[HN Gopher] 10mbps over 1km on a single pair of wires ___________________________________________________________________ 10mbps over 1km on a single pair of wires Author : yosheli123 Score : 242 points Date : 2022-06-22 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (botblox.io) (TXT) w3m dump (botblox.io) | vicek22 wrote: | - 1km of fiber optic cable - https://www.amazon.com/Jeirdus- | Launch-Singlemode-Measuring-O... - 1Gb modem - | https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Ethernet-Converter-Multi-Mode... | | The price for two modems and the cable is just under $120 | terom wrote: | A 1km reel of unsheathed 9/125um single fiber strand would last | maybe about one minute during installation before it snapped. | Zenst wrote: | 1KM of fiber cable for $60 seems crazy cheap when you contrast | it with 3D printer filement. More so as I'd of thought the | former be more expensive to manufacture. | klodolph wrote: | There aren't that many types of fiber optic cable, the actual | cable diameter is extremely small (single mode might have 9um | core), and the product is used in large quantities by price- | sensitive, sophisticated consumers doing large-scale capital | investments. Ethernet cable is also very cheap. | | 3D filament is a consumable, like paper! | inetknght wrote: | Fiber is generally laid just once. But the filament is a | recurring cost to consumers so it provides more value to | businesses ... and therefore more opportunity for a higher | demand and higher price. | Zenst wrote: | Does seem very much that the whole 3D filement market just | needs one disruptive supplier. Which often happens when you | have high-margin consumables markets. Which with the ink | printer market saw makes of the printers introduce DRM into | the consumables - something I don't see happing with 3D | filement though, so could be interesting. | | That all said, I see that there are products that can | convert your plastic bottles into 3D printer filement - | https://3devo.wpmudev.host/filament-makers/ | ape4 wrote: | You can also buy 50km on that page! But the fiber is raw | (unprotected) so I would think that its not usable to run | outdoors? | Youden wrote: | You linked unterminated single-mode fiber and a dual-fiber | multi-mode media converter, you can't actually use these | together. | | You need something more like this: | | - Terminated single-mode fiber: | https://www.fs.com/products/74355.html?attribute=255&id=3029... | | - 2x SFP transceivers: https://www.fs.com/products/75335.html | | - 2x media converters (or NICs): | https://www.fs.com/products/96396.html | | The price is over $200. | nousermane wrote: | Wouldn't cost of burying that cable be like 50x of that | anyway? | sethhochberg wrote: | These solutions for things like IP-over-copper-pair are | typically designed for situations where you already have | the cable buried or strung on poles or whatever - so the | choice isn't whether to lay new copper or lay new fiber at | roughly equal expense, its really whether to use the | existing copper or lay the new fiber at much greater | expense | jagger27 wrote: | Thank you, this wasn't clicking for me until I read this. | Of course there are countless places with a dead phone | line hanging between them. | hinkley wrote: | Or a fat old conduit that you can run a new wire | through... | jagger27 wrote: | I can't imagine a scenario where you already have a 1km | long conduit that doesn't already have copper or fibre in | it. Why would you choose to push a kilometre of brand new | copper twisted pair line down an existing conduit just to | squeeze 10 Mbps out of it? The hard part is already done | and fibre equipment is pretty cheap. | | If the conduit already has a phone line in it that isn't | being used, sure. | zakki wrote: | If you look closely in the parent's fiber product photo (last | picture), the seller providing the connector for free. | yosheli123 wrote: | Yeah, I think there's other considerations like power, overall | size, input voltage supply, ease of maintenance etc. | | If it's purely down to cost then I don't these modules would | compete | xhrpost wrote: | Nitpick, I don't think you're going to just run bare fiber | outdoors, not even indoors. You would need to first run your | own ducting/conduit and then have the equipment to pressure | force the raw line through the shielding. So, much more | expensive. But you can get outdoor rated cable with moisture | absorbing gel for not too much I believe (struggling to find a | price). Some even come with wire-mesh already attached in the | event you have to hang it between elevated positions (like | telephone poles). But you would need all of that for a copper | run outdoors as well so it doesn't change your point. | | Back to your point, fiber came to my mind as well. Why bother | running CAT5/6 when you can just run fiber? Maybe its meant for | existing infrastructure? But if that's the case, what was | utilizing that infra before? Is it just in cases where you | happen to have phone lines running between buildings? | snickmy wrote: | what does 'pressure force the raw line through the shielding' | means ? | jacknews wrote: | SPE (Single-Pair Ethernet) is going to be a big deal, IMHO, and I | would view this as a 'development board' for learning, though | perhaps it also makes economic sense as an actual solution in | some situations. | | The other killer feature of SPE (apart from in-theory cheaper | cabling) is PoDL (Power over data line). Does this board do that? | ginko wrote: | What's the advantage of SPE compared to regular ethernet? That | it's cheaper? | quickthrower2 wrote: | Well my house has electricity sockets but no ethernet | sockets, so it would be less expensive than getting those | installed. If I could stomach sub-wifi speeds. | phonon wrote: | Have you tried G.hn powerline to Ethernet? | 2000UltraDeluxe wrote: | Why not use the power lines? | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug | plasticchris wrote: | Just get a decent mesh WiFi, should get around 600mbps or | better, it's cheaper too. | NegativeLatency wrote: | You can do your own Ethernet, it's especially easy if | you're just running a wire or two for an extra AP or | something with premade cables | jacknews wrote: | Cheaper cabling, at least in theory, but I'm not sure | ethernet (for data) is the right comparison. | | IMHO, in the near future, data-intensive connections will | move to wifi 6/7/etc, or to fiber. Copper will be for | providing data _and_ power. IMHO, it makes more sense to | compare SPE to current PoE networks /devices, powered wifi | devices, CAN bus, rs485/modbus, and