Will 15 metres of extra Fibre optic cable be a bottleneck

Hi all,

Apologies if this has been asked previously.
I have broadband engineers coming on Tuesday.
My requested service is 900 Mbs.

My house is about 6500 ft². ( 20m wide by about 18m deep)
I have a preliminary location in mind (driven by my wife's decorating woes) for the ONT and Router but I have a secondary location in mind if the first location doesn't end up working very well.
I was going to ask the engineer if he will make the fibre run to the ONT longer , i.e. a helix of an additional 10 to 15 m of fibre in case I need to move the ont and router to another part of the house at a later date.
My question is, will an extra 10 or 15 m of fibre optic cable affect the 900 megabits per second quoted speed?
And, in your experience with the open reach guys be happy to coil the fibre ?

Thanks

P

The answer to your second question is no. Because that’s not how the fibre service works.

To the first, I myself would say, you can ask … but don’t be surprised if they say no. The implication is that you will be dis, and reconnecting the fibre to the ONT, and the connectors are very sensitive to dust and dirt, and can cause faults.

Have the ONT sited where required, then you are free to extend the Ethernet link to the router as you wish.

Even 10-15 meters of extra copper doesn't make a special difference, of-course with fibre optic this will not reduce your speeds or increase any latency.

How do you think gigabit Fibre optic speeds are still being delivered to high rise buildings? For example, Community Fibre offer 3000Mbps, which is 3Gbps and in absolutely all of their premises in London these are block of flats and perhaps businesses. But people are successfully showcasing/bragging those speeds on YouTube and various forums without any issues.

The same goes with most of the Altnets in London like G.Network, Hyperoptic, etc.

Just look at some of the buildings like Heron Tower, Pinnacle, etc that are over 230 meters high. By this logic that's over 100-200 meters of Fibre Optic cabling traveling upwards when they enter the individual flats through those Fibre drop cables and then another few meters of fibre inside.

But you don't see anyone claiming that those residents living in those high rise apartments are experiencing inferior gigabit performance compared to those in individual houses. Because ultimately this length of travel is long anyway, whether it is traveling from the exchange to your property or in a high rise building it doesn't make a difference.

Your biggest bottleneck however, will be your general equipment such as trying to achieve gigabit speeds with WiFi or having an old quality CPU processor, conventional hard drive or the NIC Card inside your motherboard.

If everything else is fine and you have a good quality Cat5e/Cat6/a Ethernet cable then you are good to go.

No, any additional fibre length will make no odds as the distances are insignificant. You would need to wrap the fibre around your entire home 1000 times before it would make nary a hint of difference as the speed of light is close to 300,000 km / second.

Second point is that the Gigabit or 2.5 Gibps copper link on the customer side of the ONT will support up to and including 100 metres of copper cabling and remain fully within Ethernet distance limits. This is really your best bet in terms of shuffling the service to where you need it from point A to B. The ONT and your router / rest of your home network do not necessarily need to be co-located.

The key point is to site the ONT in a long term space that has a mains power source and where it remains reasonably accessible and indoors.

When I had mine installed a few months ago, I was told that they were unable to enter floor voids to route cable. As this is really the only way to get to where I needed it, I asked the engineer if he'd give me the roll of fibre for the ONT and give me an hour or so to sort it out, which he had no problem with. I ran the fibre under the floor but as it was quite a long roll, so I kept 5-10m of it, coiled neatly, hanging from the joists under the floor so if I ever needed to move it, I could do so without bothering them. In the larger scale of things, a few metres of coiled fibre will make exactly zero difference to anything, given that it runs several miles from the exchange to get to my house!

That said, I'd probably work out where the best place for the ONT is and get it put there in the first place then you don't need to mess around moving it later. Just remember it needs power so wants to be located somewhere close to a socket. Mine is in an understairs cupboard, next to the UPS and router so it'll never need to be moved again unless we knock the house down!

My advice is would be, whilst what you are asking is not unreasonable, playing with fibre runs for the first time is a whole new ball game and either breaking the fibre cable or getting dust into the ont or fibre tip is higher than somebody who is ok with dealing the fibre runs. when i ran fibre to a sfp+ switch it ended up being a mega cautious run and using 2x the fibre length for the run length because i didn't understand the break radius. Oh and i hit transciever against the fibre tip and also dropped the transciever a few times.

I'd in your case, push ethernet cable to where you want the router to be and leave the ont where it won't be disturbed.That way if you break the cat cable you can replace that, if you break the fibre cable its a £100 jobbie to replace it.

Consumer grade fibre can go for 100kms with the right transceiver, and that applies to onts and olts too.

All,

I really appreciate everyone taking the time out to respond to my query.
That's giving me a lot of confidence in what to do.
I'm going to ask them to give me a 10 m coil.
But I will use the ethernet cable to cite the router and have the ONT in my garage near the socket which won't be disturbed.

Thanks again

In reply to a post by Peddlers:

All,

I really appreciate everyone taking the time out to respond to my query.
That's giving me a lot of confidence in what to do.
I'm going to ask them to give me a 10 m coil.
But I will use the ethernet cable to cite the router and have the ONT in my garage near the socket which won't be disturbed.

Thanks again

For a standard install, only 10m is allowed between the CSP and ONT. Premium permits 10 to 30m.

EDIT: FTTP Premium install costs an extra £40+VAT at wholesale. Your ISP could charge you more or less than this.

...or he could end up with a helpful Openreach engineer. That wont mind too much and will just run it in without too much bother.

In reply to a post by Peddlers:

All,

I really appreciate everyone taking the time out to respond to my query.
That's giving me a lot of confidence in what to do.
I'm going to ask them to give me a 10 m coil.
But I will use the ethernet cable to cite the router and have the ONT in my garage near the socket which won't be disturbed.

Thanks again

Depends who's doing the install. My CF/Zen installation required 20m but the contractors aren't issued with 20m so I have a 25m with the excess coiled up and pinned to the wall outside.
(After the job had been done I realised that the ONT could have gone at the front of the house, where I already have ethernet, and where the router could be located.)