Any data infrastructure engineers on here?

We are soon to get a fibre laid to our house via a sort of community broadband scheme for rural areas. Everyone has been laying tiny orange ducts across the fields for the last 6 months and we are soon to start having fibres blown through them to the individual houses.
The standard infrastructure (that most people will be doing) is to run underground to an outside wall, then raise up the wall a little and drill through the wall, including a gas seal. I think the reason for the gas seal is to prevent any possibility of a gas leak getting into the ductwork system, filling the entire system with explosive gas then causing an explosion at the cubicle or even worse at the exchange.

In our situation I don’t want the external wall riser at all. We have an office on the 3rd level that we have laid the 50mm duct right up through the building to that room. On that room is all our IT setup and from where the whole house is wired in Cat6 cable.

What will we need to do to keep everyone happy? Where can we put the gas seal and anything else? I think we will need to change the last 40m of orange (underground) duct for black UV stable duct? What goes on the end of the fibre as some kind of router before we plug it into our firewall and then our unmanaged switch?

Thanks for nay help. I’m a builder not an IT engineer!

C

You’ll probably find that this is in their connectivity T&C’s- the last thing they’d want is a customer taking their service and then their premises exploding. Changing the fibres wont change this, they’ll likely still insist on a gas seal (as would I).

I’d just bring it in at a low level and disguise it as best you can- and then take it up to your 3rd level via some internal Cat6, or mains-plug ethernet extenders. That will give more than sufficient bandwidth.

It’s almost certainly to stop gas (and water) entering your property, rather than the other way round.

It sounds like you are burying subduct direct in ground (a continuous bendy pipe) and then a small solid fibre cable is blown in using compressed air? Alternative is rigid duct sections that you would then draw in solid cable, or blown fibre sub duct using rope.

Obviously the rules of your supplier are key…but we would normally run the external cable externally in trunking, or to the duct entry inside, and then gas seal where the cable leaves the sub duct. Due to fire regs, we normally have to switch to an low smoke internal cable within 5 metres of entering the property. For sub duct, I think we always stop it outside.

So in your example where you do not want external cable on building, you would either terminate the orange sub duct as soon as it enters the building, and then either joint it to internal sub duct if that exists, or more likely, gas seal where it enters, lay fibres into a splicing point, and extend using internal fibre cable, or just install the NTE/ONT on the ground floor.

I’m not an engineer, but we’ve installed fibre. The external cable has to terminate, if I remember correctly, within 2m of entering the property. Ours terminates after the gas seal into a junction/splicing box (CSP?), and then a low smoke flexible cable routes around 10m to the server room.

There’s a modem of sorts (not sure if that’s correct term – ONT I think) that the internal cable feeds into which then feeds the router and firewall, so four boxes before the data hits the switches (CSP, ONT, router, firewall).

You can fit the CSP and ONT next to each other, but our entry point was 10m from the server room and no option to reroute the duct. The internal fibre cable from the CSP to the ONT in our case is much more robust than the cable from the ONT to the router (10mm versus 1mm), so I wanted the thicker cable on the long internal run. Hope this makes sense and helps.

b4rn broadband? Was reading about this on BBC news website earlier.
BBC Linky What an ace community company.

b4rn broadband? Was reading about this on BBC news website earlier.
BBC Linky What an ace community company.

Woman who’s spearheaded B4RN is a friend of mine. Awesome woman, proper force of nature and absolutely lovely. If it is B4RN you’re getting, I can possibly pass on any questions.

There’s a modem of sorts (not sure if that’s correct term – ONT I think)

We’d call it an NTE (Network Termination Equipment) – fibre goes in, Ethernet comes out (or another fibre link if it’s going to a fibre-equipped router).