Recommendations for a gigabit+ bridge, possibly with SFP

I had similar thoughts a few years ago when wanting an access point in the garden shed, about 25 meters away from the house. But I didn't think very far ahead, pulling only a single pair of multimode fibre. Initially I terminated it in a PoE media converter, powering a Unifi AP AC Pro. Some time later I mounted a ZyXEL NR7101 on the outside of the shed, and had to replace the media converter with a ZyXEL GS1900-10HP to have enough PoE ports for both devices.

This was about the time when we were trying to get the realtek switches supported in OpenWrt. And that made me regret having pulled only one fibre pair. All access to the garden shed was down without the switch running, making a bit hard to test experimental stuff.... I ended up leaving a laptop with a 4G module out there that winter :wink:

So my recommendation would be: More than one cable, whatever you do.

And maybe the PoE switch + PoE powered AP is something for you as well? The ZyXEL GS1900-10HP is a nice little thing and pretty well supported in OpenWrt. Only 1g ports though.

FWIW I moved away from the fibre connected garden shed earlier this year. The AP AC Pro, GS1900-10HP and NR7101 now all ended up in a garage, which is also a few meters from the house. But this time we inherited cabling from the previous owner, which was a single cat5e. That will have to do. Can't worry too much about surge protection. I'm not going to try to replace that cable.

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