TBH , we don’t know what the 2 new buildings on the OP ‘estate’ are to be used for , perhaps it’s accommodation for the butler and housekeepers families, this is exactly the situation for a ( relatively close by ) multi millionaire, the estate they built has buildings for the staff and a leased line distributes services to each building on the estate

Edited by Iniltous (Thu 02-May-24 08:53:01)

Or perhaps they will be rented on AirBNB in which case providing wifi would be pretty normal.

In reply to a post by jurassic86:

It is important worth noting that where the NTE comes in, we are then taking the network another 600m to my home via SMF.

To be clear, is that 600m of fibre that you're installing yourself, completely independently of Openreach?

(In theory you could lease a separate circuit from OR between the two points, but it would be horrendously expensive and completely pointless; or you could have OR deliver the circuit directly to the final location, in which case they'd put the NTE there)

In reply to a post by jurassic86:

Does the NTE only accept one router? Due to the extra distance up to my home I was unsure on best way to do it.

Either use a media converter from the router to the fibre and then back to my house with another media converter or can the NTE accept two fibre outgoing connections.?

The NTE terminates the leased line only, and assuming the 600m point-to-point fibre link is your own cable, then has nothing to do with that. If you ordered the 600m fibre as a separate managed circuit from OR then it would have its own NTE at each end.

The simplest setup is to connect NTE to router, and then a LAN port on the router would connect to the 600m fibre, and then at the other end of that you put a switch with a fibre uplink. (Don't use media converters; they're unreliable. Use a router and switch that have SFP or SFP+ ports)

The next question is: is the router being provided by TTB as part of a managed service? In that case, you can only take what they are offering, and there's no point us giving you other options. The handover is the LAN port(s) on the router, and you cannot touch the router itself.

But if this is a "wires only" service (meaning the service they deliver ends at the NTE), and they're only offering to sell you a router as a courtesy, which they're not configuring or managing for you, then there are certainly better and more cost effective options we can explore.

To be honest though, you might be better off getting a network engineer to design this for you, rather than relying on the opinion of random people on the Internet Things like building internal wiring and wifi access points will no doubt need to be considered too.

I am very sorry I should have been a little more specific.

The TTB service ends at the NTE. They have offered to sell / rent me the following equipment:

Cisco ISR4331 Router
Cisco 891F Router

Obviously they are hugely expensive so first question for members is - can anyone suggest something else, or would you stick with one of the above?

Regarding the NTE and location - we opted to get the NTE to our "Gate House" as if we wanted it to our main house, the installation cost was an additional £40k. We therefore decided we could put the infrastructure in (OS2) from the "Gate House" to the "Manor House" plant room, which is 600M away. The "Manor House" plant room is then linked to the "Manor House" via MMF as the distances are only a 100/150.

In the "Manor House" the current connectivity is via a Huawei 4G Route in the loft. Its surprisingly reliable and offers a good 40/50mb download but the need for a dedicated IP for our security monitoring company renders the mobile solution no good.

So now we have the NTE installed in the Gatehouse, which ironically we have demolished and replaced with two more. We do not intend on selling these, and instead will have these as staff accommodation, so will simply feed the network into the properties and install a Unifi Mesh System.

What I wondered was - do we have the service into the "Gatehouse" and then extend the LAN into the manor via the new fibre we connected, or would it be more beneficial to "patch" the NTE fibre into "Manor House" plant room where we would have the TTB Router (or another type) then "backfeed" the connection down two of the other cores back to the "Gatehouse" where less of a demand and service requirement is needed?

if the speeds are likely to be the same, then obviously it makes more sense to terminate at bottom of my driveway and then feed the network up to the house.

Any advise would be welcome.

In reply to a post by jurassic86:

The TTB service ends at the NTE. They have offered to sell / rent me the following equipment:

Cisco ISR4331 Router
Cisco 891F Router

Obviously they are hugely expensive so first question for members is - can anyone suggest something else, or would you stick with one of the above?

Ultimately, it depends on who is going to be building and supporting your network.

For a fraction of the cost of the above items, a Mikrotik RB4011 or RB5009 will wipe the floor with them performance wise (and you can buy a second as a spare). However, are you able to configure one? TTB won't do this for you, but they might supply the Cisco routers pre-configured.

