The need for stable, reliable connectivity for your guests has continued to increase and now many guests work and go to school remotely, allowing them to travel more and stay with you longer if they have good connectivity. Most guests also want to stay connected, posting to social media and enjoying streaming services.
One major step you can take to increase both performance and stability of your WiFi system is to add Fiber Optic Cabling to connect your access points to your WiFi system.
This is not the same thing as using fiber to bring the Internet to your property; this is connecting the remote access points on your property to the system using fiber inside your property.
When you connect the remote access points on your property with fiber you ensure that the access points have a stable, high bandwidth connection to your WiFi controller, providing a faster, more stable connection for your guests.
What is Fiber? Fiber Optic Cabling is a flexible tube to transmit light. The fibers themselves are little bigger than a piece of string and are usually enclosed in a jacket around the size of a pencil or a little bigger. They are flexible like coax cable and different types of fiber can be buried or run through walls or strung on telephone poles.
Fiber can carry much more data than Ethernet or coax cables, run over much longer distances and is immune to electrical interference and extremely resistant to lightning damage. Fiber can carry multiple networks at the same time and has a life expectancy of around 25 years. Depending upon the type of cable you use it will cost between twenty cents to a dollar a foot.
Planning your Fiber Install
The biggest cost factor in adding fiber to your system is labor. If you are building new, expanding or remodeling you should plan on installing fiber in the walls, conduits or overhead wire drops at the time of construction, even if you are not ready to use it right away. This will save you significant money and time when you are ready to start using it.
Fiber is immune to electrical interference and can share conduit with electrical wiring (when allowed by local electrical codes). Certain types of fiber can be buried directly in the ground with no conduit.
Fiber install can be a do-it-yourself project or can be installed by a cable contractor. Increasingly local electricians are also installing fiber.
In most cases you will use multimode fiber, which can generally yield gigabit speeds up to half a mile and is lower in cost.
You also need to determine if you are going to run the cable in walls (using plenum rated cables), strung overhead or run in conduits or buried using direct burial cable.
Once the fiber cable is in place it will need to be terminated. Terminations are the physical connectors on the end of the fiber. Installing terminations on fiber takes specialized tools, although you can order cable in specific lengths pre-terminated to make installation easier.
Most networking equipment will not directly connect to fiber, in most cases to connect you will use media converters to connect from fiber to the Ethernet connectors on your access points and controllers. Media converters are small devices (about the size of a pack of cards) and fairly inexpensive. Some Ethernet switches will have fiber ports that can connect directly to fiber.
Q & A
How much data can fiber carry?
Common low cost fiber cables can carry from 1 Gigabits to 10 Gigabits, or over 10,000 Megabits of data per second.
What distance can fiber cover?
While copper Ethernet wires are limited to around 300 feet and is susceptible to interference, fiber cabling can easily cover miles and is immune from almost all forms of interference.
Do I need to use fiber for all of my access points?
Ideally all access points would be wired when possible. For cable runs under three hundred feet and inside the same building you can use less expensive Cat 5e or Cat 6 Ethernet cable. For distances over three hundred feet or for connections that run from one building to another building or areas far from the building we recommend fiber.
What if I can’t connect all of my access points?
CheckBox Meshing Access Points can connect wirelessly to each other, if they are within range, and will automatically form a wireless network that will connect wirelessly back to your WiFi controller. You will need to have at least one access point wired to the controller and more if possible.