I've dug a long trench for a water pipe so before I fill it I could add an ethernet cable or two, so i can have a wifi hub in the shed, security camera, whatever...
£37 for 50 meters at ebay CAT5E CABLE UTP GREY 50M REEL, ETHERNET CABLE FOR PRO POWERis there a cheap pipe i could put it in with a string so more could be pulled through in the future?
how would you do this?
george
You can get direct-bury ethernet cable, so you don't bother with the duct/pipe, pulling extra cables through later is always harder than you expect.
I put in [direct bury] and found this
thanks Andy B !
I'll probably buy that later tonight .,...
[g]
Personally, I'd just lay the mains and add a Powerline plug at each end but I wouldn't become very popular with local radio amateurs.
Nick
They're having a laugh. Pro Power is Farnell/CPC's own brand, and the same is £19.55 inc VAT direct:
Look for 'smooth wall duct', for example:
Theo
The builder who built my man-cave for me laid a duct with a string in it. I pulled exterior grade Cat5E through it with no problem at all.
I'm sure one day I'll want a fibre, which is why the duct.
Andy
I have used blue plastic water pipe although it is the wrong colour. I did find I could push TV coax through a length of about 20 metres. I believe that you can also use a vacuum cleaner to suck a cotton bud attached to a thread down a longer length.
But did you also pull another bit of string with the cable in case in future you need another cable as well as the one you pulled through?
Looking at the limited specification data I'd say that's no different from 'normal' outdoor CAT 5E cable and has no extra physical protection from being hit by a spade so I'd be vary wary about their "Direct Burial" claim.
Also they say say "CCA conducrors" = Copper Coated Aluminium - that's not good.
+1
avoid any ethernet cable that is based on CCA or CCS.
(CCS is Copper clad steel)
ethernet cable based on pure copper conductors is more expensive but you will then have far less issues with it.
Also I'd look to using the next generation cable such as Cat6a or Cat7 for future ease of upgradeability if direct burial.
If you're using a plastic conduit, then it won't matter as then you can pull the new cable through using the old cable.
P.S.
If you want armoured ethernet, that available instead, but you're not going to die sticking a spade into ethernet
Indeed, there's a better non-armoured product in the recommended items
Go fibre now?
Some time ago I made the decision to buy switches with Mini GBIC (SFP transceiver ports).
Mine are cheap TP-LINK managed fanless. As long as you haven't gone for something with vendor module lock-in (cisco), Gigabit transceivers are also cheap (£10/pair on eBay).
I was previously going other some expensive route to install 1ightning* protection to copper cable.
scaffold pipe is good
I seen people use 40mm waste pipe as well. With 45 degree bends to bring it above ground
Also given what it is, you might find that plumbers solderless plastic water pipe might do it.
It really isn't a serious problem. Unless you joint underground, cat 5 can probably be laid straight in the ground, although its likely to increase attenuation a bit over the free air performance
putting it in a pipe that then fills with water is not an improvement on that, either.
Really, don't. Powerline is, like wifi, at best an inferior alternative to cable. At worst its unreliable and unusable
I think that fibre is an infinitely better technology for outdoor networking - its just rather more expensive and harder to terminate.
It might be interesting for anyone who has done it themselves to post their experiences
You can buy pre-terminated fibre patch leads in different lengths.
How do I know this? When the appointed contractor came to fit my ONT & Router, he was only allowed to install to ground floor whereas I wanted it in the loft.
He left me a pre-terminated patch fibre of 20 metres length free of charge so that I could relocate the ONT and router myself. :-)
If it's not for a campus linking half a dozen buildings, but an office down the bottom of the garden type install, rather than have to get someone in to splice long runs into the pigtails of fibre trays, it'd probably be worth going with pre-terminated fibre, e.g.
Not underground, but I've done a lot of datacentre stuff. We mostly use copper SFP+ Direct Attach where possible because it's cheaper with no transceivers, but there's a lot of SFP and SFP+ kit available used for cheap.
Get a pre-terminated fibre and some fibre modules. It's harder to poke down a duct but saves hassles terminating the ends. Switches with an SFP (gigabit) slot are cheap used these days.
If you want to go to SFP+ (10G) currently cheapest is two SFP+ ethernet cards point-to-point, but switches are coming down in price a lot.
The advantage of fibre is you can always upgrade 1G -> 10G -> 25G in future if you want, whereas with copper it's a lot harder. Fibre also doesn't suffer from corrosion due to water ingress.
You probably want multimode over single mode fibre and it's probably worth getting OM3 or better fibre if you can - it's not too expensive and it works better at higher speeds:
Get all the parts and test everything before you bury it.
I would probably be tempted to bury a couple of runs of cat5e or cat6 as well though - handy for other kinds of non-ethernet signalling, like TV or sensors or alarms or whatever.
Theo
That is certainly an option - I do hate wide area wiring that ends in
*plugs* though.I wonder if there is a wall plate that is female to female?
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