Cobwebs on my glasses, but…

[malbui]

I’ve been on fibre in my house in France for a fair while, but no speed above 700 megs. My ISP offered me a deal with a new router and a couple of Euros a month more for speeds up to 8 gigs, so thought I’d have a bit of that.

New router delivered, plugged in, worked first go, but no speed increase.

A bit of reading of the small print revealed the problem: higher speeds are only possible if the router is directly connected to the fibre box by an optical cable. But my fibre box is in my cellar and is connected to another box which is in turn connected to my router upstairs by a very long Ethernet cable.

So I acquired a 20 metre optical cable and managed to break it somewhere while passing it through conduits, along the garage ceiling and through the back of a cupboard into my office. Optical cables are bastard well fragile.

I acquired a second cable and after a lot of swearing and wriggling and grazed knuckles and cobwebs on the arms of my glasses, I got it all plugged in and running.

7 gigs duplex. A far cry from my 14.4K dialup days thirty years ago.

 

[JayUtah]

So I acquired a 20 metre optical cable and managed to break it somewhere while passing it through conduits, along the garage ceiling and through the back of a cupboard into my office. Optical cables are bastard well fragile.

Yes, condolences. Running fiber optics is an art. Minimum bend radius, etc.

 

[novaphile]

Yes, condolences. Running fiber optics is an art. Minimum bend radius, etc.

You've reminded me of my favourite fibre story.

City company wanted fibre internally as the 'backbone' for their high rise building.

They went with the lowest bidder.

About two months after installation was complete, their network went dark.

My contact, went in to investigate, and started in the equipment room in the basement, because he'd been told:

"We don't know if it's related, but there's also something funny going on in the basement."

He arrived to find the equipment room, and a lot of the car park filled with clear, slippery, jelly, and a weird distortion of the fibre cable's insulation inside the wall. (Looked like a deflated balloon.)

It turns out that the 'lowest bidder' had used gel-filled fibre cabling for the main vertical run.

The gel had slowly poured downhill, snapping all the tiny fibres in hundreds of places, on the way down.
(Apologies, I can remember him telling me how many strands of fiber were in the sheath, but I can't remember now.)

He described it as a 'rookie mistake' because the cable specs clearly stated: "Not suitable for vertical cable runs."