other wired IoT and | industrial networks. | yosheli123 wrote: | Smaller, lower power, more reliable + a somewhat open spec | being developed around it (unlike things like homeplug which | are kinda murky). Generally it's the same people who | developed the ethernet spec that are developing single pair | ethernet, so it's designed to play nicely with it. | Ahwd wrote: | PeterPumpkin45 wrote: | worldofmatthew wrote: | Something like this is what this is competing with; | https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314029740243 | | In the US, you will be able to get these cheaper than the product | on Botblox and with better performance (both products require a | pair). "20/12Mbps over a long distance of 1.4km" | | The author might be more competitive when he managers to go | $100/pair (which he mentioned in another post he plans to by Apr | 2023). | varjag wrote: | DSL isn't it. Not anywhere as easy to embed into products as 2 | wire Ethernet, and you miss PoE option. | [deleted] | worldofmatthew wrote: | Not a hard problem to solve as both are twisted pair and POE | injectors are a extremely cheap. | yosheli123 wrote: | tbh I don't think I'm really ever going to compete with the | mass volume stuff on DSL. I think this is more for | applications where space is the key motivator, rather than | cost. | yosheli123 wrote: | Yeah I'm really targeting directly embedded applications that | will want single pair ethernet. Robot tethers and things like | that. | | $200 a pair is definitely possible. $100 a pair is probably | possible in a year or so, I just can't place orders for the | chips in bulk because of the chip shortage so everything is | inflated. | [deleted] | superkuh wrote: | If you use a surface wave transmission line with RF launcher | cones on the ends you can send gigabits over a _single_ 28 awg | copper wire at very low loss from 100 MHz to ~10 GHz. The only | problem is that the line has to be suspended and away from | conductors. | madengr wrote: | superkuh wrote: | madengr responded with a completely on topic link to a surface | wave transmission line start-up. But it looks like that | comment, and 2/3 of their other on-topic posts are getting | grayed out [dead]. I don't think they know. | | madngr: your account my be shadowbanned and only viewable by | those like me that show dead posts. | gtirloni wrote: | Why are you mostly ignoring fiber comments in this thread? It | seems like a no-brainer. | withinboredom wrote: | There are lots of reasons to choose something other than fiber, | this isn't/shouldn't be a discussion of why you, or anyone | else, would choose fiber instead of this product. It's pretty | obvious that there is fiber in the world and saying "but | there's fiber!" isn't very constructive. | | Some off the top of my head reasons why I wouldn't choose | fiber: | | - runs that require turning very sharply, beyond what fiber can | handle. | | - applications where the cable can undergo sheering forces | causing sharp bends or damage. | | - applications where the cabling already exists. | | - in cases where the cabling is already owned thus this becomes | quite cheap. | kjs3 wrote: | No one is obligated to respond to every "you didn't do it the | way _I_ would have done it " comment. | neilalexander wrote: | Unless you absolutely need to go 1 kilometre specifically, what | are the advantages to this over using G.hn? On shorter runs G.hn | will go anything up to 1.8Gbps and will still manage well over | 100Mbps on anything up to about 700-800 metres. Even | better/further with coaxial instead of twisted pair. | | I've been using a pair of GIGA Copper G4201TMs to take advantage | of twisted pair wiring at home rather than having to rip it out | and it also appears more cost-effective: | https://www.gigacopper.net/web/en/ghn_faq_en.html | jimmyswimmy wrote: | Actually need something like this, but I need to be able to | program the microcontroller for my own uses (to use it to convert | and transfer sensor data). Is the firmware source code available? | zajio1am wrote: | 10 mbps or 10 Mbps? That is 9 orders of magnitude difference. | memorable wrote: | The website says 10Mbps. OP seems to not pay attention to that. | ladyattis wrote: | I wonder if keeping the wires on a spool is what allows the speed | to be the range of 10mbps? I only ask because I know at least for | radio signals there's capacitive coupling between wires which | some signal leakage will happen. But I assume as long as the | signals are differential as in current flow between the two wires | are in opposition which should in theory be fine, so common mode | signals ought not to leak over. | gandalfian wrote: | I'm 1km of copper to green box, then fibre rest of way to | telephone exchange. VDSL 40mb down and 6mbs up. That's on a | 1980's buried copper cable. | unwind wrote: | Neat, but is that copper a single pair? | midasuni wrote: | Yes that's how the traditional phone system works, single | pair from your house back to the exchange (via a jumper block | in a cabinet nearby). Modern DSL equipment can get upto | 50mbit aggregate speed over 1km of traditional phone wire (so | 40/10, or 30/20 or however you would want to set it up) | | Condition of the wire will effect it of course, aluminium | wire, ground conditions, cross talk etc could lower your | speed. | jandrese wrote: | I think the difference with this product is the | transceivers are $150 each and you don't need anything else | to use them except for a couple of power supplies. | | I do find it interesting that their box diagram claims a | 2km range. | anderiv wrote: | DSL uses a single pair, yes. | geozimm wrote: | All these things are related. Back in the 1990s I worked with | others to develop DSL technologies (ADSL, HDSL, VDSL) for telcos. | Why not fiber, some ask? oh, fiber materials may be sand, but | installed fiber is sand, energy, and labor. Installation costs | trump everything - use what you have for the physical medium. | | While we (PairGain) also made point-to-point private links, it | was clear then, and even moreso now that most DSL involves a | service provider managing the network - with specialized skills, | practices and setup. | | In the 2010's I was spending time with the Ethernet folks, and in | particular industrial folks with large plants. I ended up | chairing IEEE Std 802.3cg which developed the 10 Mb/s 1km | technology. Not really a speed increase - more an application | refocus. As the networking world developed, many realized that | converging networks above the physical layer added network | complexity and therefore setup and ongoing operating costs... So | we now also have SPE - pure Ethernet at DSL-like distances... | | Similar tech with different use models, enabling connectivity for | whatever... | | I'm not Al Gore - I won't claim to have invented the internet. I | just an engineer who happened to have a hand in both of these | technologies, and am still pleased to see that people use them. | cm2187 wrote: | Fiber doesn't conduct electricity, a wire does. I remember | reading somewhere to be careful with running a wire over any | long distance between two houses that are not connected to the | grid with the same meter. Something to do with phase or | different potential, can't remember, but the point was it could | fry your equipment. Fiber sounds a lot safer to me. | midasuni wrote: | The biggest problem is lightning strikes hitting the cable. | The phase wouldn't matter - and even different earthing | wouldn't matter as long as you only connect any shield at one | end. | | But fibre is so much more versatile if you're running new | cables (unless you want to run power) | repiret wrote: | Last summer the local cable company replaced all their | cables in town in order to begin offering digital cable and | internet service. I was flabbergasted that they they spent | all that money on linemen but still ran coax rather than | fiber. As far as I can tell talking to their linemen, its | not even FTTN, just FTT-central-office. | | Assuming its not run by morons, which I'll accept is a bit | of a stretch for a cable company, there must be some other | reason to not run fiber for new installations. | Aloha wrote: | Cost and Fragility. | | You can push around 1GHz of bandwidth on the normal | hardline-feed line with taps system cable uses, each node | is designed to pass by a certain number of households. | | Coax is.. cheap, forgiving, easy to terminate, and | inexpensive to replace - Fiber is more expensive, | unforgiving, and much harder to terminate. | rodgerd wrote: | https://www.chorus.co.nz/tools-support/broadband- | tools/broad... | | New Zealand has fibre to the home for the majority of a | country the side of the eastern seaboard of the US, with | only 5 million people, and a lower per-capita GDP. | | It's doable. It's just a question of wanting to. | Aloha wrote: | Its just not as efficient, you can deliver similar | classes of service by HFC networks. | GreyStache wrote: | Regarding the termination: our local fiber provider | handles the termination with some optical precision | connector (forgot the name). Both to the sunken-in- | sidewalk multiplexer and in the home to the optical | termination point (both gpon). So for mass deployments | fiber connections do not require fibre welds are not | required. | | I have to see it play out in practice and I'm not a fan | of the idea that one telco controls controls (ie stifles | competition) in a gpon scenario. The conduit has recently | been placed in our street, so "soon"... | Aloha wrote: | I'm still a fan for cost reasons of FTTN, because I think | with Coax in the last mile, you can deliver fantastic | performance, so long as you're not also trying to | delivery video too. | | Furthermore if you actually run Coax in duct for buried | circuits, its easy to replace with fiber later. | bayindirh wrote: | Our telco converted all its infra to FTTN via fiber. So, | I've actually have fiber connection up to the front of my | building, then it's terminated and distributed via VDSL | to the street. | | I have a 50/8 mbps connection at home and, it gives all | the performance it can give. The telco keeps the speeds a | bit higher to handle VDSL overhead, so we have a real | 50/8 mbps IP connection at premises. | | I'd rather not rewire my home and use existing equipment | (which can handle 350mpbs), rather than bringing in | fragile fiber into the home. | xenadu02 wrote: | This sounds like post-hoc rationalization. | | I have Sonic fiber in SF. 1Gbps symmetric, over a | "fragile fiber" run directly into my home. It works quite | well. The drop cable is pre-made in standard lengths with | weatherproof connectors. The glass is embedded in a | large-ish diameter substrate that resists sharp bends | naturally so the installers don't need to take special | care to prevent losses, just don't try to force the cable | to bend beyond what it wants to do (very different from | your standard fiber patch cables in a switch room). It is | robust enough you could cable staple it to a wall without | issue. Terminates in a tiny ONT that gives me Ethernet on | my side. | | They're deploying 10Gbps for all new installs and I'm | eagerly awaiting my upgrade. No change to the fiber | itself are required, just swapping equipment on both | ends. This same fiber can do 100Gbps in the future if the | need arises, possibly more. No coax plant can come close. | The fact that an independent ISP can do this for | $40/month and make money at it proves the economics. | | There is no reason not to run fiber unless you're more | focused on rent extraction than investing in your | business... at least in suburbs and cities. (See ATT's | public comments and focus on milking wireless while dis- | investing in physical plant as an example of goosing | profits because they don't face real competition in most | of their service area). | madaxe_again wrote: | Then you just install a lightning arrestor on your comms | circuit - I have a mast way up the hill to provide our | connectivity here, and use one on the Ethernet line down to | prevent issues (like a house fire) from a strike. | dboreham wrote: | There's really no "just" concerning lightning protection. | You can just add some protection, to code or above, but | it may not work. Nature can be unforgiving. | Aloha wrote: | You have to assume a direct hit by lightening will fry | your hardware, period, full stop - proper grounding and | lightning protection however will mean that the hardware | does not catch fire. | Animats wrote: | There are lightning protectors that will absorb a direct | lightning strike. Most antennas on hilltops and tall | buildings have them. They take lightning strikes | routinely. Here's some ARRL material on lightning | protection.[1] | | It's not difficult, but it's not miniature. A classic | design was a soup-can sized device with a coax connector | on each end and a hulking big ground connection on the | can. Inside was a spark gap with dime-sized silver | contacts, and a few turns of copper busbar as an inductor | to smooth out the spike that got past the spark gap. That | goes where the cable enters the building. Similar units | today tend to be smaller. There will still be serious | metal boxes.