How to Build a 10G Home Fiber Network?

Updated on Sep 29, 2021 by

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Why and how to add a 10G fiber to your home network with cost-effectiveness

With the wide application of the 10GbE technology in the commercial sector and the popularity of FTTH (fiber to the home), the cost of deploying a 10G network has been reduced to some extent. This trend has driven some home users to think about the upgrade of their current 1G fiber optic home network to a 10G network. Worries and hesitation are common, however, as the 10G network is still a new field for most home users. Thus this post brings some useful tips on how to build a 10G home fiber network from 10G home network basics to network assessment, selections for best home network devices, and a typical 10G fiber optic home network cabling.

Why Need to Build a 10G Home Fiber Network?

Starts from Network Assessment

Before the decision on deploying your 10G fiber network, it's necessary to have an overall network assessment for your home environment so as to ensure the network deployed can handle all your traffic needs. You should probably ask yourself a few questions, such as how many computers, printers, and other peripherals will connect to your network? How much wireless coverage will you need at your location? What type of mobile devices will access to your network? Do you have to supervise all network devices? Are there any special functions that you want for your network devices? Where would you like to have 10G connections and where would you leave it at 1Gbps?

Know What Makes a 10G Home Fiber Network

To have a better assessment, you also need to have a rough idea about the basics of a 10G home network. For a 10G home network, several components are indispensable: 10Gb home switch, home router, and wireless access point for home (AP). According to different needs, some optional devices can be also included in your home networks such as network-attached storage (NAS) devices (like a network server), 10G network cards, PoE switches, and end devices like PC and security camera.

10G Home Fiber Network Example.

How to Choose Your Best 10G Home Fiber Network Devices?

Once you decide to upgrade to 10G network, choosing the most suitable home fiber network devices is vital to you, among which home network switch, home router, and AP for home are the most essential and important three types. Next, I take the selection of three types as examples to show you how to choose the best home network device.

Home Network Switch

For a 10G home fiber network, you probably need the 10G Ethernet switch and PoE switch. To choose the best home network switch, you can take into account the following three factors:

Features & Performance

Generally speaking, a home Ethernet switch especially the managed switch has many features. However, there is no need to select a home network switch with all features. Besides the basic features such as advanced QoS, VLAN, and security, you’d better take switching capacity, max. power consumption, continuous availability into consideration. PoE support is also a common requirement as users have many security cameras these days and also access points that provides Wi-Fi to the whole family. Moreover, fanless and stack designs are important factors as well. Fanless design helps to reduce power consumption and keep your home quiet and noiseless, which matters a lot for home users. As for the stack design, it can bring great flexibility to your network. When you want to upgrade the network or add more network devices into your network, stacking multiple switches can be the simplest solution to realize your needs without changing your original network infrastructure.

FS 10G Switch Connected with 10G SFP+ Transceivers.

Ports

Usually, a home network switch comes with copper ports, optical ports, or hybrid ports. The copper port can connect with an Ethernet cable like Cat6. While a home network switch with SFP/SFP+ port can connect with SFP/SFP+ transceivers and fiber optic cables. Apart from port type, the port number to connect with your devices should also be considered. If you don’t have many network devices to connect, an 8-port or 12-port 10Gb switch is enough to cover all your needs; otherwise, you will need a 24-port or 48-port switch, or even multiple switches. You can choose a suitable one based on your needs.

Cost

The cost of an RJ45 port is lower than an optical port. Therefore, a home switch with copper ports will be cheaper than a fiber switch. And a managed switch with high performance is also much expensive than an unmanaged one. When you have already determined the type of home network switch you want, you can compare the price from different vendors and choose the most cost-effective one.

Home Router

Connecting your home network to the Internet, the selection of the best home router is also important but much simpler than a home network switch. First, you should contact your ISP (internet service provider) or look at your account details to get your Internet speed. Your router is required to handle your Internet speed. Considering you are cabling a 10G home fiber network, at least one SFP+ port should be equipped in that network router. Then you need to figure out what type of router you need: wired router or wireless router. Although a wireless router provides both WiFi and Ethernet connections, the coverage of WiFi signals is limited and the price will be more expensive than a wired one. Therefore if the area needs to be covered by the network is large, a wired router, combined with the additional wireless access point(s), is preferred for its cheaper price and more stable connections.

Wireless Access Point for Home

When connecting your wireless devices to an Ethernet network, the wireless access point for home is indispensable. Similar to routers, you also need to figure out the amount of space the wireless network to cover and the number of wireless devices to connect which will help you determine the number of AP you demand. The wireless AP that you are going to buy should be able to handle that figure. And these days Wi-Fi 6 AP seems to be a new trend, if you want to try a fresh wireless network experience, 2x2 MU-MIMO dual-band Wi-Fi 6 AP is definitely enough for your home use.

A Case of 10G Home Fiber Network

After the network assessment for your home and purchasing all network devices needed, it's time to deploy your 10G fiber optic home network. As you can see in the following diagram, we now have a good number of devices all over the house. Having counted the possible connections, we take the 24-port 10Gb switch as the core switch in the home, which has 24 RJ45 ports to connect with most of the end-devices and 4 10Gb SFP+ ports to connect with a PoE+ switch, router, NVR, and server. As for the PoE devices in the courtyard, garage, and living room, we use an 8-port Gigabit PoE+ switch to cover them all.

Here is a detailed list of all the components used in the above 10G fiber home network:

FS S3900-24T4S 24-Port Fanless Gigabit Ethernet Switch #72944
FS S3150-8T2FP 8-Port Fanless Gigabit PoE+ Switch #90130
FS 2x2 MU-MIMO, Dual-Band Wireless Access Point #84027
FS 10G router is currently not available
FS LC to LC Duplex OM3 Multimode Fiber Optic Cable #41729
FS 1000BASE-SX SFP Transceiver #11774
FS Cat6 Snagless Unshielded Ethernet Cable #70595

Conclusion

Deploying a 10G home fiber network is not so hard and expensive as you might have thought while pretty much similar to a Gigabit fiber network. What you need is a complete network assessment for your house and a smart choice of affordable 10G home network devices. Based on these, you can build your best 10G fiber optic home network.