Fiber Optic Advice

This isn't my specialty and we are looking at working with some fiber in the very near future.

Heres the deal.

Our main office is to far out from any CO or cable company to get any form of High Speed internet. We have satellite, but it sucks.

Recently the telephone company has expanded their DSL range to where it now reaches the CEO's house. His house is approximately 4-5 miles from the main office.

Our thinking is running our own Fiber from his house to the main office.

The cable is going to cost us about $10,000, but before we commit to this much I want to make sure my idea is going to work and what we might need.

I'm thinking we'll have 2 DSL lines at the CEO's house. One for his personal connection, and the other one for the office.

The DSL for the office will run into the DSL modem then run into some sort of converter from there to convert it into a signal to run on the fiber lines. It would then travel the four miles to the office where it would hit another converter to convert it back to a ethernet signal.

This way the the office will be able to get out on a DSL connection.

Now what equipment do you guys think would be needed for this project?

I've done some research and I'm pretty sure I'll need single mode Fiber.

Our current equipment is a Symantec Gateway, Cisco 2950 Switch (standard. Can't accept Fiber) and a few smaller switches.


what I'm wondering about mainly is like what kind of converters or routers do we need, and will what I'm talking about work?

Any advice or products I should look into would would be appreciated as I've never dealt with Fiber before.

Thanks

Ok I'll take a crack at this ... I'm not an expert but we have a firm which uses a big backbone of fiber.

For smaller off-site locations which are about 4 to 8 KM's away they use these small converters (looks like these )and the fiber they use is indeed single mode fiber ...which is needed because it's only this fiber that can connect locations up to 10 km where multi mode fiber can only connect (depending on the "thickness") up to 275 or 550 meters for support of Gigabit Ethernet according to manufacturers. They also use fiber to connect to off-site WLAN Access points which are then connecting a remote site with that off-site building and they get rather good reception (no loss in signal because of fiber to the AP).

So if you use these Single mode converters the signal gets converted to UTP which you then can connect to your switch (or you can use any other means of connection that accepts UTP).

As far as your question goes "Will it work?" ...I think it will ...Isn't it's just like you put a very long UTP cable on the DSL Modem ... I don't think the signal can get transformed by the converter (someone correct me if I'm wrong though).

Hope this is somewhat helpfull ... as I'm not a network specialist :D

Tip : Don't look directly into the single mode fiber ( to check for light if it is connected) it is known in some cases that this can damage your eyes. This can't realy happen if it's multi mode as this mostly uses LED light and Single mode mostly use LASER therefore the danger (just thought I mention it ;) ) [edit] Also be carefull handling the fiber , it's very fragile but you might allready know this [/edit]


C.

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Our thinking is running our own Fiber from his house to the main office.

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This sounds like a good idea in theory but have you looked into the legalities of dropping your own fiber? I mean, you're going to have to cross private/public property to do this.

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This sounds like a good idea in theory but have you looked into the legalities of dropping your own fiber? I mean, you're going to have to cross private/public property to do this.

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I assumed it would be done by a specialized firm and with city approval ..in Belgium you can't do this without approval and months of planning and lobbying so I took it for granted ...good remark thehorse13.

C.

We're in the middle of a fiber rollout that covers an entire metro area. It took years to get all the specifics worked out. It's amazing how much red tape you have to go through to simply pull some cable through an underground wire race.

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It's amazing how much red tape you have to go through to simply pull some cable through an underground wire race

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Tell me about it ... this firm I was talking about ordered some equipment through my firm to complete a site they wanted connceted to the fiber backbone .... this site was like 1km of the fiber backbone ... it took them 4 months to get the go (it was all sidewalk that needed to be laid open) ... then before the firm who installs the fiber could start it was another 2 months because they were doing something else at the time (very strange I thought it was that they don't have extra personell for these kind of situations) ...so about 6 months later the 1 km was finaly laid ...

The site was allready operational since 4 months back and had to work with leased lines (so extra cost) ..;goes to show that planning these kind of things is not at all easy..glad I didn't have to do it :D

C.

cheyenne1212:

Have you checked to see if microwave is available or will be in the near future?

Microwave is line of site correct? If so we don't have line of site, to hilly here.

Thehorse: Thats what we're figuring out right now is how will we be able to run the fiber. I'm going to talk to the electric company and phone company and see about running fiber on their poles. There isn't any city out there its just county and state.

Theres still a lot of phone calls I have to make to see what we need to do.

Thanks for the advice guys.