I’ve had fiber installed at two houses this year, and in both they worked with me to get the fiber, the ONT and the Ethernet exactly where I wanted them at no additional charge. At my old house, the fiber came in through the basement in the back, the fiber runs under the joists until it ends up under my office, and they ran Ethernet up to an outlet on the office wall. At the new house, it enters into my basement workshop, on the top shelf of a cabinet, where the ONT is and Ethernet goes to my router. There is plenty of extra fiber coiled above the drop ceiling for relocation.
msabeln
joined 1 year ago
Imagine you want a drink of water. What is best: going outside in the rain and opening your mouth up to catch drops, or turning on a water faucet? WiFi is like rain, Ethernet is like a faucet.
My place of employment has an 80 Mbps upload / 80 Mbps download fiber optic connection, with approximately 150 users. The network works fine, but the network hardware is good, enterprise-class hardware: Fortigate firewall, Cisco routers, Brocade managed switches, and Extreme Networks WiFi access points.
Sure, no one is downloading games over the network, although there are a lot of software updates, but they are doing extensive YouTube and Netflix streaming, etc., and our supposedly tiny 80 Mbps connection handles multiple 2K streams without issue, and without lag or hiccups.
The first most important thing our network does beyond typical consumer hardware is traffic shaping, Quality of Service, and traffic prioritization. There simply isn't any reason why software updates, downloads, and media streams need to have low latency, but it is critical that interactive processes get high priority. ASUS routers have some of these functions, but a router distribution such as pFSense, OPNsense, or OpenWRT, running on PC hardware will do it better than simple consumer models. Consider the "prosumer" class Omada or UniFi product lines as well.
Small but frequent critical infrastructure traffic such as DNS and clock synchronization is centralized on the network, so that each and every device is no longer getting that information from over the Internet, but from a local server, and our firewall enforces that, redirecting or blocking attempts to bypass the local server. Many Windows and Google updates are also locally handled by a server, so these updates gets downloaded only once.
It depends on the neighborhood. Where I live, all utilities are underground. At a former house, I had broadband coming from utility poles.