Posted by alienchow 19 hours ago
This I don't quite get .. as I understand it "PVC trunking" is a type of cable channeling / ducting.
I do a lot of cable and pipe layout around houses, farms, workshops, worksites, etc. and it's routine to use pipes / ducting / channels to allow other cables to be threaded through after or to replace bad cables.
As much as cable deterioration sucks it should be a relief to have ducting to pull good through after the bad.
But yeah, maybe it's not that bad after all. I hope it won't get to that point.
One of my love / hates is Australian parrots and cockatoos - fantastic birds, noisy as hell - and they can rip out and shred unprotected wiring from rural camera and sensor systems like winged can openers.
I saw someone commented elsewhere about a plastic bag and a vacuum. Another option to keep in mind is a lubricant intended specifically for the task of pulling cable through a conduit.
That's why the leads are wrapped in a polythene bag.
When people started using polystyrene sheet insulation in houses (thankfully they no longer do this!) the cables running inside the walls were affected in the same way, with the PVC insulation rotting off as the plasticiser leached out and attacked the polystyrene. Of course there you had the added joy of having a potential electrical fire with a source of just-about-inextinguishable fuel, the polystyrene foam made of fuel and air.
I wonder if something similar has happened here, something's gotten onto the fibre jackets and pulled the plasticiser out?
It's not clear who "FS" is. A reseller? A manufacturer? They seem to be in Singapore. There's no excuse for the external plastic sheath disintegrating. They must have formulated the plastic wrong. The terms specify a 30 day warranty.
Here's a catalog of real mil-spec fiber optic cables.[2] This is overkill for home applications; you put these in a fighter jet.
In between are Telecom Industry Association compliant fiber optic cables. That's what telcos use. There are US manufacturers with real plants and addresses.
https://www1.hkexnews.hk/app/sehk/2025/107950/documents/sehk...
I agree that less-than-milspec equipment should survive being installed in a home, but... this fiber didn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572962 seems to be relevant.
I don't think it's fair to make fun of the cable specifications, seems to me they held up just fine despite the jacket disintegrating. The article doesn't mention the error rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still zero.
The second thing is that domestic buildings usually do not come with a consistent ground plane. I worked in a 1960s build purpose made for mainframes and we had ~48v floating between racks at either end of the building and had to do a shitload of work to reground the building, in the 90s (-we were decommissioning an IBM 3033 and deploying a secondhand cray1) the point being somehow, God knows how, prior rs232 serial wiring didn't care and the ground plane for the mainframe was fine at the time. Pre Ethernet this stuff maybe just passed code.
I suspect people who build their own home to some spec acquire these theories. Data comms? Not much reason tbh unless you're pushing a lot more data than normal.
Ordinary unshielded copper Ethernet doesn’t care: it’s transformer-isolated at both ends. Shielded cable may object to carrying any substantial amount of current through the shield.
Anyway, there are a handful of good reasons to use fiber:
- Length. Copper is specced for 100m. Panduit will sell fancy copper cable that they pinky-swear works for Ethernet at 150m. Single mode fiber will work at silly long distances.
- High bandwidth. Copper will do 10Gbps. High speed specs exist, but there is approximately zero commercial availability of anything beyond 10G using copper at any appreciable distance. Fiber has no such problems.
IMO if you are running fiber anywhere that makes it awkward to replace (i.e. not just within a single room), use single mode. Multimode fiber has gone through ~5 revisions over the last few decades, and the earlier ones have very unimpressive bandwidth capabilities at any reasonable distance. Even the latest version, where truly heroic engineering has gone into reducing modal dispersion, relies on fancy multistrand cables for the faster Ethernet speeds. Single-mode fiber, meanwhile, continues to work very well and supports truly huge bandwidth at rather long distances, and even decades-old fiber supports the latest standards. And the transceivers for single-mode fiber are no longer much more expensive than multimode transceivers.
Also, preterminated fiber is a thing. While it’s not that hard to terminate MMF, it’s still easier and more reliable to buy preterminated fiber. SMF terminations are apparently much more sensitive to being done perfectly, and buying preterminated fiber is wise. (I’ve never personally terminated any fiber, but I have installed and connected fiber, and it’s delightful to just plug it in.)
I ran SMF and have no regrets. https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
Also, not needing to rerun any cabling if we want to bump up speeds in the future, you just change the laser module on either end. These should be good to >100x current speeds. Not the case with copper.
The real problem here is that 10GBASE-T is ancient. The spec dates back to 2006! And worst of all: it only saw lukewarm adoption by the datacenter industry, so there hasn't really been a reason for manufacturers to refresh their lineups. This means that SFP+ transceiver you buy in 2026 might be using chips manufactured using a 20-year-old node. No wonder it is running hot!
2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T are essentially using the same technology, but you don't hear anyone complaining about it running hot: hardware for this only recently started to become available due to consumer demand, so any hardware for that is being manufactured using more modern technology, which means a lower power use.
It's still going to consume more power than fiber, but a modern 10GBASE-T SFP+ transceiver should not be burning hot.
https://www.servethehome.com/cheap-10gbe-realtek-rtl8127-nic...
25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T were standardized 10 years ago, but there are still basically zero products available with support for it. The datacenter market just wasn't interested and chose to use fiber and DAC instead. Worst of all: it requires Cat8 cables and is limited to 30 meters. This means it can't reuse existing cabling, and doesn't have the reach for many home applications - OPs blog post mentions the longest run in their apartment being 55 meters.
Combine that with the general death of wired networking for home & office use, and it is extremely unlikely the market of hardcore tech enthusiasts is big enough to warrant massive investments into developing some kind of 25G-over-Cat6-for-100m standard.
10G is pretty much the standard for high-end gear these days. This means any kind of future-proof setup needs to be prepared for a future upgrade to a fiber-based technology.
(speeds: 100 gig today, but faster speeds are coming.)
Ethernet runs on many mediums, as well as over the ether.
(He’s gone, plaid!)
Next what popped in my head, “Military grade means, made by the lowest bidder.”
The conclusion paragraph seems doubtful to me though - unlikely that speeds will slow down from a cables external plastic flaking
I've also had problems with their pigtails also being weird, by the way (layers separating so that automated cutters can't stretch the pigtail properly). It's weird when everything else is so good—it's as if they only care about what's going on internal to a data center and you never need to do a splice. :-)