[1] | | You need a serious ground. As in hulking big copper cable | to a long ground rod. Grounding to a pipe is no longer | allowed; there might be plastic pipe somewhere in the | system, either now or in the future. | | The next stage is a "central office protector". This is a | gas tube with three terminals - both sides of the line, | and ground. So it's an enclosed spark gap in an inert | gas. An overvoltage will ionize the gas and short it to | ground. Telco central offices have one of those on each | line. They're plug-in devices that sometimes have to be | replaced. | | There's a lot of obviously fake stuff on eBay and Amazon | in this area. 2D logos superimposed on curved surfaces, | even. There's a standard, UL 497B. If it doesn't have | that certification, don't buy. | | [1] https://www.polyphaser.com/search?Category=Data+Surge | +Protec... | | [1] http://www.arrl.org/lightning-protection | Aloha wrote: | Well, Howdy! | | I'm a licensed radio amateur since 1996, I've spent about | 20 years working in the cellular/telecom/two way radio | industry, and I've done Motorola R56 inspections (as well | as other proprietary grounding standards). | | I respectfully disagree, a direct lightning strike almost | certainly will take out gear at a cell site, even when | properly grounded. Similarly a direct strike to telco | cable will certainly fuse the 16-20ga wire in the cable | itself at the first point its near a ground. Carbons, | Glass Tubes, and other similar hardware will protect you | in the event of a nearby strike (like to a lightning rod | on a tower, or building) - but wont save you if the | infrastructure is struck itself. | | Generally the point of lightning protection systems is to | well ground the tower, to draw the lightening away - so | the tower and grounding system can protect the equipment | - that isn't a direct strike by what I'm saying here - a | direct strike would be if it struck the antenna itself. | | Thats the perspective I have from cleaning up from | strikes at well grounded and protected tower sites. | Animats wrote: | Yes, few antennas really need to remain operational | against direct hits. Nor do they usually need to be the | highest thing on the tower. | | Data cables aren't usually up that high, fortunately. | Power cables, though, are. In some areas high tension | towers carry a ground wire between the peaks of the | towers for lightning protection. It's impressive to see | those systems take repeated direct hits without the | lights even flickering. I've seen that in Florida. | | Worst case is probably is an AM broadcast station where | the tower is isolated from the ground at the base. WSM in | Nashville TN is like that. They had a pipe ground | vaporized and windows blown out in a lightning strike in | December 2019. They lost the tower lighting and some | transmission components were damaged, but they apparently | stayed on the air. | | The Empire State Building takes about 25 lightning hits a | year. I wonder what their lightning protection looks | like. | upofadown wrote: | ... also lightning strikes hitting the ground somewhere in | the area. That can induce large voltage differences between | the power grounds on the buildings. The voltage difference | might be large enough to arc across any isolation provided | by the physical network implementation. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | My neighbor's house was hit by lightning last year and it | took out the ethernet ports on two of my devices. Nothing | else was affected though. Those devices still work. | They're on a PoE switch (though not using PoE) so that | may have been part of the cause. | dekhn wrote: | Any long run like this would use optoisolaters. | aidenn0 wrote: | Magnetic coupling removes any issues with potentials, and if | it's not AC at the same frequency as what's in the wall, the | phase is irrelevant. | willglynn wrote: | I'd like to add a few asterisks: | | Magnetic coupling removes issues with potentials _up to the | dielectric breakdown voltage_. Ethernet magnetics are | considered high potential components, and even the entry | level options will isolate at least 1.5kV, but fault events | often exceed that figure. | | Magnetic coupling removes issues with _common mode_ | potentials. If the + and - side of a pair are both a | thousand volts away from the pair on the secondary side, no | problem. If a wire pair suddenly measures a thousand volts | across... well, Ethernet transformers are typically wound | 1:1. | | _Ideal_ magnetic coupling removes issues with potentials. | Ideal transformers behave as above, but real transformers | have parasitic effects, particularly winding capacitance. | Fast transients (including ESD) can and do capacitively | couple across the transformer from primary to secondary. | | Magnetics are important but do not solve the problem on | their own. It is possible to design and manufacture | electrically robust copper Ethernet systems - for a given | definition of robustness (typically defined as passing some | specific EMC test) - but even then real world electrical | faults can and do destroy robust Ethernet systems. Fiber | has none of these concerns. | aidenn0 wrote: | All very true; good clarifications. In context my point | was that it would be totally safe to run a copper | Ethernet cable between two houses on separate electrical | grids (or even an un-earthed battery powered computer). | Aloha wrote: | Inductive pickup (foreign voltage) from even fairly long | runs (20kf +) of well maintained copper is usually much | less less than half a volt, measuring either T-R, or | T-G/R-G. It's supposed to be floating to ground - nothing | on a twisted pair should be ground referenced, if you do | have voltage to ground, you have a short. | | If it was not floating, you'd get atmospherics, hum, and | other issues that you saw in old fashioned ground return | systems. | | Indeed, measurement of voltage and continuity of T-G and | R-G is a standard way to check for faulty cable | throwaway____10 wrote: | What a blast from the past, DSL was an exciting technology. | | I did the config and networking of DSLAMs for the first private | test installs of Paradyne (Hotwire) DSL hardware in a western | state around ~1998-1999, a couple years before DSL really hit | the mainstream. | | The telecos were slow to move on the technology and didn't do | their own centralized rollouts until several years later. We | took full advantage of that lead time time to win away a lot of | ISDN customers with much lower prices and much faster service. | We also saw end of that advantage coming and got out of the | business before we had to compete directly with the telecos who | could operate at scale and do bundled pricing of the line + | service that was harder to compete with. At the time high speed | internet over cable was also a while off for the general | public. | | We also had a tip from a teleco employee that we could use DC | Signalling channels / dry copper pairs instead of regular phone | circuits (no dial tone, they were meant for alarm service). | They cost about 1/2 to 1/3 of the price. | | At one point we petitioned to get the local telco to dig up the | sidewalk and install several hundred more copper pairs into the | building. | | It was really interesting to watch the internet access | landscape change so quickly. | netsharc wrote: | Al Gore never claimed that, btw, but he did recognize its | importance and provided political support, even Vint Cerf said | so: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/internet-of-lies/ | baldfat wrote: | dekhn wrote: | there is an entire multiverse fan fic where Al Gore won the | presidential election and we're all living in a post-scarcity | society. | serf wrote: | >Al Gore never claimed that, btw, | | GORE: "During my service in the United States Congress, I | took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the | initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives | that have proven to be important to our country's economic | growth and environmental protection, improvements in our | educational system." | | There are three ways to read the first sentence, two of which | take the presumption that Al Gore invented the internet. | | Snopes is so half-wrong that it's getting to be easy to | ignore. | | In other words , he _did_ say that, he just didn 't mean for | people to interpret his ambiguous statement in that fashion. | | aside : the word of the day is _initiative_. | zuminator wrote: | Gore absolutely deserves to be dinged for speaking | ambiguously in a way that leans towards greatly inflating | his contribution to the field. | | But at the same time, anyone who's ever read or written a | resume will readily recognize "took the initiative in | creating" as CV-speak for "I assisted in some capacity, | however minor." I expect the actual number of people misled | by Gore's self-puffery to have been small to nonexistent. | Xeoncross wrote: | "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the | initiative in creating the Internet" | | Sounds like we're playing word games at this point. | | Imagine that, a politician playing word games. | baldfat wrote: | Why ruin a good meme with FACTS! People | geozimm wrote: | absolutely - a good meme takes on a life of its own... | geocrasher wrote: | Right. Don't want to mess up the AlGoreithms that run the | interwebz! | oasisbob wrote: | > While we (PairGain) also made point-to-point private links, | it was clear then, and even moreso now that most DSL involves a | service provider managing the network - with specialized | skills, practices and setup. | | Mmm. This brings back memories of running private DSLAMs in a | campus environment as a transitional pre-Ethernet stopgap in | the early 2000s. 95% of the DSL lines worked great. The | remaining 5% were a never-ending nightmare of troubleshooting | and sudden breakage. | | We didn't want to be DSL experts, we just wanted the hardware | to work well-enough for long enough to make it all go away. | jleahy wrote: | I actually ran a private DSLAM to get internet between | upstairs and downstairs in my house only a few years ago (not | a joke, G.fast). | kombre wrote: | >oh, fiber materials may be sand | | what does sand means in this context please ? | hervature wrote: | Fiber optics cables are made of glass whose primary | constituent is silicon dioxide and/or quartz which are the | primary constituents of sand. | kombre wrote: | oh okay, thx | NegativeLatency wrote: | And therefore should be cheap in a naive estimate | jaredhallen wrote: | To be fair, fiber cable itself is actually pretty cheap | in the scheme of things. It's the installation and | termination that account for the bulk of the cost | mbarras_ing wrote: | Dr Z! I've recently started at Tunstall Healthcare and you are | frequently referenced when refering to SPE. I'm the first | person they've had working full time on SPE, so hoping to make | some progress :) | yosheli123 wrote: | Awesome to have your input on this. I'd love to talk to you in | person to learn more. Reach out at josh@botblox.io | tomhoward wrote: | Cool to see you here on HN. I hadn't heard the name PairGain | since I worked for a small corporate ISP in the early 2000s. | We'd recommend PairGain modems for clients who needed seriously | high-speed links of 2Mbps! This was just before ADSL and SHDSL | were rolled out en masse, or at least well before they were | reliable enough for corporate use. We had to organise a special | installation of a direct copper line from their premises to | ours. I guess they just patched them together at the exchange? | It was a pretty small catchment area. Fun times! | EvanAnderson wrote: | The tariff in my locality allowed for dry copper pairs to be | installed ("burglar alarm circuits") and some of my Customers | took advantage of that along w/ PairGain devices to get high | speed links between sites serviced out of the same central | office. | | Relevant article: | http://helices.org/commentary/dry_copper_pair.html | watersb wrote: | I can't tell exactly from a quick scan of Cringeley's | commentary... but I get the impression that a "dry copper | pair" the single-pair POTS equivalent of "dark fiber"... | with the critical caveat that a dry copper pair can link | two points only if they are serviced by the same central | telephone company switch. | Aloha wrote: | I remember seeing your guys HDSL hardware in the field what | seems like a million years ago. (for those without a telecom | background) It was pretty common as a way to extend T1's | without conditioned lines or repeaters then. | | Interestingly enough, I'd done direct t-spans's inside of a | building over house cable in a situation that was too long (and | too poor of cable) to do Ethernet. | hericium wrote: | DSLs were capable of at least 8Mbit/s speeds close to 20 years | ago. I worked for a small ISP and where were more than 100 meters | (theoretical limit for cat5) between residential buildings, we | were setting up 8 modems on a single UTP cable. With home | internet speeds back then it wasn't a bottleneck. | vinay_ys wrote: | ADSL2+ can do 22Mbps at 1KM. It can do 10Mbps at 2.8KM. But | without mass-manufacturing of the such a switch/access device, | it will be expensive. | hinkley wrote: | As long as you weren't stringing those cables off of rooftops. | I heard too many stories of lightning strikes burning out a lot | of expensive equipment. | baybal2 wrote: | DSL and 10BASE-T1L are not quote the same. | | 10BASE-T1L PHY fits on a single chip, without much of analog | trickery, and the whole line encoding, signal processing is | much simpler. | | 10BASE-T1L is what will go into 1 dollar devices, not a $100 | modem. | zokier wrote: | > 10BASE-T1L is what will go into 1 dollar devices, not a | $100 modem. | | Which is why this $150 media converter product feels bit | baffling tbh. | RicoElectrico wrote: | Wait, can DSL modems talk to each other instead of a DSLAM line | card? | crazyjncsu wrote: | Not a traditional dsl modem, but these work well using dsl | technology: https://www.amazon.com/Tupavco-Ethernet-Extender- | Kit-Repeate... | iforgotpassword wrote: | According to the description this adds at least 660ms of | latency, so might be useless for certain applications. | Wonder how much the TFA solution adds. | Dan_Sylveste wrote: | I was about to point something like this out. | xhrpost wrote: | That's pretty cool. The specs look like this is both faster | and cheaper than the main link of this thread, unless I'm | missing something? | betaby wrote: | Most SHDSL and some VDSL can talk each other indeed. Used | that capability a lot in 200xs. | ajb wrote: | Its true that the specs are not symmetric in ADSL. The CO | (Central Office) end is different from the CPE (Customer | Premises Equipment) end, and two CPE devices cannot talk to | each other. Among other things, the engineering work had to | take into account that at the CO end a bunch of wires would | come together and leak RF between each other. | | G.SHDSL is more common in a 1:1 configuration (although I | think the ends may still be not symmetric) because it was | designed as a T1 replacement. | | However some devices that could do a single line of CO were | made, that can therefore talk to a CPE. | | See also https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works- | over-wet... | geocar wrote: | Some can at least. I used Netopia SDSL routers without a | DSLAM around twenty years ago to serve "high speed internet" | in town in the US (Easton Maryland) a few years before they | managed to get municipal broadband. | MrBuddyCasino wrote: | It used to be possible many years ago, when I had a DSL modem | as PCI card. There was a windows software that would put it | in "server mode", and then you could connect another DSL | modem to it and "dial in". Not sure if this is possible | anymore, but there are Ethernet repeaters that are based on | DSL tech which should work in a similar way. | chmod775 wrote: | They may be using the term "modem" loosely here, or rather, | more generally than "home modems". | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem | miguel_cordeiro wrote: | Love this stuff and was expecting to find more "wild" engineering | stories in the comments. Not disappointed! | yosheli123 wrote: | So I built a tiny single pair Ethernet bridge (10BASE-T1L) that | can transmit 10mbps over a kilometer on a single pair of twisted | copper wires. | | Would love to get some feedback for the next iteration | Aloha wrote: | What are the limits on cable characteristics? Capacitance, | foreign voltage, etc? | zakki wrote: | Is this full duplex? | yosheli123 wrote: | Yep full duplex | chriscjcj wrote: | Definitely cheaper than StarTech's offering. That's appealing. | | https://www.startech.com/en-us/networking-io/110vdslext | | However, with StarTech's product, you have a shot at faster | speeds if you're going a shorter distance. It can do 75 Mb/s at | 300 meters and up to 100 Mb/s at shorter distances. | | I would really like to find a similar box that can bond | multiple pairs for faster speeds but I haven't found such a | device yet. | tyingq wrote: | >Definitely cheaper than StarTech's offering | | There are other brands of VDSL extenders. This board seems to | be $300 for a pair. | | This product, for example, is ~$271 a pair if you buy them at | the same time: https://www.netsys- | direct.com/products/vdsl2-ethernet-bridge... | | And they come with an enclosure and power supply. And a | better sort of "step up / step down" bandwidth based on | distance...see the chart at the bottom. | yetihehe wrote: | > Any application requiring a simple, low cost, robust | connection between physically disparate devices | | At $195 it's definitely not low cost. | [deleted] | silviot wrote: | What's the difference in price between 1km of fiber vs 1km or | single pair wire? It might play a role in this solution being | cheaper than immediately apparent. | rkangel wrote: | It comes down to whether the cable is there already. If you | were laying it, you'd probably go for fibre. But if you've | got 1km of some poor quality cable there already, then | spending $200 to get usable bandwidth might be a lot | cheaper than laying something new. | DannyBee wrote: | The fiber is much cheaper because it's so much more common. | | For example: I/O fiber is about 0.10 cents a foot or less | for 2 fiber cable. (12 fiber is only 20 cents a foot). | | OSP gel-filled direct burial is 0.55 cents a foot or less | for 2 fiber cable. (12 fiber is only 65 cents). This is | micro-armored OSP cable, resistant to chewing/damage as | well. | | Basic 18 awg single pair shielded direct burial wire is | about 0.80 cents a foot. Can't even find a non-expensive | armored version | | 10km single fiber transceivers at 10gbps are 40 bucks. | | 10km dual fiber transceivers at 10gbps at 29 bucks. | | It would be much cheaper, more effective, and a better | result to just use fiber for 1km here. | | You could easily bury 12 fiber cable and use it for the | price you will pay to use single-twisted-pair. | Aloha wrote: | When everyone prices fiber, they fail to include the | termination costs. | | How much are the termination costs on that fiber, per | run? | | Also, you'd never install single pair direct burial, and | almost never shielded (unless its audio and not phone | type) - it'd be 4/6/12 pair direct bury gel-filled cable. | xenadu02 wrote: | Besides what DannyBee says about termination being a lot | cheaper and easier when you can tolerate small losses | (which is most people): | | Big infrastructure often orders the cables pre- | terminated, eg an ISP will order their arial cable with | built-in termination at certain intervals. No muss, no | fuss. | | You're right about single pair though. If you're putting | in two strands might as well do 6. If you need 6 might as | well do 24. Never hurts to have spares and extra | capacity. Especially if it involves stringing poles or | digging holes. | DannyBee wrote: | Termination is basically a non-cost anymore. The price a | pack of 10 sc/apc field terminations (IE that a random | DIY'ers could do) is <20 bucks, and to your question, the | same as a price of a pack of 10 ez-r45 connectors. | | The loss and ease of mechanical connectors has gotten | good enough (0.15 db or better) that most of the folks i | know will only fusion splice when they really have to. | | I agree it wouldn't make sense to do single pair or | single fiber, but that's the actually the comparison at | which 10baset-1l is _at all_ competitive. | | I have buried a _lot_ of fiber, and a _lot_ of network | cable over the years :) | | I was just trying to be fair and present the best case | for 10baseT1L | | In practice you can do 12/24 strand fiber (or 6 strand | fiber + power + whatever) for less than the price of | whatever particular set of 18 awg twisted pair (which is | what the spec requires at 1km) + other things you wanted. | The cable would be smaller, and if you use A3 or B3 | fiber, it would be more flexible/support a lower bend | radius than the 18 awg twisted pair. By far. IT's not | even close. | jandrese wrote: | This product makes sense if you are reusing existing | copper lines. | DannyBee wrote: | in which case unless you have 18awg copper lines around, | you can't do 1km :) | | I would be shocked if anyone has those. Maybe alarm wire | I guess? | p1mrx wrote: | > 0.80 cents a foot | | Isn't that 80 cents/foot, or 0.80 dollars/foot? | bufferoverflow wrote: | Aren't you off by a factor of 100? Maybe dollars per | foot, not cents per foot? | icedchai wrote: | If you're in the position to bury new fiber cable, why | would you use this product? | DannyBee wrote: | To get to 1km, the spec requires 18awg cable, which | nobody has around either ;) | withinboredom wrote: | A copper wire can be bent in just about every which way | (such as tangled when being tethered to an underwater | drone), while fiber cannot. | eru wrote: | I don't think the wire itself would be the expense, but the | laying of it? | voakbasda wrote: | The cost of laying wire is virtually the same as laying | fiber, so the difference really comes down to the | material costs. The only good reason to use wire would be | existing installations, as you sidestep that cost | entirely. | EUROCARE wrote: | But perhaps the wire is already there. I don't think | anybody advocates for building entirely new datalinks | using this. Laying another 1km of cable is much more | expensive than 2x200 USD to reuse existing cable. | kube-system wrote: | "Low cost" is relative. For parts in the industrial/robotics | space, $195 is not expensive. | | You can certainly spend more on other options: | https://westwardsales.com/patton-cl2300e-ethernet-extender | jeroenhd wrote: | You can get full products that do higher speeds over longer | distances at lower cost, search term "vdsl repeater". | | It's possible that this product handles bad wiring better | as it's ethernet rather than VDSL2, but I think those | devices are a much better fit. | | One thing that might be better with an ethernet based | standard is the ability to add multiple stations to the | same link, relying on ethernet's error correction. | ComputerGuru wrote: | The schematic/drawing says 2000 meter range, the title and | description say 1km. Not sure which to believe! | tiffanyh wrote: | Most don't realize, you can run 400mbps of data over your old in- | home electrical wiring. | | https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/everything-you-need-... | RedShift1 wrote: | My experience with powerline adapters is that they all fail | sooner or later... I think 230 V is just too much to handle in | a small package combined with sensitive low voltage | communication chips. | icedchai wrote: | I experimented with powerline network adapters for a while. You | might see 400 megabits on the same circuit. Between floors in | your house on different circuits? Very unlikely. The latency | was also pretty bad compared to wifi. | tumetab1 wrote: | My experience is also that between floors (circuits) you | loose bandwidth. With latency I see no issue and I find that | weird. | | Latency, with Wi-Fi or not, it's probably correlated with | transmission failures so there probably some bad circuitry or | devices than create noise (like electrical motors). | worldofmatthew wrote: | Depending on the country, you can be made responsible for radio | interference. | worldofmatthew wrote: | Some questions: | | 1. Would you need two of them at a $430 cost for this? | | 2. If so would the person be much better with alternative | solutions like fixed wireless or Ethernet-VDSL2 conversion that | would deliver much better performance at this price point? | mrjin wrote: | Further more, why would someone choose this over $59.69 a pair | fiber ether net media converter, up to 20KM, 1000Mbps from TP- | LINK? There are most likely cheaper options from other vendors. | | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001435649462.html | numpad0 wrote: | These emerging Ethernet standards are cost effective upgrades | for large industrial objects like warehouses and monstrous | vehicles. | | You may have an unused phone line or just some reserved pins in | a connector, and the cable runs a quarter mile to the other end | of "this". The existing solution is working, albeit | inconvenient, and it will be _nice_ to be able to just add | Ethernet telemetry or control to it. That's where these shine. | xattt wrote: | The economics in buying this is whether re-running the 1-km of | copper with whatever media you want will cost $430 or less. | | I think just rolling a telecom truck will cost you this. | yosheli123 wrote: | Yeah fair. I'm aiming at new space constrained applications | with this. | yosheli123 wrote: | Yeah approx $400 for a pair. Mainly chip shortage messiness, I | think I can get the cost down to less than $200 a pair in April | 2023. | | Regarding VSDL, never used it myself; I guess it would come | down to space/power considerations. I haven't seen VDSL used | much in the industrial automation, single pair ethernet seems | to be the preferred choice. | worldofmatthew wrote: | Long range networking is a very overcrowded market. You need | something that is either really good or really cheap. | jmpman wrote: | What's the best way to do this underwater? I need to go across a | lake about 1km. | dhon_ wrote: | You might be better off with directional wifi antennas if | appropriate for your