Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Can confirm, DIY fiber is not too difficult to figure out yourself. For most uses outside of an ISP you don't need the super-low loss that you get with a fusion splicer.

When I needed to wire up a campground and some cabins I studied a couple of the Fiber Optic Association textbooks and I recommend them as informative and easy to read. Also it is pretty easy to spend $50-100 over and over again on "one more tool" to save time and effort.

On a random tangent, DIY fiber topics often makes me think back to a book about Kevin Mitnick (Takedown I think) where the author describes how he has fiber running around his house for various reasons. That was pre-1995 which was when the book was published; I imagine it was much more difficult and expensive back then.



I honestly found it no harder than anything else - I just did a 300m run to an outbuilding, as 802.11g just wasn’t cutting it, and the project basically compromised two media converters, a reel of armoured fibre, and a termination kit - took all of an afternoon to do.

I guess it’s just overkill in most scenarios - but for long runs, you can’t beat it. I’ve also got a 200m cat6 PoE run with a repeater/voltage booster halfway down, and it does duplexed gigabit just fine - which even further limits the scenarios in which fibre is the better option. Even with the repeater it was cheaper than the fibre alone, never mind the media converters.


My training in the US Army included learning to splice fiber optic cable by hand, including polishing the end of the fiber itself! That was in 1993.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: