion splicing fibre is not hard at all once you’ve done it a few times.

The most important part is the cleaving, always use a high quality cleaver.

Chances are very high the fibres themselves in the cables are absolutely fine, they are remarkably resilient given their size.

bawana 5 hours ago|
Andromeda strain
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