A friend at work has started experimenting with 10G LAN at home and at that speed one interesting observation is that the copper interfaces use significantly more power, like 8W vs 1W for an optical one or something like that. But it’s only really worth it if you have a significant portion of end devices that have SPF+ slots directly, with the converters you get the worst of both worlds really. Except for range.
You also lose the option of PoE with fiber, although TBH in all my years I’ve never used it.
I’m just bitter because I bought a big roll of Cat6 a couple years ago and it cost an arm and a leg. The same length of multimode fiber would have been a fraction, and I’d probably get better speeds.
If you’re forward thinking for future speed generations you definitely should go with singlemode fiber, by the way. Multimode is mostly done at 10Gbit/s as far as I know. There are some things like 40G and 100G SR4, over multimode but they use 4 fibers in each direction. Whereas I have personally installed 100G bidirectional lines already on singlemode over 10 km already, that’s easily commercially available (though it would be ridiculous for home use).
I think the price difference between 10G single mode and 10G multi mode gear has also decayed enough that taking the step up to singlemode is no big issue anymore.
A friend at work has started experimenting with 10G LAN at home and at that speed one interesting observation is that the copper interfaces use significantly more power, like 8W vs 1W for an optical one or something like that. But it’s only really worth it if you have a significant portion of end devices that have SPF+ slots directly, with the converters you get the worst of both worlds really. Except for range.
You also lose the option of PoE with fiber, although TBH in all my years I’ve never used it.
I’m just bitter because I bought a big roll of Cat6 a couple years ago and it cost an arm and a leg. The same length of multimode fiber would have been a fraction, and I’d probably get better speeds.
If you’re forward thinking for future speed generations you definitely should go with singlemode fiber, by the way. Multimode is mostly done at 10Gbit/s as far as I know. There are some things like 40G and 100G SR4, over multimode but they use 4 fibers in each direction. Whereas I have personally installed 100G bidirectional lines already on singlemode over 10 km already, that’s easily commercially available (though it would be ridiculous for home use).
I think the price difference between 10G single mode and 10G multi mode gear has also decayed enough that taking the step up to singlemode is no big issue anymore.