application. | [deleted] | mrjin wrote: | Fiber I recon. | yosheli123 wrote: | You'd use some standard tether cable, Blue Robotics sell good | stuff for that. | | https://bluerobotics.com/store/cables-connectors/cables/fath... | | Then just straight onto the screw terminals. | transistor-man wrote: | Awesome project! | | This would be fairly great fit for underwater UAV's, or like | security camera way out on the edge of property. May be a good | idea to post on ardu-sub related discussion forums. I'm not aware | of an off the shelf module that's point to point ADSL, almost | every modem is intended to yell at a ADSL / ADSL2+ host. | | Did you run into any issues with consumer-grade gigabit switches | negotiating 10Mbit? | 0xfaded wrote: | Blue Robotics sells the fathomX exactly for this purpose. I | wouldn't be surprised if it uses the same chip set. | | https://bluerobotics.com/store/comm-control-power/tether-int... | yosheli123 wrote: | That tops out at around 300meters. Ours goes beyond 1km. | Still there's is awesome for camera feeds; I love the Blue | Robotics hardware, SPEBlox Long is just a different | application (more industrial automation focussed) | transistor-man wrote: | Any chance you're going to release schematics / open source the | design? | hotpotamus wrote: | It seems that single mode fiber is king for long distance cable | runs now, nevermind that it can push gigabits. What kind of cable | would this be and is it actually much cheaper? My impression is | that most cost of cabling now is the labor to run it as opposed | to the medium, but I'm a neophyte for sure. | time0ut wrote: | A common use case for this is to use existing infrastructure | like in an industrial setting. You can also provide power over | a cable like this. | mschuster91 wrote: | Fiber has the downside of being extremely vulnerable to | mechanical damage or dirt and expensive on long runs. This here | runs on virtually anything that's twisted-pair wire. | throw0101a wrote: | > _It seems that single mode fiber is king for long distance | cable runs now, nevermind that it can push gigabits._ | | Bandwidth isn't the only consideration: you can deliver power | over copper: | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet#PoDL | | * https://www.ti.com.cn/cn/lit/an/snvaa25/snvaa25.pdf | DannyBee wrote: | Main reason POE is useful is that it lets you deliver power | over existing wires. If you are running new wires, you can | already do what you want. | | They make plenty of fiber+power in single cable, because the | fiber is unaffected by the power. | | Running 1km of slow, expensive, single-pair cable to run low- | data rate + power, vs fiber+power cable saves you essentially | one connector. For very high cost - in money and loss of | bandwidth. | | Plus 10base-t1l is not common, so the price of equipment is | high as well. | yosheli123 wrote: | Basically just any CAT5e like twisted pair has worked for me up | to 1km. 26AWG unshielded twisted pair basically, 100Ohm diff | impedance. Cost of cabling is pennies IMO. Labor cost, who | knows. | | Optical can be quite expensive though these boards aren't | exactly cheap (yet). | hotpotamus wrote: | I've actually had to deal with fiber for the first time in my | career recently and it was actually easier and cheaper than I | imagined. I think my take on costs was about a decade out of | date and things have gotten pretty affordable these days (for | 1Gbps at long range at least). Probably all the fiber to the | home providers have pushed the economies of scale on these | things. | | But here's sort of an example of what I'm talking about. | | https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-Ethernet- | Converter-1000Base-L... | | So the cost is pretty low if you wanted to terminate with | these (these things aren't too loved in networking circles, | but I can vouch that they do work), then the biggest | difference is the cost of bulk cable - fiber vs copper. I | assume the cost of labor to run it is essentially the same. | | The main tradeoffs I see are that you can run power over catX | cable (though probably not 1km?) but single mode fiber seems | to be indefinitely able to upgrade bandwidth; I'm told that | old installations from the 90's are still used and are | pushing 100's of gigabits with newer optics attached to them. | | Like I said, I'm fairly new to this having started a job | where I have to talk to datacenter people about this sort of | thing, so I'm learning a bit as I go. | DannyBee wrote: | Optical is not expensive anymore. It's 20 bucks for 10gbps | transceivers. The cable is much cheaper than twisted pair. | termination will take you no longer than a network cable. | | The world is not the same as it was 15 years ago :) | madengr wrote: | I wired my house with 62/125 fiber 22 years ago as a 1 km spool | was only $250. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I suspect | multimode fiber is cheaper than copper, and termination kits | are cheap now. | | I'm running 10G on single mode 100 ft jumpers to a few | computers in the house and that's cheap too. SFP are $35 but | the NIC are more. | hotpotamus wrote: | Yeah, multimode fiber seems to be the red headed step child | of the networking world these days, but that's a good | question about the cost of it vs copper. It's just plastic, | right? It seems like a good option for high speed SOHO or | perhaps within rack networking. But if I was running cable in | my house today, I think I'd still go copper for PoE | capability. | madengr wrote: | trollied wrote: | A few years ago, revk (owner of an ISP in the UK) did ADSL over | wet string: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works- | over-wet... | yosheli123 wrote: | That's brilliant! | xhrpost wrote: | There's also Ethernet over barbed wire: | http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm | gorkish wrote: | Back in the day I ran X.25 over an actual barbed wire fence | for a customer. It connected a serial terminal in a field | house at a local feedyard back to their SCO box in the main | office. Probably about 1500 feet. It was reliable! | rlonstein wrote: | Paraphrasing the old joke about getting a dry pair, must be | an SBC customer. | justcodin wrote: | wow | aidos wrote: | The HN post at the time: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440681 | | RevK is the owner of AAISP (an xkcd/806 compliant | organisation). | ComputerGuru wrote: | https://xkcd.com/806/ | | https://www.revk.uk/2010/10/xkcd806-compliance.html?m=1 | jokoon wrote: | I guess it's also a latency tradeoff? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-22 23:01 UTC)