Outside plant - prewire customer demarc preference

Mon Nov 27 19:38:52 UTC 2023

On 11/27/2023 09:12, Josh Luthman wrote:
> If I was building a house I'd just get some 1" conduit from the outside 
> to the inside.  Put it in a NEMA box.  That solves the problem forever.

1" is great if you can get it, and I'd try to argue for it.  I'd settle 
for 3/4"

Builders and resi electricians are going to hate 1".  It's not something 
they'll stock nor is it readily available at cheeeap prices that they 
seek.  3/4" ENT is available fairly cheap, and the electricians are 
going to have a hole hog big enough for it which they may not have for 
1" if they're truly resi-only.  I can see the adder for 1" being 
eye-rolling as a result.

> As a fiber ISP, and assuming you're doing your own WiFi in the house, 
> you can do conduit inside or we can just run the fiber.  We don't want 
> to run up/down walls and such.  99% of our installs are through the 
> exterior wall and then a u6x covers the house.  We run fiber

Same.  I don't expect to find a house pre-wired with suitable fiber from 
the outside utility access area to the inside distribution point.  I'll 
use it if it's there, but the only time I've ever had that happen is 
when I've managed to hand the builder (or, more likely, the electrical 
contractor themselves) a spool of fiber during construction.  Usually 
this is only on custom and semi-custom homes.  Tract home electricians 
aren't going to do ANYTHING outside their SOW.

Most large fiber ISPs won't use existing fiber even if it's there and 
suitable.  They don't trust it, and it's not "standard" for them. 
Occasionally the install techs may bend the rules.

When I'm running fiber for a customer, anything more than "rise up from 
the ground and poke it through the wall" is getting into "premium 
installation with upcharge" territory.  Nobody wants to pay for it. 
Most other fiber ISPs seem similar.

> If you're in a cableCo area just run coax to get to your modem/router 
> situation.

Agreed.  In theory they could also use suitable fiber for RFoG if 
they've got such a deployment in the area.  I'm not aware of any 
standards for such prewires, and like above I doubt they'd want to use 
it even if it were present.  All of the MSOs I know of doing RFoG to the 
home put a micro-nid outdoors and reverse power it over coax from 
inside.  Fiber doesn't enter the home itself.

> I'm not sure what the Cat5 is for outside.  Ethernet isn't going to work 
> and DSL is nearly dead already.

I suspect the relevant ANSI standard is just old and dates back to 
POTS+DSL.  CAT6 is great for VDSL and G.FAST, and a standard cable gives 
you 4 pairs to work with and is cheap and fairly tolerant of abuse 
during install.

I would love to see the relevant standard updated to include e.g. a 
duplex or 6-count tight buffered or breakout single-mode fiber cable.

--
Brandon Martin