Those models only have one SFP(+) port, meaning one fibre connection. Have you yet found out whether the connection that you make into the NTE will be presented as copper or fibre?

If you need multiple fibre connections to multiple buildings, something like the CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS has a ton of fibre ports. Since it's a router, you can give different subnets to each building (a good way to scale your network), apply ACLs between the subnets, etc.

In reply to a post by jurassic86:

What I wondered was - do we have the service into the "Gatehouse" and then extend the LAN into the manor via the new fibre we connected, or would it be more beneficial to "patch" the NTE fibre into "Manor House" plant room where we would have the TTB Router (or another type) then "backfeed" the connection down two of the other cores back to the "Gatehouse" where less of a demand and service requirement is needed?

It's a shame that you don't have SMF between the manor house and manor house plant room, because then you could simply patch the fibres together passively.

As an overarching principle: you want to bring all the fibres from the different buildings into one location(*) and fan out from there. Are other buildings likely to be fibred up to the manor house plant room, or to the gatehouse?

Putting the router next to the NTE would be simplest - both on a UPS of course. You could then fan out all the connections from there.

However, to serve the manor house you'd need to install a switch in the plant room to connect the SMF to the MMF. (Or if it's ducted, you pull another SMF cable).

Putting the router the Manor house plant room makes no difference from a performance point of view. But it would allow you to use the MMF to the manor house and SMF to the gatehouse (in different router ports). If there are other buildings that have fibre connections back to the manor house plant room, that would also be a logical location.

As you say, to provide Internet access to the gatehouse itself will involve using another pair back to the gatehouse, but that's no big deal. The gatehouse will need a switch with one fibre port. Even the tiny Mikrotik hEX PoE will do the job (it's a router but can be configured as a switch, and has 4 PoE ports for connecting access points). For more ports there are the CRS switches, or things like Netgear GS110TP.

For reference: at home I use the RB4011, hEX PoE and GS110TP. I've not used the CRS switches. The RB5009 is newer than the RB4011, but the RB5009 can *only* run RouterOS v7 (the RB4011 can run v6 or v7). v7 has had a chequered history, but should be stable enough now.

(*) However it's fine to patch fibres together: with no active equipment in the path, that counts as a direct connection.

An RB5009 connected to a CRS305 might be a plan at the edge of the site. At the other end of the fibre a CRS309 leaves 7 SFP ports to serve the buildings with up to 10 Gb and if more switch ports or PoE are needed it can branch out from there with switches closer to where the ports need to be. Spine and leaf network rather than the star you mentioned

Thanks for this, can I assume that these are simply a bigger version of a media converter? So I could terminate the fibre into these and then patch it into my network switch?

CRS305 and CRS309 are both switches. https://mikrotik.com/products/group/switches

It's better if you have a switch with an SFP port, than to use a media converter. Media converters do work but tend to be unreliable. They're also dumb (unmanaged) so you can't monitor them.

A managed switch with an SFP port and a decent DOM-enabled SFP will be able to report things like the transmit/receive light levels, voltages, temperature etc.

Thanks for the reply,

Would it be possible to connect both MMF and SMF into the switch? If so that would solve a lot of my problems.

Yes. Each SFP port is independent, and you plug whatever type of SFP module you require for that particular link, which can be 1G or 10G, multi-mode or single-mode, etc. (SFP = 1G, SFP+ = 10G; most SFP+ ports can also take SFP modules)

There is actually one special case which is 1000baseLX: this standard works on both SMF and MMF. However the device at the other end also has to be 1000baseLX. If you want it to talk to a media converter which is 1000baseSX then you'd need a 1000baseSX module.

It's easy to remember: L = long haul = single mode, S = short haul = multi mode. You can tell the difference by looking at the wavelength on the module. If it's 1G and it says 850nm, it's SX. If it's 1310nm, it's LX.

Very good (i.e. carrier grade) modules are available from Flexoptics and Approved Optics, at about 1/10th of the price of those from Cisco/Juniper etc. The Chinese ones from fs.com aren't bad and are even cheaper, so you can keep some spares in stock. Avoid vendors on Amazon: you have no idea what you're getting.