FTTR, beyond ethernet to room

What has this got to do with OpenWRT?

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marketing BS for FTTH...

Not exactly the same thing:

The Fiber to the Room (FTTR) all-optical Wi-Fi solution directly extends optical fibers to each room, achieving gigabit coverage everywhere at home.

I'm not sure why is fibre needed to redistribute the traffic into the rooms, and why is ethernet not a viable solution.

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related to networking only, ATM, in future when Openwrt support fiber we might head in that area.

That is why posted in the other questions section.

That is my question too. why can't 10gbps do the same job? fiber is more tricky to setup even at FTTH level, going for FTTR means longer and longer installation time.

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marketing and waste of fiber... also lots of worker around the house for something not useful at all...

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well it really depends on the device... sfp is already a thing on openwrt we have a few ipq807x device that support sfp via aquantia phy afaik

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You can do Power over Ethernet, so not only is it a viable solution, I'd argue it's the superior solution. With Ethernet cables you can use PoE access points and not need a power plug at the point of service. Unless their "all-optical" solution also involves a copper pair to carry 48 V, but I doubt it.

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[not directly referring to the 'FTTR' stuff, which is indeed just marketing ploy]

Sadly(?) SFP or fibre connectivity is scarce in typical consumer- or prosumer gear, yes you may find the odd router with one SFP+ port intended to take a GPON/ PON transceiver on WAN, but that's it. You're more likely to see copper based 2.5GBASE-T or 10GBASE-T ports on the LAN side (and even there the number of these ports is very limited), than anything SFP+/ fibre based. Yes, 10GBASE-T cards with SFP+ are cheaper (and foremost available on the used markets) than copper based 10GBASE-T cards (~90+ EUR), but once you add the cost for the optical SFP+ modules or DAC 'patch cables', the price delta becomes almost negligible. If you look at onboard network cards, most contemporary mainboards come with 2.5GBASE-T, copper based 10GBASE-T if you're very lucky - the same goes for other high-end consumer devices, copper based 1000BASE-T, 2.5GBASE-T, 10GBASE-T, but rarely anything with SFP+ ports. The only things where you will see SFP+ ports, are PCIe network cards and switches.

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yes, I'm aware that copper based 10GBASE-T is more power hungry than SFP+, but that doesn't really help without devices offering it.

Team Turris just gave an update on their new high end router in development, see:

6 x 10 Gbps SFP+ cages... still under development, but targeted for 2024 with a price < $1000
As much as I marvel at that design, I am pretty sure it will fall way outside my budget (just the cost of populating the 6 SFP cages to turn this thing into a usable router is larger than my planend router budget for 2024 :wink: )

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And Realtek switches, and stuff like an EdgeRouter-X SFP, ...

And I got this lovely RB5009UG+S+IN doing SFP+ too :heart_eyes:

wait what is that bad boy... what should be the use of it? :o

Can't wait to see them deliver power of the fibre to those APs. That 'll be something to write about...

You've never seen the support thread pop up here in the forum?

Their 'cable' contains two copper conductors, so delivering some power should be easy....
See:

So their "all-optical" solution does in fact carry a copper pair. I stand corrected.

However, if their marketing diagram is an accurate depiction of their proposed network topology, then it's a hard pass for me. I don't see a router/firewall between the ONT and the rest of the home network, and it appears to propose yet another "cloud management platform" and yet another smartphone app dependent on The Cloud™ to manage the nodes. No thanks.

Of course that is a separate issue from the cables themselves. But unless I can get a complete set of decent-quality tools for working with their FTTR cables for less than $100, none of this matters anyway.

Nice. Would of course have been even better if the fibre was part of a cat6a core so you wouldn't have to pull both types of cables.

But then again I don't really see how some vendor proprietary cabling system improves anything regardless. There's nothing preventing fibre to the room today. Just pull it along with the cat6a. Actually did that a couple of weeks ago, after moving into a new house where the previous owner surprisingly enough hadn't thought about FTTR :slight_smile:

That experience also taught me something about future proofing home cabling. There is no point. This house was built only 20 years ago. It had TV coax to every bedroom... Of course taken out of use by the previous owner a long time ago.

The only future proof parts of any cabling are the conduits.

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I guess the idea behind FTTR is to leave the bulky CatN wiring behind, fiber (especially polymere based) can be much thinner and hence less obtrusive....

Think about this from the perspective of the vendor's bottom-line :wink: But yes, unless becoming a real standard with multiple suppliers this is mostly a gimmick for those not afraid to lock themselves in with a single source...

Yes, however even conduits need to be laid out and planned to match e.g. the thickness and bending radii of the intended use-cases so requires some thinking. Also most conduits will likely ever only see the initial cables, making this a pretty expensive arrangement on average. I am thinking that maybe all one needs is drilled straight connections between rooms that have a diameter allowing for a handful of cables... So not even conduits, but simply solving the dirty and potential challenging drilling issue before hand... That said, should I ever build or renovate something from the ground up I would try hard to get the kind of wall mounted cable conduits that can also house power and network sockets as often seen in office spaces, but these get expensive quickly.

Interesting how perspectives on this differ. I'd still lay coax (for DVB-S2) into every room where $generic_TV might be wanted (alongside at least two cat7 runs), even into a newly planned house.

The reasoning is simple, DVB-S2 is free(2air, as part of the mandatory tv license fee), a few bucks more for a LNB with 4- or 8 outputs, all sorted. All (most) other sources for TV signals depend on some kind of proprietary receiver, additional fees or don't carry the full programme all the time (e.g. sporting events or prime time movies might miss the redistribution rights for streaming). While DVB-S2 to IPTV bridges exist, information about those is scarce and they are relatively expensive/ proprietary (long term security, IPv6 support, integration into the TV set channel list).

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Disclaimer: I have been using vdr with PCI/ PCIe cards for DVB-S/ DVB-S2 and DVB-T/ DVB-T2 for almost 20 years now, using xineliboutput and streamdev, but a 'dumb' TV set is imho still better served with the native DVB signal.
Finding new mainline supported DVB-S2 cards seems to have become difficult/ expensive in recent years though...

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